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So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by MGM Plus. From and its whores returns for season four. Centered around a town that traps all those who enter. Terrifying creatures that come out at night. Horrors some wish to stay buried. Where desperate hope leads to darker truths. Dangerous new arrivals. A sinister figure. A shocking revelation. From season four premieres April 19th on MGM Plus. Some doors should remain closed. What do you picture when you imagine a fairy? Most probably a childlike creature with wings. Perhaps perched on a flower. But this is a far more modern image than we might think. As Matthias Eagler explains to Lauren Good in this episode of the History Extra podcast, fairies didn't get their wings until the 1780s and long before that they reviewed, along with their elven counterparts, as much more human than other. Matthias traces the history of how we've perceived these creatures and why these perceptions can reveal so much about the society that dreamt them up. Hello Matthias, thank you so much for joining me today. Hello Lauren, it's great to be here and thank you very much for your interest in my work on that most obscure of topics of fairies. Most of those listening I'm sure will picture these elves and fairies as lovely almost childlike creatures. But as your book points out, they haven't always been like this have they? Indeed they have not. If you read traditional stories from 19th century Iceland, their fairies are almost impossible to distinguish from human beings. So the typical way how an encounter is described is that person X meets a person on the road, assumes that's probably the farm hand from the neighboring farmers. And later on it turns out that that farm hand had been somewhere else entirely and inquiries are made. And nobody can be found who was on the road, on the place, on the day. And therefore it's concluded must have been an elf. So they are absolutely not distinguished from human beings in their appearance. And it's pretty much the same if you look at all those famous Arthurian stories where fairy is encountered deep inside some enchanted forest and the night immediately falls in Lafithir or think of Magandlafe who after Arthur has been leasedly wounded, receives him on the island of Avalon to heal his mortal wounds. There is no sense that these elf and women look in any way different from human ones. So just the childlike aspect that comes in much later in the history of elves and fairies. You also mentioned this moving from being the beliefs of poorer members of society in more rural parts perhaps to wealthier demographics. How were they viewed firstly in these more rural locations? There is a very, very close correlation between the circumstances of everyday life of the rural population and the way how the mythology is developed. So if you look at Iceland, my favorite example, traditional elves are very much a parallel society of hidden farmers who have hidden sheep, they have hidden cows. Occasionally people come across the cow pads of the hidden cows as the only evidence that remains of a hidden cow that has just disappeared into thin air. They go out to collect whale meat from beeched whales, the same beeched whales that also human farmers have just gone out by boat to collect whale meat from. So there's a really far-reaching parallelism and not much difference either in the wealth of the elves versus the human being. So looking at Icelandic stories, there often is a sense that the elves are a tad better off than humans, but it's not fairytale world, excuse the pun, where everybody is eating of golden plates, but it's basically the same economic constraints and the same ways of making a living from the land that are practiced both by humans and by elves. And on one occasion the elves have to help the human farmers out because somebody is falling ill on the human family and a year later the humans have to help out the elves because from the elf somebody has fallen ill and so they have to help themselves to the milk by the human cows. Interestingly, you say that when the stories of these creatures moved to more urban, perhaps wealthier environments, they were shrunk more physically but also tamed. When the stories of elves are adopted by an urban audience, then the stories are told by people who have very, very different concerns and very different emotional needs from a countryside population that has to work with the land every day and that very often kind of goes hand in hand with a certain loss of stature. So the countryside varies kind of as an ideal type and the manner of speaking. Our parallel farming society in Iceland that has the same problems as humans and the same capability of solving them. If you move a couple of hundred years later to the present time and to urban flower fairies, there is no longer that sense that you've got a fully capable society of problem-solving beings in a daily struggle with their environment to make a living, but just something that becomes almost a decoration. You also say in the book that the other world of each of these sections of society reveals its fears. In light of this, what does the other world tell us about the differences between these demographics? It can be really telling about different perceptions of nature. So, conceptions of the other world often reflect the very far-reaching differences in how people looked upon nature in rural versus urban context. So if you live in the countryside and you work the countryside and you farm the land, then you are working not with an abstract concept of nature, but you always work with the concrete physical landscape that you are farming. So you're not dealing with something abstract, but with that concrete, Stony Hill, with that Waterlogged Meadow. So