In folklore, fairies are magical beings who often meddle in human affairs, sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes mischievously. Fairies are now usually associated with children’s stories, and are kind, beautiful and tiny. But this was not always so. Fairies in the past were feared as dangerous and powerful beings who could often be very cruel.

Yallery Brown is one such cruel fairy. He is rescued from under a rock by a kind, hardworking farmhand who hears him weeping. He promises to stay with the farmhand and help him with his work as long as he is never thanked. But things begin to go wrong for the farmhand from the moment Yallery Brown comes into his life. His friends begin to avoid him and fear him as they see his chores being done by an invisible creature. In a desperate attempt to get rid of Yallery Brown, the farmhand thanks him. This makes Yallery Brown furious and he begins to ruin everything the farmhand does, and haunts him constantly, singing:

‘Loss and mischance and Yallery Brown
You’ve let yourself out from under a stone.’

The farmhand becomes poorer and poorer each day. He finally dies, alone and miserable.

Fairies may carry off men and women and little children to fairyland, which, in folklore, is a frightening and bewildering place, and not the  beautiful and magical land it is made out to be in children’s books and  films today. No one can return from fairyland if they partake of any fairy food or drink there.

Fairies are usually beautiful, and live longer than humans. Sometimes fairies are the same size as people; often they are smaller, maybe even as tiny as your thumb. Fairies and humans can marry each other, but it is usually dangerous for the human, who could die. Sometimes fairies leave changeling babies behind. These babies are different from normal children, and they are found either dressed in green, or in a green cradle. Or they have green eyes. Sometimes they might even have green skin.

Some fairies can tell the future. Some can give gifts or pronounce curses over a baby when it is born. This is what happens to the princess in the story of The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood – the good fairies give her beauty, intelligence, grace and other good qualities, but the wicked fairy says that she will prick her finger on a spindle when she is sixteen and die.

Some plants, such as St.John’s wort and yarrow protect us from fairies. Other plants, such as hawthorn trees, ragwort and foxglove are special to fairies and protected by them – humans who spoil or injure these plants in any way may soon find strange and uncomfortable things happening to them.

Today fairy lore is still popular in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. Fairies are also present in written literature: in English, from Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Shakespeare’s Titania and Shelley’s Queen Mab, to the technologically advanced fairies of Eoin Colfer in his Artemis Fowl books.