THE ELEMENT ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES: An A-Z of Fairies, Pixies, and other Fantastical Creatures

Taking a Bible, a cross, a dirk (dagger), and a cockerel, the last of which he hid in his coat, the smith went to the fairy mound, where he heard the sound of pipes, dancing, and merriment. Sticking his dirk in the earth as he crossed the threshold, he ventured inside, to find the fairies enjoying their revels while his son was slaving away at a forge.

The fairies became very agitated with the smith for intruding on their festivities, but couldn’t approach him because he carried the Bible and cross. When he demanded they return his son, they shouted and made such a noise that the cockerel crowed.

The smith grabbed his boy and they left through the door wedged open by the dirk just as the fairy mound closed and all became dark once more.

At first the boy was silent and pale and wouldn’t go about his work, but a year and a day after his rescue he made a rapid recovery, took up his tools, and went on to prosper as one of the land’s finest smiths.

The metal dagger, Bible, cross, and cockerel in this tale are common examples of items used as protection against malicious fairies. The Bible and cross are allied with Christian beliefs that equate fairies with demons. The crowing of the cockerel is a sign that dawn is imminent and therefore that fairy revels must end, for fairies are believed to be afraid of the light. Metal, specifically iron, was widely used to ward off the unwanted attention of fairies. Metal objects were often placed in babies’ cradles as protection against the children being snatched by the fairies. An open pair of scissors or a pair of tongs was considered particularly effective. They had the added benefit of forming the shape of the cross—considered a protective symbol even before the advent of Christianity. An item of the father’s clothing such as a waistcoat or a pair of trousers served the same function. According to E. S. Hartland’s The Science of Fairy Tales (1891), a right shirt sleeve or a left stocking was particularly favored, though quite why this should be so is not clear.

In Sweden it was said that the fire must be kept burning in the room of a baby who had not yet been baptized—unbaptized children being particularly at risk from the incursions of fairies was a common theme across many cultures. As protection, a piece of steel such as a needle should be attached to the child’s swaddling—the preferred color of which was red, to simulate fire—and the water the child was washed in should not be thrown out. In China, the ash of dried banana skin was used to draw the sign of a cross on an infant’s forehead and a fisherman’s net placed over the cradle to guard against evil spirits. In Egypt, it was widely believed that a human child left unattended was at risk of being swapped with a djinn child.

Many tales across cultures stated that babies were particularly at risk of being taken by fairies during the first six weeks of life and were most vulnerable during the first three days. It was advocated that a fire be kept lit near the child at all times and that the parents keep constant watch. This had obvious practical benefits in safeguarding the child against accident, injury, and disease. Of course, in modern-day childcare it is still important to keep a baby warm and under the watchful gaze of its parents—not for fear of fairies, but to ward off illness and because infants cannot conserve heat for the first four weeks of life.

Accounts of changelings continued to be reported into the late nineteenth century. In 1895 in Ireland a woman named Bridget Cleary was killed by her husband, family, and neighbors, who claimed that she was a fairy changeling. The ordeals she was subjected to in order to cast out the fairy and return the “real” Bridget resulted in her death.

Though reports of this type are thankfully a thing of the past, changelings continue to capture the imagination and appear in many works of art and literature. A famous example is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which revolves around a squabble between Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, over a changeling boy. W. B. Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child” was inspired by Irish tales of children spirited away to fairyland. More recently, Maurice Sendak, children’s author and illustrator and creator of Where the Wild Things Are (1963), drew on changeling lore in his book Outside Over There (1981), in which Ida’s baby sister is taken by goblins and replaced with a changeling made of ice. Ida must go the goblin realm and rescue her sister by playing her horn. Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth (1986), developed in conjunction with renowned fairy artist Brian Froud, acknowledges Sendak as an influence. Featuring David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King, it tells the story of Sarah, who must rescue her baby brother from the domain of the goblin king.

Changeling stories deal with themes that continue to resonate, such as panic when a child goes missing, the fear that a child is sick or weak, or—from the point of view of the changeling—the feeling of not fitting in. Perhaps this is why changelings continue to be a source of inspiration for films, art, and literature today.

Chin Chin Kobakama

Japanese fairies. A Japanese fairy tale, written down by T. Hasegawa in Chin Chin Kobakama (1903), tells the story of a lazy little girl who ate plums and hid the stones under the matting on her bedroom floor. Eventually this angered the fairies and they punished her. Every night at 2 a.m., known in Japan as the Ox Hour, the fairies rose up from the matting as tiny women dressed in bright red robes, singing:

Chin-chin Kobakama,

Yomo fuké soro,

Oshizumare, Hime-gimi!

