ARUP: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Arup K. Chatterjee. You’re watching the Unofficial Seminar. And today with me I have a very special guest, Professor Adam Grydehøj. Did I pronounce it right?
ADAM: It’s wonderful.
ARUP: So, Adam is a professor at South China University of Technology, and he is very well known in histories of islands and the cultural perspectives into islands. Adam has also been the editor of the prestigious journal Island Studies, and he’s currently the founding editor of Folk Knowledge and Place, of which I also happen to be an advisory editor. Professor Adam Grydehøj is, among his many interests and his vast portfolio of writings and contributions to the literary world, also interested very deeply in folklore — and the subject of today’s conversation is fairies. Apart from the several things that we tend to resonate on, Adam, I think our shared critique of the Enlightenment — the European Enlightenment particularly, because there are also Eastern ways of being enlightened — so, what got you interested in fairies and folklore?
ADAM: Yeah, that is a complex topic in itself, but I actually started out with an interest in Old Norse religion — Viking history, actually, in Scandinavia. And one thing that comes up with this topic is, of course, things like elves and giants and all of that. And with that comes a temptation to possibly draw equivalences with things that happen later on in history. It’s not difficult to start from a comparative religion standpoint and then get interested in what folklore means relative to religion — from a European perspective you have some fascinating similarities but also divergences between what I’ve come to see as the difference between myth and religion and folklore.
ARUP: Is there a tendency, do you think, of clubbing what used to be called religion and mythology in a pejorative sense back in the nineteenth century — is there a tendency of euphemizing that into folklore studies, or do you think folklore studies today is a vibrant, substantive subject?
ADAM: Well, I do think it’s a vibrant, substantive subject, but it’s one of those difficult subjects and difficult disciplines where you’ll have vernacular, everyday meanings that then come into conflict with a more or less formal academic discipline. Often you’ll end up with folklore still being associated with kind of bad history, or fake history — which, of course, is one way of looking at it. But folklore could be, in a sense, just the stories that we tell each other about who we are, how people relate to the past.
ARUP: Has it ever occurred to you that folklore might be a kind of resistance to mainstream, scholarly, canonical historiography?
ADAM: Yeah, certainly — I think it often has been, thinking about folklore both as the lived experience of people and, ultimately, as a kind of academic approach which internally has quite often taken an activist perspective, which has been less true of history as a discipline over the past sixty years, let’s say.
ARUP: All right, Adam, you know something slightly disruptive happened to my cognitive apparatus a few years ago when I was in the Faroe Islands. One of our colleagues introduced me to this historical fact — that it was the Vikings who introduced the concept of a parliament in Europe, and the oldest parliament happens to be in the Faroe Islands, in Tórshavn, I think, and this is more than a thousand years old. But that is not the capacity in which I had heard of Vikings until then — Vikings were largely a quasi-historical, quasi-mythical, with big beards, horns, and everything. And you, in the same breath, are also interested in Vikings, elves, and fairies. Help us draw these connections — how do we join these dots?
ADAM: Well, I mean, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of mythologization of these actual, ordinary people who lived in the past. And the primary way that we, as historians or folklorists or anyone else who’s interested, know about the Vikings is from these texts, which are written after the end of the Viking period. So we can say Vikings are usually thought of as being from maybe the 600s through the 1000s CE. But eventually, in the late 1000s, 1100s, 1200s, 1300s, we have people in different parts of Scandinavia writing stories about the Vikings — writing about the past, always from a Christian perspective. So we only have indirect textual evidence of the Vikings. But part of what makes the Vikings so appealing is that this textual evidence is really great. In Iceland in particular, there was a new genre of fiction literature that arose that we know as the sagas.
ARUP: When was this?
ADAM: Let’s see — this would be in the 1100s and 1200s, its high point. They did it for a while afterwards, but it kind of arose in isolation from other forms of literature in continental Europe. And because of these sagas — a lot of these are like family dramas, action stories, and romances — but you also have some things involving religion, involving religious history, because at that point people no longer believed in the old gods. They were Christians, but people might want to write about the old gods — also people recording and writing down poems that would have existed hundreds of years before. But, of course, to what extent are poems written down at a later period in time — to what extent do they really reflect the previous traditions? There’s limited knowledge, in that sense.
