Ana y Mía: el culto a la extrema delgadez en redes sociales - Miércoles 6 de Agosto del 2025

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 Eaglo 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 most obscure 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, or the typical way how an encounter is described is that person X meets a person on the road, assumes that's probably the farmhand from the neighbouring farmers, and later on it turns out that that farmhand had been somewhere else entirely in the enquiries on it, 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, their fairies and counted deep inside some enchanted forest and the night immediately falls in love with her, or think of Morghain Lafei who, after Arthur has been leastfully 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 favourite 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 pets 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 beached whales. The same beached whales that also human farmers have just gone out by boat to collect whale meat from. There is a really far-eaching 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 attached better of than humans, but it's not fairy tale world that's used upon 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 is 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 is the humans have to help out the elves because from the elves somebody has fallen ill and so they have to help themselves to use 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 and the stories are told by people who are 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 in 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 areas there is not no longer a 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 upper world often reflect 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 lands and 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 waterlogue metal. So it's always this field, this metal, this little river. Whereas for the urban population the land is something much more distant and much less concrete 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 says it's not identified with places that you can actually go to but it's just a completely separate, dream 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 bed piece of land? You mentioned Arthurian legends before and you do touch on the role King Arthur and the Knights 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. And much of the history of ideas of Ellison 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 shivalry and the sort of tales of King Arthur's and the Knights of the Round Table, which has 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 interest, 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 armor. 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 programmes. Now we're jumping forward in history quite a bit here, but we see James I of Scotland coming to the throne and it becomes known for which trials. What part did the other world play in these? Which child documents from early modern Scotland are really fascinating, if horrible, rules 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 socially 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 are 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, two 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 is 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, in his treatise on demonology from the 1590s, he 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 a vision that's coming from Satan and Satan has to be fought and everybody having any doing so, 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 romanticising the other world and artists. 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 theatre stage in a mid-summer night stream. 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 or something that plays a huge role in the history of fairly beliefs and often in a very, very cynical manner. 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 it 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 crystallised itself maybe three, four years into the research that class difference played such a huge role for the stratification of very belief throughout European cultural history. You did touch on a mid-summer night stream 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 fairie world looks like. So he popularised Oberon, he popularised Puk and Robin Goodfellow as a literary figure. And he invented Titania as a screen of the elves. And even 200 years later, he still had a crucial influence on the development of fairie iconography because today, if he hears the word fairies, 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 leading painters who gave wings to the fairies and the context in which these artists invented this modern winged fairie iconography, very illustrations of Shakespeare, especially of the Midsummer Night's Dream. So the theatre 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 texts, what he does is 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 texts. 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 theatre plays, and these retellings often trivialize the way how fairies are depicted in them. And so Tinkerbell who in Barry's original texts actually is quite mean. And through her meanness has a lot of the complexity of historic fairy beliefs, becomes a Sakurai, a winged little female nature-loving being that has nothing mean at all about it and is just boring but very cute. So it's 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 an author you set out with the best of intentions to write complex fairy is still get Sakurai and Truvial by the time the story has been retoured twice. Alongside literature materials 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 Kottingley fairies. For those who aren't too familiar, what was this phenomenon? Kottingley fairies was one of the strangest things to happen in the British culture 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 glam and came back with photographic plates depicting one of the girls together with fairies. And family didn't actually take that too seriously because 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 the Argel was such celebrity I mean he's until today this had a huge impact but it was not when all is he has every advertisement is good but what cannot necessarily say is that the Kottingley fairies have been good for ideas of fairies in Britain because there were two issues with the way how the Arthur pushed the ideas that the Kottingley fairie 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 personallyifications 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 statue 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 also think of us that are 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 had sometimes being stuck. that decodingly a 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, Matthias, we see Sicily Mary Barker's flower fairies published. I love these illustrations of child and my mum 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 that are quite wonderful works of art and they're incredibly popular, of course, and keep being incredibly popular. 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 plant in question tailored to the needs of a four-year-old. As a deducted concept, it's hugely successful but it also cement that kind of identity association between fairies, cuteness, childhood and nature in a very abstract sense. After the Second World War, Tolkien returned 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 re-entract 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 fair narratives in different genres and different regions of European medieval literature from Elimodanskotid or late medieval poems to medieval Irish texts. So in the Hobbit, in the Lord of the Rings, he reintroduced heroic, human-sized elves, we had nobings and to a 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, stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable. Do you think people would have been more receptive of this last childlike creature because of what they just endured in the war? That is very possible. I mean, I've never thought about it like that. 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 and about 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 Sakurai and flower fairy type of being. So that's that strange tension between on the one hand, we are worried about nature and on the other hand, the nature's 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 Law and Good about his newly translated book, "Elves and Fairies". Matthias is a professor of Old North literature and culture at Gertrée University, Frankfurt and mine.