Ya ton ton!

“We are the Chin-chin Kobakama, the hour is late, sleep, honorable noble darling!”

Though the words were kind enough, they were sung to taunt the little girl and the fairies pulled faces as they sang.

After many nights of this, the girl became tired and frightened. So, one night her mother sat up with her to see the fairies. When the little women appeared, she struck at them and they fell to the floor—as plum stones. So, the girl’s laziness and naughtiness were discovered. After that she was a very good little girl and never dropped plum stones on the floor again.

Churnmilk Peg

Guardian of Yorkshire nut thickets and orchards, she disapproves of laziness in humans, but takes a fairly laid-back approach to her duties, passing the time by smoking her pipe while protecting nuts and fruit from human hands. Melsh Dick carries out the same task.

Cipenapers

Welsh version of the word “kidnappers,” sometimes used to talk about fairies.

Clap Cans

Lancashire bogie that can be heard but not seen, so-called because of the sound it makes, like that of banging together cans or pots. It is one of the less frightening of the bogies.

Cloud Master, the

See Nuberu, El.

Cloud People, the

Spirits of the clouds in the mythology of the Pueblo peoples of North America. According to Hopi legends, the Rain Cloud clans performed ceremonies to the Cloud People to bring rainfall. They sang songs until a mist began to form, then heavy rains fell and frightful bolts of lightning came from the sky. After this display of power, the Rain Cloud clans were invited to join the Hopi pueblo.

The Cloud People were expert basket-makers. They introduced this skill to the Hopi people and were the originators of the basket dance, which is still performed at certain ceremonies.

The Hopi continue to perform rituals at the winter solstice and in the spring to ask to the Cloud People to bring rainfall to ensure a good harvest. In these ceremonies the Cloud People are represented by kachina masks.

Cluricaune

(Pronounced kloor-a-cawn.) Irish cellar-dwelling fairy, similar to a leprechaun. Irish folk-tale collector Thomas Crofton Crocker described him as wearing a red nightcap, a leather apron, long pale blue stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. In some tales he acts like a buttery spirit, beleaguering drunkards and frightening unscrupulous servants stealing from the wine cellar. If the victim attempts to escape the cluricaune’s taunts by moving house, the cluricaune hops into a cask and accompanies them.

Coblynau

(Pronounced koblernigh.) Welsh mining fairies, similar to the Cornish knockers and English blue-cap. In British Goblins (1880), Sikes describes them as grotesquely ugly, about 18 inches (45 centimeters) tall, and dressed like miners. They helped miners by indicating where to find good lodes of ore. In Germany, these mine spirits were known as Kobolds.

Tom Cockle

An Irish household brownie who stayed with the same family for generations. When the family relocated to America, they were sad to bid farewell to their helper. But on arriving in their new home, they were delighted to find food set out and a fire already burning brightly in the hearth, for Tom Cockle, their loyal brownie, had come with them.

Coco, El

A bogieman in many Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. The myth of El Coco is thought to have originated in Portugal and Galicia and spread to Latin American countries such as Mexico, Argentina, and Chile with Spanish and Portuguese colonization. The name “Coco” is related to the Portuguese and Spanish for “skull” and the bogieman is sometimes represented as a coconut or a carved pumpkin. Like a dark counterpart to a guardian angel, he is said to take the form of a dark, shadowy figure, often sitting on the roof, where he watches over a child, ready to pounce at any sign of disobedience or bad behavior and spirit them away.

Coleman Grey

A little pisky boy who was adopted by humans, as related in Robert Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England (1865).

Colepexy

Pexy or colepexy are the names of a Dorset pixy. In Dorset, an area of southern England renowned for its fossils, belemite fossils are known as colepexies’ fingers, and fossilized sea urchins are also called colepexies’ heads.

Sometimes described as a fairy horse, the colepexy haunts woods, and coppices, acting as a guardian of orchards, leading travelers astray, and occasionally luring unsuspecting folk into mounting him, whereupon he embarks on a wild ride across the Dorset downs, through thorny thickets and wetlands before bucking off his rider, leaving them stranded in a stream or ditch.