ARUP: This might be a wide leap, but help me understand your definition of fairies — because I remember you telling me one day that even the spirits of India, or Hindu deities, sometimes qualify as fairies in your definition. So help us understand what you mean by fairies.
ADAM: Well, I’m at risk of going down many different directions here. But as a folklorist, as an academic, I’d be thinking about fairies in a slightly academic way — as a broad, general category of what you might call spirits, or what some concepts might call demons, as long as it doesn’t necessarily have a negative portrayal, which I would be viewing as — they might form part of religion, but as existing outside the main currents of religious tradition. So, as an example — part of the difficulty comes when we’re thinking about fairies in a European context. Most people will be thinking about Tinkerbell, maybe little things with wings like dragonfly wings or butterfly wings, and so on — for which there’s, like, the fairies in The Tempest, for example, by Shakespeare. Here it gets complicated, because we’re having to think about at what point are we understanding the fairies in Shakespeare. Because what I might call flower fairies — the sort of winged fairies — are often extremely small, and there is very little evidence that people ever believed in these things prior to the 1800s. But if we bring up ideas with Shakespeare, and there’s certainly theories from Shakespeare, we’ll have to bear in mind the time periods in which people are illustrating Shakespeare, and the different ideas that they might have of what Shakespeare is doing.
ARUP: Very interesting. Okay. But—
ADAM: Something else I could bring up here, and this comes back to the ideas with the sagas and Shakespeare together — if we’re listening to someone tell us a ghost story about when they encountered a ghost, maybe in their kitchen — which is some research I’ve done before — people will be telling us about what we might regard as an everyday kind of event. If you speak to someone who’s seen a fairy, they might have similar kinds of experiences. But if we have to go back to famous literature or mythological texts to understand fairies, this is like going back to these same texts to try to understand humans. You might have humans in these texts, right — you might have some famous Viking warrior, or you might have Prospero in Shakespeare. Is this the best way of learning what ordinary humans are like? Not really, right? These are going to be exceptional figures who might really not be the norm. But because most of us are not really believing in fairies as such in this way, it’s easy to just see them all as simply invented figures — and then to have difficulty making the division between fictional fairies, which are made for fictional purposes. At the time Shakespeare was writing, nearly everyone in his society would have believed in fairies. It doesn’t mean that he’s writing about the kinds of fairies that people would expect to encounter.
ARUP: So something very interesting happens around the time of Shakespeare, and this is just before the Enlightenment — a hundred years prior to that — and that is the Reformation. That changes a lot of things in Christianity, but I suppose, more importantly, it changes the destiny of fairies as well. You say Shakespeare writes about — according to you, in your definition of fairies — Shakespeare writes about fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and also, uncannily, in Hamlet. I don’t know if you would make sense of the ghost of Julius Caesar as a fairy as well. But surely — do you think Hamlet’s dead father, the ghost of his dead father, qualifies as a fairy?
