NO PASSPORT NEEDED

Jeremy Harte. Fairy Encounters in Medieval England. University of Exeter Press, 2024.

On the first page of this book, the author presents us with what is probably the best definition of 'fairies' I have seen: “the beings who broke into human life [who] were never very forward in identifying themselves”. Of course, it's a pretty good definition of a lot of other characters as well, many of whom have cropped up in the pages of Magonia over the last half-century.

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THE VERY GREEN PARTY

John Clark. The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England. University of Exeter Press, 2023.

The story of the Green Children, a boy and girl, coloured green and in green clothing, who appeared mysteriously in the Suffolk village of Woolpit some time in the mid twelfth century has been around for centuries, hovering between folklore, fairy-tale, Forteanism, and most recently ufology. 

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DOUBTFUL ORIGINS

Simon Webb. The Origins of Wizards, Witches and Fairies. Pen and Sword Books, 2023

This book contains a mass of information and conjecture; all of it diverting, some of it convincing, much of it discredited. The author takes time (55 pages to be precise) to set the context, and to introduce his wide-ranging selection of traditions, concepts and images common across Northern Europe. 

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ELVISH LORE AND LIFE

Linda Raedisch. The Lore of Old Elfland: Secrets from the Bronze Age to Middle Earth. Llewellyn, 2019.

The elves have been among us throughout recorded history. Reports of these elusive beings predate Christianity and have been intertwined with Norse mythology, the magical powers and the capricious behaviour of the gods. As with other liminal beings, elves do not have a scientific, objective existence. 

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FAIRYLAND REVISITED

Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook. Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500 AD to the Present. Gibson Square, 2018. -

This is a thought-provoking collection of data. Most people have heard of fairies, but few realise quite how much they have infiltrated our folklore; and even more surprisingly, how many modern sighting reports are still being recorded.
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AWAY WITH THE FAIRIES

Richard Firth Green. Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church. University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Nearly all human cultures have conceived of liminal beings that straggle the divide between mortal and immortal, matter and spirit, good and evil, habitat and wilderness. In western culture these beings have been given names such as fairies, elves, trolls, boggarts etc., in Islamic culture they are the djinns, and other cultures have their equivalents.
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LETTERS FROM FAIRYLAND

Magonia Review has developed something of a tradition of noting forthcoming sets of postage stamps from around the world, which have themes related to the kind of topics we cover in this blog. Fairies have cropped up quite a few times recently in our book reviews, so readers may be interested in a new set of stamps to be issued by the postal authorities in the Channel Island of Guernsey.
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UP THE AIRY MOUNTAIN DOWN THE RUSHY GLEN

Bob Curran. The Truth About Leprechauns. O’Brian Press, Dublin. 2017.

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Varla Ventura. Fairies, Pookas and Changelings. Weiser Books, 2017.

These two titles are rather lighter ventures into the world of the strange and unexplained than we usually deal with here at Magonia, but no less worthwhile for that. Bob Curran will be know to Magonia Review readers for titles like American Vampires and Inside the Dark, Twisted World of H.P. Lovecraft. With Leprechauns he lets his hair down a bit with an amusing ramble through the world of little folk in Ireland and a few adjacent territories.
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HIDDEN AMONG US

S. D. Tucker. The Hidden Folk: Are Poltergeists and Fairies Just the Same Thing? Fortean Words, 2016.

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Albert S. Rosales. Humanoid Encounters: The Others Among Us,  2010-2015. Triangulum Publishing, 2016.

If you asked most people they would argue that belief in fairies is a dead superstition and that the stories told of them were purely cultural inventions and not memories of actual experiences. These two books challenge that view, one explicitly, the other implicitly. 
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FAIRY FRIENDS

Ronan Coghlan The Fairy Realm. Skylight Press, 2014.

Apart from the Tooth Fairy, whom probably most of us believed in as children because we had "proof" in the form of a coin under our pillows in exchange for the tooth we had lost, there was another fairy who went by the name of Nuff, often invoked by adults when agreeing on something, as in the expression "Fairy Nuff".
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FAIRYLAND, MY FAIRYLAND

Marjorie T. Johnson. Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times. Anomalist Books, 2014.

If this book is any guide, there are a lot of people out there who claim to have seen fairies. Its 350+ pages are crammed full of first-hand sighting reports, most of them not duplicating the many accounts recorded in my own book Fairies: Real Encounters With Little People.
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DARK FAIRIES

Bob Curran. Dark Fairies, (illustrated by Ian Daniels). Career Press/New Page Books, 2010.

Most people in the contemporary western world have a highly romanticised view of fairies, derived in no small part from Disney schmaltz. Fairyland/Magonia is seen as, to use the famous expression of Jacques Vallee, "a place where gentle folks and graceful fairies dance, and lament the coarse world below." However. as we in Magonia have often argued, and this new book by Ulster folklorist and story teller Dr Bob Curran emphasises, the original fairy beliefs were very different.
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