Who still believes in faeries?

Factual Questions
1

I know there is still a sizable constituency for angels, ghosts and lake-monsters, but are there any (adult) people, anywhere, who still believe in European Medieval Grimm-type creatures such as dragons, dwarves, gnomes, basilisks, elves, trolls, faerie folk, changelings, leprechauns, pixies, giants and water-sprites?

Or who believe that they USED TO exist? (Not just as Jungian dinosaur archetypes or pygmy hominids, but in the sense of, “there used to be a lot of dragons, but the knights killed them all.”)

While touring Ireland, I heard a rural tourbus driver tell a Canadian tourist that he believed in leprechauns and banshees. I doubted his sincerity–I thought he was just being a good tour guide.

I heard once from an Icelandic classmate that there were still people who believed in the Norse gods–mostly elderly professors, I think. (PLEASE don’t tell me what faux “Aryans” and white-supremacists “believe”–I doubt their sincerity as well!)

I think it would be more interesting to hear about Scandinavian farm folk who still quake at the thought of trolls coming to pillage them by night. Are there any such folks?

I have also heard that the famous Viking chess set was found when a Northern British farmer accidentally unearthed a few pieces. He thought he had disturbed a faery mound, and ran away. But that was in the early 1800’s.

No need to tell me about the English schoolgirls’ “fairy photo” hoax of 1916–I know all about that one, and saw the movie too. It inspired me to take Polaroids of my fourth-grade students holding cutouts similar to the Cottingley ones. I picked out the best one and sent it to Michael Shermer’s SKEPTIC magazine. (They never published it–too bad.)

Once I was teaching the D’Aulaire version of “Greek Myths,” again to fourth-graders, and as usual I threw in a disclaimer that the stories are not true and no one believes in the Greek gods anymore, just to protect myself in case some Christian parents got riled. (Hey, it was the Nineties.) One girl grinned and said, “I only believe in Aphrodite.” I think she was expressing admiration for the character rather than factual belief.

Once again: DO any grown-ups still believe???

2

Darn, that’s exactly what I was about to do.

I’m sure there are some loonies out there who still believe in such things, but I’d be hard-pressed to find them… were it not for the invention of search engines. :slight_smile:

I didn’t check around these sites enough to see whether these people are serious or not, but you might want to:

Faeries in the garden?

More than I want to know about Faeries

3

Believe it or not, some people think all sorts of supernatural thingies exist. Like God, for example.

Me, I have a pink unicorn living in my back yard.

Wanna buy a bridge in Brooklyn?

4

One of my students (I think she was 16 or 17 at the time) mentioned in a paper that she believed in faeries. She said that she had never seen them but that she believed they existed and that they would try to help you if you believed in and respected them.

5

I suspect that there are many adults who still believe in fairies or something similar. You’ve got to remember that the fully Westernised world is only a small part of the Earths population. I know that there are still Aboriginal people in this country who believe that there are spirits who live in trees and only come out during the wet season, and others who believe that their are spirits who live underground and will cause all sorts of misfortune if you disturb there abode and don’t make attempts to repair the damage. I’m certain that there would be similar beliefs amongst many cultures worldwide.
Added to this my half-sister has a belief in ‘Devas’ (fairies basically)> She’s a strange hippy type who believes in al sorts of organic earth mother stuff. She’s not alone, many people like her and her husband believe in this. Find a copy of ‘The Findhorn Garden’ if you can. It’s a real education in what people still believe in. If you do a site search on ‘Deva’ rather than ‘Faerie’ you’ll get hundreds of links to educated westerners who believe this stuff.

6

Oh, sure, loads of people in the Western world believe in faeries, the old gods, etc. They call themselves Neo-Pagans. There are a fair amount of people at this message boad that worship the ancient Greek and Roman and Celtic gods. 5 minutes in google found this Do a search for “Pagan” or “Neo-Pagan” or “Wicca” or “Witchcraft” or “Faerie” etc., and you should find plenty.

7

…just as long as he doesn’t try to dis nixies or the Leshy…

8

Here in Minneapolis, people were actually leaving offerings to the “elf” that supposedly lived here

9

I do.