ADAM: I would not go so far as that, but I think the fact that he’s a ghost is instructive of things that were happening with fairies at the same time. I mean, Hamlet as a character is partly famous for his doubtfulness, his procrastination, his wondering what he should do — and as someone reading the play today, we could often think, what’s wrong with this guy? He should clearly act on the knowledge he gets from his dead father. If our dead father comes to us, maybe we would be inclined to trust him. And indeed, fifty, a hundred years before Hamlet was written, I think the Hamlet figure would be inclined to trust his dead father as well. Because, well — because in this time period, when society is firmly Catholic, we have the ability to understand ghosts as being more or less neutral beings. Sometimes, in this sort of tradition, you would have dead souls that just sort of end up stuck on earth, or — if we’re going to use some Christian doctrinal idea — that could be in purgatory. Indeed, in Hamlet we have discussions of this in-between realm in which the father finds himself. But what happens with Protestantism, among many reforms, is the removal of purgatory. It doesn’t mean that the average person going around England is thinking about ideology and doctrine, but the removal of the possibility of being neither in heaven nor in hell — which existed before, which allowed things like fairies and goblins to be neutral: they could hurt you, but it doesn’t mean that they’re evil; they could help you, doesn’t mean that they’re good; they could just be something that doesn’t fit within either the heavenly or the hellish. But by the time Hamlet‘s written, we’re getting this transition period in which, if you see a ghost, it’s likely going to be a devil — because the actual dead soul is again either going to be up in heaven, and thus having his own arc or whatever, or down in hell, and can’t visit earth even if he wants to. So the only thing that could possibly be, if not an angel, would be a devil. And this figure is clearly not an angel. So when you have a figure that appears to be a dead father who’s urging revenge, this interpretation of Hamlet would be looking at it as Hamlet doubting to what extent he’s dealing with the actual spirit of his father, or this thing that’s trying to lead him into mortal sin. Where this can come in with fairies — people’s popular ideas, people’s experiences with the supernatural, which is the kind of approach that I’m usually taking, is going to be somewhat distinct from literature. Many of the accounts that people have of fairies involve seeing their dead relatives with the fairies. So there’s the idea that people’s — especially in recorded instances prior to Protestantism, but also afterwards, when we’re dealing with texts written by people who don’t necessarily care very much about the fixed form of religion — people are encountering the dead among fairies, or the disappeared among fairies, which we might interpret as being the dead. A lot of the famous fairy stories we have, which are recorded in ballads and legends and written down or recorded by folklorists and antiquarians later on, are strongly associated with fairies and the dead in a way that doctrinal Protestantism really does not allow.
ARUP: It’s very interesting that the word “fairy” is taking on very different connotations in all these definitions that you’re providing. Apart from the obvious fact that fairy today, I suppose, in most parts of the world is a very gendered word — don’t you think? When did the gendering of fairies start happening, according to you?
ADAM: Oh, this is an interesting one, because there’s certainly no strong connection with fairies being male or female in terms of folklore. But if we think about the word itself, which does indeed come from the French into English — you could also refer to them as the “fair folk.” “Fair folk” would suggest pretty things, but a lot of the descriptions we get of fairies are not of particularly pretty beings.
ARUP: Exactly.
ADAM: So this would typically be viewed academically as a euphemism, to avoid saying taboo words. A lot of the words that we have for particular kinds of fairies are euphemistic words, to avoid saying things that will bring you bad luck. If you think about Shakespeare again — Robin Goodfellow is a perfect example. This might be treated — and is again mentioned, I believe, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream — as some kind of individual being, but at the time it’ll just be a way of referring to something that you don’t want to be calling by its own name. So to refer to the fairies as “the fair folk” is a way of talking about them while avoiding bringing misfortune upon oneself. What happens in the 1800s in England, in particular, is — partially in relation to some of these associations between fairies and the dead — you start having associations between angels and fairies. And one thing that angels have are wings. And it’s at this point in time that fairies start getting wings. Again, you could have some earlier illustrations of fairies that involve wings, but you don’t really start having people’s reports of their own experiences involving wings until, in a relatively short period of time, it becomes a popular idea of what fairies look like. At precisely the same time, people are stopping believing in fairies. Some of the most famous fairies that we have are the Cottingley fairies, which are a source of — there were some young girls who took photographs with fairies. And partially famous because Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous Sherlock Holmes author, ended up believing very strongly in the existence of these fairies, which people still have different theories about. But these are the classic — what we might now view as the classic fairies, the little dainty things with wings.
ARUP: And that gendering is interesting.
