2026-04-14 20:02 UTC
highly recommend that anyone interested in where our ideas about fairies come from read ronald hutton's "the making of the early modern british fairy tradition" (2014), it fucking slaps so hard
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@tholindeth@wizzzard.online 2026-04-14 20:11
the gist is that from the 11-15C, a heterogenous collection of inchoate beliefs and reports of encounters with humanlike magical beings were shaped into a consistent literary portrayal of a fairy kingdom, whose rulers and inhabitants acquired attributes from (1) old english beliefs about elves (whose name they also took), (2) magical characters—usually of an unclear, unstated nature—from literary romances and (3) those above-mentioned encounter reports