William Barnes, in Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect (1844), describes the colepexy’s activities thus: “To beat down the few apples that may be left on the trees after the crop has been taken in; to take as it were, the fairies’ horde.”

See also Colt Pixy.

Colt Pixy

Fairy horse of Hampshire whose neighing tricks other horses and travelers into losing their way, leading them into bogs, similar to a brag or dunnie.

In Somerset, the colt pixy is an orchard guardian who chases away scrumpers (apple thieves), and may be a variant of the colepexy.

See also Lazy Lawrence.

Corrigan

See Korrigan.

Cottingley Fairies

When two girls in Bradford borrowed a camera to take photos of the fairies at the bottom of their garden, neither of them could have imagined the sensation that was about to follow. When the resulting images attracted the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the eminent writer with a keen interest in the supernatural, the Cottingley Fairies phenomenon had everybody talking. The excitement and speculation have rippled down through the years, sparking the idea for two films released in 1977, Photographing Fairies and Fairy Tale: A True Story, and the story continues to attract interest today.

It all began when cousins Elsie Wright, aged 16, and Frances Griffiths, aged 10, got into trouble for getting wet playing in the stream at the bottom of the garden at the Wrights’ home in Cottingley. The girls loved playing in the stream, not least, they said, because they saw fairies there. When their parents laughed at the notion of fairies at the bottom of the garden, dismissing it as fanciful, or merely an excuse for splashing in the stream, the girls set out to prove the grown-ups wrong. They persuaded Elsie’s father, a hobbyist photographer, to let them borrow his camera and set off for the stream. They returned triumphantly, in great excitement.

When Elsie’s father developed the photographs in his darkroom, he dismissed the initial picture—of Frances watching four fairies dancing on a bush—as the girls fooling around with paper cut-outs. However, a couple of months later the girls went on to produce a second photograph, of Elsie sitting on the lawn with a gnome.

In 1919 Elsie’s mother showed the photographs at a meeting of the Theosophical Society at a lecture on “Fairy Life.” A few months later, the photos were displayed at the Society’s annual conference, where they caught the eye of Edward Gardner, an eminent member. His interest was piqued and he sent the images and the glass-plate negatives to a photography expert, who was of the opinion that the photographs were genuine. Gardner then used enhanced negatives to reproduce the images, which he used to deliver illustrated lectures around the country.

The editor of the Spiritualist magazine Light drew the photos to the attention of renowned author and Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He had been commissioned to write an article on fairies for the Christmas edition of the Strand magazine. He contacted Gardner to find out who had taken the photos and subsequently got in touch with the Wrights to ask for permission to use the two photos to illustrate his article. Impressed that such an eminent figure as Conan Doyle was interested, Elsie’s father agreed that the photos could be used, but refused to accept any money for them, stating that if they were in fact genuine, then they shouldn’t be sullied by the exchange of money.

Conan Doyle was preoccupied preparing for a lecture tour of Australia, so Gardner went to meet with the Wright family. Elsie’s father told him that he been convinced there was some trick involved in the photographs, but when he had searched the girls’ room for evidence—scraps of pictures or cut-outs—he had found nothing incriminating. As further verification of the photographs’ authenticity, Gardner returned to Cottingley with two cameras and some photographic plates, which had secretly been marked to reveal any tampering. Frances was invited to stay to see if the girls could repeat their feat and again take pictures of the fairies.

Insisting that the fairies would not show themselves if other people were watching, the two girls set off alone to the stream, where they took several photos, three of which appeared to show fairies. “Frances and the Leaping Fairy” showed Frances in profile looking at a winged fairy sitting on branch; in “Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie,” a fairy is offering Elsie flowers. The final photo, “Fairies and their Sun Bath,” showed the fairies, without either of the girls, frolicking in the sunshine.

Packed in cotton wool, the plates were sent back to Gardner, who wrote to Conan Doyle in Australia expressing his joy that the experiment seemed to have worked.

The Christmas edition of the Strand in which the original photos were published sold out in two days. Elsie and Frances’ names were changed to protect their privacy and they were referred to as Iris and Alice Carpenter. Conan Doyle concluded his article by writing he hoped that if the photographs helped to convince people of the existence of fairies it would jolt the materialistic twentieth-century mindset out of its rut and into acknowledging the glamor and mystery of life. It was his hope that the images would encourage people to open up to other psychic phenomena too.