it's always this field, this meadow, this little river. Whereas for the urban population, the land is something much more distant and much less concrete and in that sense more abstract. So in other world conception between the country and the city, nature in the urban context or nature as an abstract often replaces the concrete physical landscape features. Nature becomes a sort of abstract presence that is separated from its specific small-scale manifestations and that is also mirrored in how people imagine the other world. So in stories from medieval Ireland or 19th century Iceland, the elves always live in this specific hill or that specific rock. Whereas in the urban literature of modernity, the other world is something that's separate from the physical landscape. And so the other world of fantasy literature, say, is not identified with places that you can actually go to, but it's just a completely separate realm distinct from the world of everyday experience. Yeah, I suppose it reflects how connected that society is to nature. Exactly. In which way it connects to nature? What is your daily experience of nature? Do you experience nature as something that you see on the television screen, maybe as a park when you have a stroll in the evening, or as something where you have to work on it and kind of solve the daily problems that come with working this particular bad piece of land? You mentioned Arthurian legends before and you do touch on the role King Arthur in the Knights of the Round Table played in this movement between sections of society. What sort of role did it play? Overall, I think one could say that there is a general development from the country to the city. So much of the history of ideas of elves and fairies can be described as an adaptation of originally rural storytelling by an urban audience. And this was up to a point also done already by the medieval literature of chivalry and the tales of King Arthur's and the Knights of the Round Table, which thus formed a stepping stone in this development. So I think one could say that in the Middle Ages already the tales of the working countryside population were adopted by the medieval rural aristocracy, which means an adaptation to the interests, the preoccupations of that stratum of society. And so you had as a consequence a shift from a focus on particular fields and from agriculture to encounters between beautiful face and knights and shining armour. And this medieval aristocratic version was then fascinated writers and intellectuals in the 19th century urban elite. And in this way, the world of the fairies then enters the modern novel and today's television programs. Now we're jumping forward in history quite a bit here, but we see James the first of Scotland coming to the throne and it becomes known for witch trials. What part did the other world play in these? Witch trial documents from early modern Scotland are a really fascinating, if horrible, source for the spectrum and the development of ideas about fairies in the early modern period. So what you can see there basically is an increasing gulf between the ideas of the social elite on the one hand and the common people on the other hand. So in court records from the 17th century Scottish witchcraft trials, there's at least 113 cases where fairies formed part of the so-called confessions of the accused. And there you can see a broad spectrum that reaches from very traditional, very kind of agriculture focused fairies to fairies that are completely amalgamated with satanic tropes. So you get intercourse with the devil, you get the contract with the devil connected with fairies. And that is a result of a demonization of everything in popular religion that was not part of accepted church doctrine by the upper classes of the early modern period, which at this time really systematically started to persecute popular beliefs and popular practices that deviated from whatever the local church defined as acceptable practice. And King James played a central role in this. I mean, in his treatise on demonology from the 1596, explicitly talks about elf beliefs and people having visions of elves and how that has to be interpreted ontologically and legally. And his argument is that everybody who thinks he has a vision of the fairy queen really had a vision, but it's a vision that's coming from Satan. And Satan has to be fought and everybody having any doings with Satan has to be punished with a severity that is appropriate to the heinousness of, as he saw it, of this crime. And so the whole area of popular mythology is criminalized and demonized and condemned in a top-down movement. It's a stark difference here, isn't it? We have the higher classes romanticizing the other world in art as they love the stories, but then poorer parts of rural society are being punished for their beliefs in these trials. Yes, absolutely. And that's not even the chronological layering in that, because at the same time as when King James was kind of publishing several editions of his treatise on demonology, Shakespeare brought the fairies on the urban theater stage in a Midsummer Night's dream. And that was and is his most successful play. And it was shown on the London stage at exactly the same time when people were executed in Scotland for having dealings with the fairies. So it's power dynamics between social classes are something that plays a huge role in the history of fairy beliefs and often in a very, very cynical manner. 