ADAM: I think it comes from this transition away from belief. Another critical point here is one thing that really most traditional fairy stories have in common — if by “traditional” we mean people talking about their own experiences with fairies, telling other people about them, ultimately telling researchers about these kinds of things. One thing that many of them have in common is: you can’t recognize a fairy. The stories usually don’t work unless you think it’s a human when you first see it, and only later realize that it is, or must have been, a fairy — because these cases of mistaken identity — well, people don’t want anything to do with fairies unless they can help it, because they’re usually dangerous. Even if they’re not bad, it’s usually very dangerous to be around them. You can’t eat their food, otherwise you end up being stuck with them. You don’t want their help — I mean, they can make you rich, but they can also just kill you. So the idea that fairies have to be mistakable for humans — otherwise these stories won’t happen, otherwise you won’t sleep with them (very bad idea, by the way) — or have these other dealings. But clearly this doesn’t work if what we’re imagining is little things with wings, or indeed very little things in general. Most of the fairies that we deal with in actual tradition, in legend, look human enough to fool us in the first instance. And I don’t know — here I don’t want to turn the tables, but I don’t know if you could have a similar situation in Indian tradition, or in China, where I’m living now. The closest things we have to what I might be calling fairies would be fox spirits and snake spirits and other animal spirits which are shapeshifters — their true form might be as an animal, but they’re able to take the form of people, and sometimes they take the form of people and don’t realize that people are viewing them as people. Sometimes they want to trick people and pretend to be people in order to fool them. But in these kinds of cases, the fairy has to look like a human.
ARUP: Since you asked me — off the top of my head, I can mention two concepts. One is less of a religious concept, to my reckoning, and more of an ethno-regional concept, primarily known to me as a Bengali concept, which is called nishi daak. Nishi means “night” — a nocturnal calling. So somebody calling you by your name in the middle of the night — don’t answer it, because if you do, your soul will fly off, or your bodily remains will fly off, I don’t know which one, because I haven’t met anybody who’s undergone that experience, but it used to be very popular even until the ’90s, before liberalization took over — I don’t know what happened after that. And then there’s the concept of jinns. So, a jinn in Islam, and particularly in Bangladesh — because, being born in Bengal, having grown up in Bengal, and my proximity to Bangladesh allows me a lot of contemporary understanding of the daily psychology of people growing up in Bangladesh till about 2000 — they would seriously take the concept of jinn to some very practical entity just out there. So you might be a jinn — if I was a practicing Bangladeshi Muslim, I might consider you to be a jinn, or almost a jinn. So at any time you could just come out of the closet and declare yourself to be not human. So do these qualify as fairies in your definition?
ADAM: Well, thanks — and I do think so, because, again, from the academic perspective, “fairy” is going to be a catch-all term we just might tend to use, because English has become this kind of language that we use for categorizing. And I think you’re bringing up a crucial point, which is the everyday nature of these things. The fairies would be things in Europe that would live at the hill next to your farm, right — they would just be there. And in a way, in fact, to ghosts, which we brought up earlier — ghosts are a sign of something that’s kind of wrong in the universe, whereas fairies are supposed to be there. And so it’s that everyday nature of it that we could kind of lose when we enter a time period in which people aren’t really believing that they were always there. We can get confusion today when people know, right, that people used to believe in fairies. But if our idea of fairies is the little things with wings, we have to ask: how stupid do we think their ancestors were, right? We had this case in Denmark, where I lived for years, where — there’s a particular kind of fairy that lived on the farm and helped people; most farms would have this kind of fairy — in English we call it a brownie — but in Danish popular culture, through complex ways, they became known as Christmas figures that are associated with Christmas; they wear funny clothes, you feed them rice pudding once a year. Now, these are absurd figures for everyday belief, but this is the only image of the brownies that people have. And there’s this disconnect between what we think our ancestors had, our culture, and what they actually did, which makes it difficult, I would say, to understand the past in a more general sense.
ARUP: Now, obviously there was a lot of opposition to the idea of fairies, and increasingly they became more and more censored in the mainstream imagination. Now, I can think of a parallel scenario, and you can confirm or deny whether the direction I’m going into is right. So, since the late eighteenth century, and particularly in the nineteenth century, the image of Kali — who I do not think to be a fairy, even by your definition — the image of goddess Kali, which is another form of goddess Durga, became the subject of particular irritation and even importance among Scottish missionaries in India. Generally, you know, you can’t expect a colonial missionary to love Indian gods — Lord Vishnu, Shiva, Durga, and so on — but this was a case of immense hatred, especially for Kali. Now I’m wondering if Kali invoked something in the Scottish missionaries that the concept of fairies might have invoked back in Europe, in England — sorry, in Britain.
