How Fairies Got Their Wings: The Reinvention of a Folk Tradition

The fairy of popular imagination bears almost no resemblance to the creature documented in British folk tradition. Here is how one became the other, and what was lost in the process.

The Baseline: What Folk Fairies Actually Were

The fairies of medieval and early modern British folk tradition were not small. They were not winged. They were not dressed in flowers and they were not, as a rule, friendly. They were human-sized or larger, travelled in groups, and were distinguished from ordinary people primarily by their capacity to cause harm. They stole children and left changelings in their place. They led travellers off paths and into bogs. They caused livestock to sicken and crops to fail. Contact with them was, at best, an inconvenience and, at worst, a catastrophe. The appropriate response upon encountering one was not delight. It was iron.

The documentary record is consistent on this. Charlotte Latham, recording Sussex traditions in 1868, described the Pharisees – the county’s distinctively named fairy folk – as travelling as lights, leaving no footprints in snow, and possessing no wings whatsoever. The Scottish Brownie, the Irish Aos Sí, the Welsh Tylwyth Teg: none of them, in their earliest documented forms, conform to the image now considered standard.

They were uncanny because they occupied the same physical space as human beings whilst operating by different rules. That wrongness – present but not quite right, familiar but not explicable – was the source of the fear. Wings would have made them easier to categorise, and therefore considerably less frightening.

Shakespeare: The First Major Distortion

Elizabethan theatre performances like A Midsummer Night's Dream portrayed fairies

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is frequently cited as evidence of Elizabethan fairy belief. It requires careful handling as a source. Shakespeare drew on genuine folk tradition selectively – Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, has documented antecedents as a household trickster; the anxieties around changelings and enchantment reflect genuine popular belief – but he reshaped his material substantially for theatrical purposes.

The fairy court as a unified aristocratic hierarchy, complete with king, queen, political intrigue and named attendants, is a dramatic convention. Folk fairies did not, in the documented record, organise themselves along Elizabethan court lines. This arrangement suited the Globe Theatre considerably better than it suits ethnographic analysis.

The play’s lasting damage was not in its own distortions, which are transparent enough, but in its influence on subsequent writers and artists who treated it as documentary. By the seventeenth century, the literary fairy – courtly, capricious, diminutive in Shakespeare’s smaller characters such as Peaseblossom and Mustardseed – had begun its long divergence from the folk fairy. The two traditions would not fully separate for another two centuries, but the direction of travel was established.

The Romantic Painters: Giving Fairies Wings

William Blake painted A Midsummer Night's Dream for a Victorian audience

The visual reinvention of the fairy occurred largely between 1780 and 1870, driven by a generation of painters who found in fairy subjects a space for the uncanny, the erotic, and the psychologically strange that mainstream portraiture and history painting did not permit. Henry Fuseli, Richard Dadd, John Anster Fitzgerald, Richard Doyle – their fairy paintings are technically accomplished, frequently beautiful, and ethnographically useless.

The winged fairy appears in this period not because anyone had documented wings in the folk record, but because wings solved a compositional problem. A fairy that was simply a human being, perhaps slightly wrong, was difficult to render legibly as supernatural. Wings signalled otherworldliness immediately and unambiguously. They also drew on a ready visual vocabulary of classical sylphs, Cupids, and Renaissance putti that educated Victorian viewers would have recognised. The folk tradition offered uncanniness. The painters offered clarity. The painters won.

By the time these images entered mass circulation through engravings, periodicals and illustrated gift books – the Victorian equivalent of going viral – the winged fairy was sufficiently embedded that readers began to assume it had always existed. It had existed for perhaps two generations.