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Now available in Canada too. Go to qince.com slash history extra for free and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash history extra. Order now on Uber Eats. Orders of $30 or more save up to $25 and 430.26 see out for details. in the ball with Benifold freshly prepared meals. Visit purina.com slash Benifold to shop now. I was really struck in your book about these themes of class coming up because it wasn't a theme I necessarily expected when opening your book. I take that as a compliment to be able to surprise the reader by bringing in an aspect that's not expected. But to be honest, it's also not something that I expected to be so prominent when I started working on that book. So that really just crystallized itself maybe three, four years into the research that class difference played such a huge role for the stratification of fairy belief throughout European cultural history. You did touch on a Midsummer Night's Dream there and I would love to talk about it and just the effects literature did have on the perceptions of this other world. What role did Shakespeare's play have in the perception of fairies and elves? It was a huge thing and continues to be a huge thing today. I mean, for one, he made it socially acceptable to treat the topic of fairies in art, which at the same time as a matter of folk belief was being persecuted. He really had a tremendous influence in shaping ideas or the first associations, especially of the English speaking world, what the fairy world looks like. So he popularized Oberon, he popularized Puck and Robin Goodfellow as a literature literary figure. And he invents Titania as queen of the elves. And even 200 years later, he still had a crucial influence on the development of fairy iconography because today, if you say, here's the word fairy, it's probably the first association that pops up in your head or at least in my head is that of a small winged creature. And that is not at all a very old idea of how to imagine fairies. So fairies got the wings only in the 1780s in artistic circles in London. So William Blake, Henry Fusili, that was the leading painters who gave wings to the fairies. And the context in which these artists invented this modern winged fairy iconography were illustrations of Shakespeare, especially of the Midsummer Night Stream. So the theater text in this way also ended up fundamentally influencing through its reception in painting how we imagine fairies iconographically as small winged beings. We're jumping forward quite a few centuries now, but another piece of literature you explore in your book is Peter Pan. You mentioned there that fairies didn't get their wings till the 1780s. What does the evolution of characters like Tinkerbell tell us about how we perceive these creatures? Tinkerbell is a really fascinating case. If you read Jay and Barry's original text, what he does is a really multi-layered, deep, often very dark and complex reception of many different strands of fairy lore, which he weaves together into great literature. Now, all of us, we all know the stories, but very few of us, comparatively speaking, have read the actual original text. And that really is a sign of the huge success of Barry's work, is that most of us know his works through retellings in the form of children's books, in the form of movies, or as children's theater plays. And these retellings often trivialize the way how fairies are depicted in them. And so Tinkerbell, who in Barry's original text, actually is quite mean, and through her meanness has a lot of the complexity of historic fairy beliefs, becomes a Sakharine winged little female nature-loving being that has nothing mean at all about it and is just a tad boring but very cute. So this trivialization that we see going on inside the reception of Barry's work is really fascinating because I think it's so representative of the main line of development in literary artistic circles that fairies have taken over the last 100 years or 150 years, that even if as our author, you set out with the best of intentions to write complex fairies, they still get Sakharine and trivial by the time the story has been retolled twice. Alongside literature, Matthias, there was a huge event in our perception of fairies that I would love to discuss with you, and that's the photographs of the Cottingly fairies. For those who aren't too familiar, what was this phenomenon? The Cottingly fairies was one of the strangest things to happen in the British cultural history of the 1910s, I think. So what happened was that in 1917, if memory serves, two young women from Yorkshire or in Yorkshire went off with the camera of the father of one of them and went to local Glen and came back with photographic plates depicting one of the girls together with fairies. And family didn't actually take that too seriously because Orgess always assumed it's been cardboard cutouts and that's that well done for their age, but what shall you say? But these photographs of fairies then came to the attention of the Arthur Conan Doyle, he of Sherlock Holmes' fame, and he threw his whole and very considerable literary and cultural weight behind propagating the ideas that these photographs are real and they are in the indisputable evidence for the real existence of fairies and therefore for the real existence of a world beyond the material world. And because Sir Arthur was such a celebrity, I mean he's until today, this had a huge impact, but it was not when all is hears, every advertisement is good, but what cannot necessarily say is that the Cottingly fairies have been good for ideas of fairies in Britain because there were two issues with the way how Sir Arthur pushed the ideas that the Cottingly fairy photographs were real evidence for the existence of another world. The one was how in his publications the fairies were interpreted because he applied an interpretation that following theosophical ideas or ideas that were common in alternative literature thinking of the day that made the fairies very small and made them essentially into semi-sentient, not at all very intelligent personifications of