ADAM: Yeah, no, I would absolutely agree with your instinct there. And it’s not just because of some idea of one god opposed to another god in this case — I mean, the reason — let me contextualize, because, having looked into the psychology of some of these Scottish missionaries, I think — I’m not trying to vindicate any of them, but I’m simply trying to understand whether it’s simply a kind of racial xenophobia, or something that has actually started far back in childhood. Well — Christianity, obviously, in a general sense, has difficulty with other gods, right — there should only be one God. But what I could think of, from my very limited knowledge, is that some of the practices surrounding Kali are going to cause special problems that we could compare on the fairy side. Because, as you say, Kali for various reasons cannot be considered a fairy — but the ideas of “barbaric traditions” and what might be called “witchcraft,” which today is a pejorative term — but if we’re looking at European tradition around the same time period back in Europe, a lot of people would have considered themselves witches, as far as we can tell. Now, what we think of their magical powers might be something else. But what’s quite interesting here — something which comes up in the witch trials, in which people are being tried for being witches, and famously killed sometimes — is that fairies occur quite often in these trials, and in fact it’s one of the biggest proofs used, especially by the Protestant-based courts, that someone is a witch: that they had dealings with fairies. If we go back previously in time, having dealings with fairies is not necessarily evil, because fairies don’t need to be good or bad. By the time we have strict Protestantism — especially like Calvinism in Scotland, which is one of the very strictest forms — then anything one does with fairies is going to be a bad thing, and is going to be necessarily evil. If I’m thinking about reactions to Kali in India on the part of missionaries, you certainly have this period of heightened concern about people having dealings with the supernatural.
ARUP: Look — if Kali is not really being regarded as a goddess herself by the missionaries, then theoretically it shouldn’t be much of a problem, right?
ADAM: Because it’s only if there is somehow some competition for Jesus—
ARUP: Exactly — which it wasn’t.
ADAM: So I think part of the idea of people having dealings with the supernatural that could not fit within Christian worldviews — part of the confusion, or the complication here, in popular culture in the West, we have this desire, often including academic desire, by people who might take literary studies, literature approaches, or history approaches without much of the folklore approach — a tendency to view fairies as somehow fundamentally pagan, pre-Christian.
ARUP: That’s very interesting. Please elaborate.
ADAM: Yeah, sure. I mean, for which — I think we could assume that people have always believed in fairies, as I’ve defined them here, in this incredibly broad sense — this idea of a non-religious supernatural—
ARUP: Right, right — but which they aren’t, your saint?
ADAM: Well, no, I mean, I would say that we can look at them this way, right — they probably predate Christianity, but the difficulty that we have is that they’re also fundamentally ingrained in Christianity and in Judaism. You mentioned jinn, in Islam as well — there are quite a few stories from the Old Testament that seem a lot like fairies, to me. They’re not called fairies, because that’s a language that’s been used at the time. But because the earliest descriptions we have of these kinds of supernatural things are taking place, or concerning things, in pre-Christian eras — and because these things are first being studied as an academic discipline at a time when people believe quite strongly in Christianity — it ends up being kind of clustered together with this thing that is from before the Christian era, and does not belong to Christianity. But certainly, in Catholicism and in Judaism, there was no real problem dealing with fairies. You have many descriptions of fairies prior to the Reformation. The only written texts we have, by which we might know fairies, are written by Christians — often written by priests. And again, we have archaeological evidence, other things which can strongly suggest that people believed in fairies before, but our best sources are all Christian.
ARUP: I think I wouldn’t be too wrong to think, Adam, that Protestants and Calvinists who happen to tune into this conversation might leave a few comments in the YouTube comment box — but you’re most welcome to do that. Adam, thank you so much for giving me your precious time.
ADAM: Well, thank you for the invitation.
ARUP: It was a pleasure to host you, Adam. Dear audience, I hope you liked today’s conversation. Please like, share, and subscribe to the Unofficial Seminar, and we really hope to have Adam back — properly online — and until the next time, dear ladies and gentlemen …
Arup K. Chatterjee 