Initial reactions to the images were mixed. Skeptics noted that the fairies conformed to the images in traditional nursery tales and sported suspiciously fashionable hairstyles, while others took the girls and their photos at face value, welcoming the images as evidence of the existence of supernatural beings.

Conan Doyle used the second batch of photographs to illustrate another article in the Strand in 1921. This article went on to form the basis of his book, The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922.

In 1921 Gardner made a final visit to Cottingley, this time accompanied by a clairvoyant named Geoffrey Hodson. On this occasion neither Frances or Elsie claimed to see fairies; however, Hodson professed to observe many of the winged creatures. Frances and Elsie later denounced him as a fake.

Public interest in the Cottingley Fairies phenomenon gradually died down after 1921. Elsie and Frances married and lived abroad for many years. It was not until 1966 that the fairies—and Frances and Elsie—found themselves once again in the limelight, when a reporter for the Daily Express tracked down Elsie, now living back in England. In an interview, she admitted that the fairies might have been figments of her imagination, but said that what she saw in her mind had somehow been captured on the photographic plate. The article triggered more media interest and scientific investigations into the photographs, most of which concluded that they were fakes.

In 1983, in an article in the Unexplained magazine, the cousins admitted that the photos had been fabricated. However, they maintained that the fairies were real and they had genuinely seen them. Elsie, a skilled artist from a young age, had copied out illustrations of fairies from Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914), a popular children’s book, which they had then made into cardboard cut-outs, being careful to dispose of all traces of anything that could be used as evidence. However, a question mark remains over the fifth and final photograph, “Fairies and their Sun Bath.” Both girls claimed to have taken it, and Frances always maintained that it was genuine.

In an interview on Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Elsie explained that she and Frances had been too embarrassed to say anything after the highly esteemed Arthur Conan Doyle had championed the pictures as genuine evidence of fairies. What had started out as an attempt to prove their parents wrong had taken an unexpected turn that they could never have predicted. They had never thought of it as fraud, Elsie said, just two cousins having a bit of fun. She couldn’t understand how so many people—and very highly regarded figures at that—were taken in. She believed they had wanted to be taken in.

Prints of the photographs, two of the cameras the girls used, and watercolors of fairies painted by Elsie are displayed at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

Co-walker

An apparition of one’s double or doppelgänger. In the north of England it is known as a waff and portends death. In The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1691), Robert Kirk believes it to be a type of fairy that can be seen by those with second sight. This double resembles a person in every way, like a twin or shadow, and can be seen before and after that person is dead. It is often sighted eating at funeral banquets or bearing the coffin to the grave.

See also Fetch, Swarth.

Cowlug Sprites

In the villages of Bowden and Gateside, on the border between England and Scotland, the cowlug sprites haunt the villages on Cowlug Night. These strange sprites are aptly named, with ears said to be shaped like the ears of cows.

Crimbil

Welsh for changeling.

Crodh Mara

Scottish sea-dwelling fairy cattle. These hornless cattle sometimes bestow the gift of their milk on humans.

One story tells of the Hero of Clanranald, who lived with his wife and their cow. The cow gave very little milk. One day the hero’s wife saw three crodh mara and went to milk them. That night she heard a voice that told her to spill some milk on the fairy hill. She did, and from that day on the cows appeared for her to milk every day. When she died, they never returned.

In another tale, a couple spotted crodh mara on an island at Lochmaddy. The milk from the fairy cattle supplied the couple with butter and cheese for half a year.

Croker, Thomas Crofton (1798–1854)

The antiquarian and folktale collector Thomas Crofton Croker was born in Cork, Ireland. After a sporadic local education, he joined a mercantile firm in 1813, but soon became more interested in artistic pursuits and developed an interest in the folk and fairy traditions of Ireland. In 1819 he obtained the position of clerk at the Admiralty in London, where he continued to work until his retirement.

His writings were influenced by visits to the province of Munster in the south of Ireland where he collected legends, folk songs, and tales. He wrote the first volume of Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland in 1825. The book proved to be very successful; it garnered praise from Sir Walter Scott and was translated into German by Jakob Grimm. The second and third volumes were published in 1828. Croker’s wife, Marianne, was a painter and provided the illustrations for the books. Croker himself is regarded as the first field-collector of folk tales in Ireland.

Croquemitaine

French bogeyman, literally, the “cruncher of mittens.” When French children misbehave, their parents threaten to send them to the croquemitaine, who will gobble them up.