Wylde Wood Soap~About The Fae

~About The Fae

I've always been curious about faeries. My passion for the mystical aspects of life has led me to believe in them. There is evidence all around us that leaves one to more than speculate, all you have to do is look with childlike eyes and an innocence.

Here is what I have found in the Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia.

Fairy and Fairy Tale, in folklore, a diminutive supernatural creature, generally in human form, dwelling in an imaginary region called fairyland; and the stories of its interventions through magic in mortal affairs. The term fairy is also loosely applied to such beings as brownies, gnomes, elves, nixies, goblins, trolls, dwarfs, pixies, kobolds, banshees, sylphs, sprites, and undines. The folk imagination not only conceives of fairyland as a distinct domain, but also imagines fairies as living in everyday surroundings such as hills, trees, and streams and sees fairy rings, fairy tables, and fairy steeds in natural objects.

The belief in fairies was an almost universal attribute of early folk culture. In ancient Greek literature the sirens in Homer's Odyssey are fairies, and a number of the heroes in his Iliad have fairy lovers in the form of nymphs. The Gandharvas (celestial singers and musicians), who figure in Sanskrit poetry, were fairies, as were the Hathors, or female genii, of ancient Egypt, who appeared at the birth of a child and predicted the child's future.

The traditional characteristics of fairies are depicted in European literature in such works as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet (in Mercutio's “Queen Mab” speech); The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser; L'Allegro and Comus by John Milton; Contes de ma mère l'oye, known in English as Tales of Mother Goose, by Charles Perrault; Kinder-und Hausmärchen, known in English as Grimm's Fairy Tales, by the brothers Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm; a fairy-tale series by Andrew Lang, for example, The Blue Fairy Tale Book and The Red Fairy Tale Book; and representative collections of Irish stories such as Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland by Thomas Crofton Croker and Irish Fairy Tales by William Butler Yeats. Croker has described fairies as being “a few inches high, airy and almost transparent in body; so delicate in their form that a dewdrop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles, indeed, but never breaks.” In folklore fairies are generally considered beneficent toward humans. They are sensitive and capricious, however, and often inclined to play pranks; so if their resentment is not to be aroused, they must be spoken well of and always treated with deference. Bad fairies are thought to be responsible for such misfortunes as the bewitching of children, the substitution of ugly fairy babies, known as changelings, for human infants, and the sudden death of cattle.

Faeries in the Garden

'Twas I that led you through the painted mead.
Where the light fairies danced upon the flowers
Hanging from every leaf an orient pearl.
The Wisdom of Dr. Dodypoll-1660

Faeries under the Moonlight

DREAM FAIRY
(Thomas Hood)

A little fairy comes at night,
Her eyes are blue, her hair is brown,
With silver spots upon her wings,
And from the moon she flutters down.
She has a little silver wand,
And when a good child goes to bed,
She waves her hand from right to left,
And makes a circle round its head.
And then it dreams of pleasant things,
Of fountains filled with fairy fish,
And trees that bear delicious fruit,
And bow their branches at a wish.

Faeries in the Woods

FAIRYLAND
(Maud Keary)

A Fairy's house stands in a wood,
Midst fairy trees and flowers,
Where daisies sing like little birds
Between the sun and showers,
And grasses whisper tiny things
About this world of ours.

Such flowers are there beside the way,
Lilies and hollyhocks:
Blow off their stalks to tell the time
Tall dandelion clocks;
While pansies ring an hourly chime
Like a wound music-box.

Some day shall we two try to find
This strange enchanted place?
Go hand in hand through flower-lit woods
Where living trees embrace --
And suddenly, as in a dream,
Behold a fairy's face!