chemical processes in the growth of plants. So suddenly fairies were in charge of making sure that the petal of a flower is the right color or that roots grow right. So they're really reduced in the statute, something that's not only tiny but also trivial in terms of what they are doing because they really become very small scale personifications of biochemical processes. And Arthur just made a laughing stock of himself. So the whole idea of believing in fairies somehow became ridiculous just because it was pushed so hard by somebody who was so prominent in public life at the time. And so it has sometimes been said that the Cottingly fair was the end of fairies as a legitimate object of cultured interest. I will say at this point that if listeners would like to read or listen to more about the Cottingly fairies and other historical hoaxes or supernatural history, you can head over to historyextra.com. Also around this point, Matias, we see Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies published. I love these illustrations as a child and my mom still has a mug with one of the illustrations on which shows just how ingrained these were into popular culture. Again, we're cementing the idea of fairies as these floral childlike creatures, aren't we? Yes, absolutely. I also love those illustrations. They're quite wonderful works of art and they're incredibly popular, of course, they keep being incredibly popular. But I mean, Barker's Flower Fairies, what they do is to depict fairies as little children with insect wings and then each one associated with one particular plant and associated with a poem which gives information about the plant in question tailored to the needs of a four-year-old. So as a deductic concept, it's hugely successful, but it also cements that kind of identity association between fairies, cuteness, childhood and nature in a very abstract sense. After the Second World War, Tolkien returned to the medieval sources and created his own brand of elf. He even said that children detested these more popularized flower fairies we've just talked about. How did his work change ideas about creatures in the other world? Yeah, he really loathed flower fairies, didn't he? What Tolkien did was kind of re-inject medieval ideas into popular literature. I think that's the shortest way of summarizing it because as a medievalist, Tolkien was really familiar with the many fairie narratives in different genres and different regions of European medieval literature from early modern Scotia or late medieval poems to medieval Irish texts. So in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he reintroduced heroic human-sized elves who had no wings and were very much patterned on chivalric literature and other forms of medieval literature and thus in a way tried to turn the wheel back by 500 years and go back to the fairy image of stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Do you think people would have been more receptive of this less childlike creature because of what they just endured in the war? That is very possible. I mean, I've never thought about it like this. So thank you for putting that question in that way. I have to think about that, but I think that you are very much onto something here that after the World War, you just needed a more serious literary engagement with the questions of life than the flower fairies could provide because people did not have the worries of four year olds about flowers and chocolate anymore, but lost people in the wars and had to deal with that and talking, providing images that one could use to think about that loss and conflict and the interconnectedness of conflict and loss and fighting for ideals. I find it absolutely convincing that that would be a major factor for why his kind of recasting of fairies in the medieval image was so successful. So in light of this, Matthias, and all that we've talked about in this episode about the other world revealing the thoughts and fears of the society it's within, they're certainly very interconnected. If that is the case, what do you think our current other world says about our society now? I don't know, but I keep wondering because on the one hand, people now seem to be more worried about, especially environmental questions than they've ever been before, and at the same time fairies today are predominantly associated with nature and environmental questions, but at the same time, overall, the most prominent image of fairies is still the cute, Sakharayan flower fairy type of being. So that strange tension between on the one hand, we are worried about nature and on the other hand, the nature spirits of our stories are anything but worrying. Maybe this means that our societies are still in the process of making up their minds about the relationship to nature. I'm not sure, but it will be interesting to see how the other world develops in the coming years. That was Professor Matthias Eagler speaking to Lauren Good about his newly translated book Elves and Fairies. Matthias is a professor of Old Norse literature and culture at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. And we're back in the Miller's Yard. It's spring time and their true green lawn is thriving. They got a lawn like a golf course here in Maryland without wasting a weekend, and PJ to a golfless started showing up like this pro who's never seen spring grass this perfect outside a course has to clear the patio furniture and the sandbox. Oh, perfectly struck. True green, the easiest way to get a golf course quality lawn. Click the screen now and get started today at truegreen.com. Exclusion supply see truegreen.com for details. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date? Oh, no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. 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