The Stage and the Spotlight

J. M. Barrie’s Tinker Bell, as written, is a point of light. A small glow with a tinkling voice, inferred as a fairy rather than seen as one. The winged, humanoid Tinker Bell familiar from illustration and cinema is a later accretion, consolidated by stage convention and the 1953 Disney film. On stage, Tinker Bell has traditionally been represented by a moving spotlight – which is both a practical solution and, inadvertently, the most accurate representation of folk fairy behaviour in the entire theatrical tradition. Lights moving in the dark, at a distance, behaving strangely. This is precisely what Charlotte Latham’s Sussex informants described in 1868.

The pantomime Fairy Godmother compounded the damage. By the late Victorian period, she had become a fixture of the Christmas stage: large, elaborately winged, costumed for maximum visibility, and entirely without folk antecedent. The stage required legibility. Folk fairies offered none. The version that survived into the twentieth century was the one that could be performed. This is not an unusual mechanism in the history of tradition – the version that endures is frequently not the most accurate but the most reproducible.

Victorian conception of fairies for the theatre

Cottingley: The Logical Conclusion

The infamous Cottingley photograph

In 1917, two cousins in Cottingley, Yorkshire – Elsie Wright, aged sixteen, and Frances Griffiths, aged nine – photographed themselves with fairies in the garden. The fairies were paper cutouts, copied from a popular illustrated children’s book. The photographs convinced Arthur Conan Doyle, who published them in 1920 as evidence of genuine fairy presence. He was not alone in being convinced.

The Cottingley affair is usually presented as a story about gullibility. It is more accurately a story about what a century of Victorian fairy imagery had accomplished. By 1917, the winged, flower-dressed fairy was so thoroughly embedded in visual culture that photographs of paper cutouts were indistinguishable, to educated observers, from what fairies were expected to look like. The folk tradition had been so completely displaced by its artistic successor that the successor had become the measure of authenticity.

When Frances Griffiths finally confirmed the hoax in 1983, she noted that she had genuinely believed in fairies as a child – simply not the ones in the photographs. The distinction she drew between the paper cutouts and the real thing was not one that Conan Doyle had thought to make.

What Was Lost: The Sussex Case

Sussex Pharisees – to return to where we began – are considerably stranger than anything the Victorian painters produced. They travel as lights. They leave no footprints. They have no wings. Their name derives from a county-specific peculiarity of pronunciation, ‘fairieses’ corrupting through ‘fairisees’ into ‘Pharisees’, which caused no small confusion among Victorian clergymen who encountered the references in parish records and assumed doctrinal unorthodoxy rather than folk belief. They are a specifically Sussex creature, embedded in a specific landscape, reflecting specific local anxieties about the natural world and the spaces beyond the village boundary.

This specificity is precisely what the Victorian reinvention erased. The generic winged fairy belongs nowhere in particular. It carries no landscape, no county, no history. It is portable and reproducible and entirely without the quality that made folk fairies unsettling – the sense that this creature belongs to this place, knows this ground better than you do, and is under no obligation to be helpful about it.

When we gave the Sussex Pharisees wings in the first edition of Sussex Roots, we were not merely making an error of fact. We were participating, without fully realising it, in a two-hundred-year process of replacement. The second edition corrects this. The Pharisees have had their wings removed. They are, once again, lights in the dark, leaving no footprints in the snow.

Modern retellings of Sussex folklore

This is, we think, considerably more frightening. Which was, of course, the point.

For more on the documented folk traditions of Sussex fairy belief, see our investigation into Pharisees, Ferishers and the Fair Folk.

Sussex Roots

Sussex Roots began as an experiment by people who were not sure anyone would come with them. The second edition exists because you did. We have learnt an enormous amount — from the research, from the folklore community, from the readers who knew things we didn't and told us so — and we are braver for it.

Sussex Roots, second edition, is available here (UK) and here (US).

The Untruth Seekers are dedicated investigators of the legends, ghost stories, and historical mysteries lurking beneath the surface of Sussex and beyond. Their confidential files document the folklore, hauntings, and half-buried histories that most people walk past without a second glance. All findings are published under the series From the Confidential Files of the Untruth Seekers, for readers who suspect there is always more to the story.