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Do fairies exist?
We all know about fairies, even if we wouldn’t all necessarily agree on an exact definition. Some of us may picture Tinker Bell from Disney’s Peter Pan, while others have images firmly fixed in our minds from other pop culture sources such as Dungeons & Dragons or The Spiderwick Chronicles. “Fairy” is even a type of Pokemon. 
When it comes to trying to pigeonhole the fair folk, though, we find that they are (thematically enough) surprisingly elusive. While the word may call to mind images of pixie-like, minute creatures with delicate wings, coming up with a definition that captures the wide variety of fairy lore is all but impossible.
Indeed, even knowing what to call them can be tricky. According to Historic-UK.com, “when belief in fairies was common most people didn’t like to mention them by name and so referred to them by other names.”
Perhaps this is part of why there is such a bewildering array of epithets for fairies. You may see them referred to as little people, hidden people, good neighbors, kindly ones, and many more.
Ask a folklorist, and they’ll tell you that many of these names, especially the ones that make the fair folk out to be beneficent, are used in irony, or as a kind of ward against incurring their wrath.
Even the word “fairy” itself has an array of spellings and variations. There are fairies and faeries, fay and fey and fae—even once you settle on a spelling, the word “fairy” can mean a creature, or it can be used as an adjective, to mean “magical” or “enchanted.” It’s also often used as the name of the land from which these beings hail.
On top of all that, the term covers a dizzying array of different entities. Sometimes, the word fairy describes a particular thing—often those smallish creatures with the wings we mentioned earlier, though that is a somewhat more recent representation—while other times, the term includes all manner of other creatures, such as goblins or gnomes.
So just what is a fairy?
Fairies can be found in the folklore of the Celts and the Slavic peoples, as well as the history of England, Germany, and France, to name just a few. Many other countries are also home to folk tales featuring similar creatures, such as the Japanese yokai; but for now, we’ll confine our interest to the European fairies. After all, there’s plenty of them.
As you might expect from an entity with such diverse origins, there are a lot of different stories about just what fairies are and where they come from. Because they have been handed down from a wealth of different traditions, and passed through a number of different cultural filters to reach our understanding of them here in the present day, the possible origins and explanations of fairies are as bewildering as everything else about them.
Then what makes a fairy a fairy?
Again, it depends on who you ask, but folkloric accounts have a wide variety of answers. Many early fairy stories revolve heavily around two things. One is stories of changelings, in which human children are abducted by the fair folk, and a shapeshifter fairy left in their place. The other is ways to ward fairies off, to break their spells, or to simply avoid their displeasure.
There are a variety of protective charms that are said to ward off fairies, with one of the most popular in modern culture being cold iron. Others include church bells, four-leaf clovers, and wearing your clothing inside out. Specific wards work for specific fairies, though, and we’re quickly going to get back into the weeds if we start talking about all the different varieties of fey that are said to exist throughout European history.
Enough stalling! Are they real or not?
Well, we don’t really know, do we? Obviously, we have no real evidence that fairies exist, but at the same time, it’s difficult to prove that they don’t, for the simple reason that it’s difficult to prove a negative.
Like cryptids and UFOs—which have, in some ways, taken fairies’ place in the imagination of the credulous or those who, to quote the X-Files, “want to believe”—fairies exist for those who want them to badly enough, and there’s probably nothing that anyone can say that will dissuade them.
While putting one over on Sherlock Holmes may be an insurmountable task, Doyle himself was not so incredulous. A devout spiritualist, Doyle was perhaps too eager to believe in the authenticity of the photos, and used them to illustrate an article on the subject of the fair folk that he had been commissioned to write for The Strand. This, more than anything else, thrust the photographs into the forefront of the public imagination, where they would stay, on and off, for years to come. 
Published: May 28, 2022
Latest Revision: May 28, 2022
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