Make fun all you like.

10

I believe in faeires and the like, and I always have. I think that the idea must have come from somewhere. You know it never hurts to believe in the whimsical and whatnot.

11

I think I read somewhere that the “Elf Door” hoax (not really a hoax, per se) was perpetuated by columnist James Lileks.

–Tim

12

I had a friend who believed in faeries. But she also believed that all dreams and hallucinations were glimpses of another reality just as real as our own. She had an IQ of 174, too!

13

There’s also a huge gray area between believing and not believing (or believing it doesn’t exist). Most people would claim that they don’t believe in faeries, but when shown some kind of evidence, many would be pleasently surprised rather than skeptical.

14

Almost a quarter of the population of Iceland believes in the huldefolk, or the Hidden People, whom we would probably call elves. About ten percent claims to have seen them, or some manifestation thereof.

MR

15

Not to do a sequential threads hijack, but for a little while this question was riding right above “Advanced Peter Pan Syndrome…”

All of you naysayers just killed Tinkerbell!

16

I haven’t read much of this thread, just thought I’d post what I know about the subject.

I come from Iceland (don’t live there no more, thank god) and back home A LOT OF PEOPLE believe in fairies and elves. The government even officially supports this belief by having contractors make roads around places that are regarded as having large elven populations, such as large rocks or rockformations close to towns. This has cost a lot of money through the years.
Oh, and handily enough these fairies can’t be seen without them WANTING you to see them. They apparently work in far more mysterious ways than simply coming out of their dwellings and telling workers to bugger off and go mess with some other non-inhabited stone! (OK, so there are some ancient Sagas of this happening, but usually people didn’t listen and were severly punished. This seems to be a theme with most of the Icelandic mythical stories: you meet an elf, OK, cool. You do the slightest thing wrong and: POW! you’re history, or wish that you were. Apparently they have also been linked with the devil, because they do not believe in god or Jesus.)

Many Icelandic workers claim to have suffered mysterious accidents and setbacks while trying to build roads through the aforementioned areas and a lot of elderly people in Iceland seem to sincerely believe in the stuff.

Now a days however, younger people simply see it as a source for tourist revenue, or a cool new-age thing to pretend believing in for novelty value. A few are probably just nuts.

For the record, I think it’s all just fairy-tales. (Sorry, just couldn’t resist that pun… I’m weak.)

  • Gunnar Hrafn
17

Speaking of trolls and Scandinavians . . .

The novel Dance of the Tiger by paleontogist Björn Kurtén is about interactions and socialization between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals in prehistoric Scandinavia (during a glacial interstadial period, no doubt). The Cro-Magnon folks refer to the Neanderthals as “Trolls.” (With a capital T, as though it’s the name of an ethnic group.)

Kurtén seems to be postulating that the existence of trolls, so deep in the Scandinavian folkloric psyche (remember “In the Hall of the Mountain King”?), can be traced back to ancestral memory of when Neanderthals walked the earth.

18

You can currently buy maps to the hottest fairy places in Iceland. They apparently have clearly marked rocks of abode, rocks of worship and rocks of commerce.

Most of the map covers an area called Hafnafjordur, a strange place for sure. I haven’t met many elves there though, just a gorgeous little redhead with an attitude.

But that’s another story :wink:

— G. Raven

p.s. that prehistoric roots thing is pretty interesting. Most people seem to agree that many of the more occult beliefs of Iceland (trolls, giants, ghosts, ghoul like creatures) come from the fact that for hundreds of years everyone lived in complete darkness inside cold, damp and miserable huts made of mud and grass (and couldn’t go out much during winter!). This is apparently not very good for your mental health, they had few lamps and little oil to burn and thus became paranoid, seeing elves, ghosts and goblins in every shadow.

19

I certainly believe in trolls. Not like I’ve not seen enough of them on these boards, tha’ knows.

20

I heard of a recent case in Scotland like this. The construction of a road was held up in the courts for a long time because it was scheduled to go through a home of the Little People.

From what I heard, many Scots are quite serious about not fucking around with the Little People.