Fairies & Elves

Remember the UFO … the unidentified fungal oddity discovered by Temple Hall Highway property owner Bruce Lustenhouwer? The particles were arranged in a circle, 16 feet across, and colored black, brown and gray. They didn’t resemble anything Lustenhouwer had ever seen before. “It’s a powdery substance in the grass,” he said. “It doesn’t appear to be killing the grass. The grass growing through it looks healthy. It’s not attacking any one kind of grass. It’s on different grasses.” He had consideredanother alternative. “It could be some of those little bitty people operating a nuclear collider under the ground,” he offered, grinning. Not likely, he said. “I don’t know that I buy the UFO explanation.” Neither does Hood County News reader Bob Thomas, whose terse e-mail to us read: “This was covered on Walter Reeve’s radio call-in show in Atlanta last week.

The circles are caused by a fungus. Check out the link. Scroll down for an identical picture to that appearing with your article.” According to the Web site forteantimes.com, Lustenhouwer’s artistic growth is known as a “fairy ring.” “Long before crop circles caught the headlines, there were fairy rings,” the Web site states. “Fairy ringsare, and always have been, a lot more common than today’s more famous crop circles, but originally their origins were as mysterious and ascribed to similar causes. “Usually, a fairy ring is visible as a noticeable circle appearing in grass. Some rings are formed by a luxuriant growth, taller and of a darker green than the grass at their center. “Others seem to be the opposite: a patch of poorly growing grass or even bare earth in a circular pattern. When both types combine, the luxuriant growth has an area of bound ground as an inner circle. We now know that fairy rings are actually produced by fungi, but this was not always the case. “As the common name for the phenomenon implies, they were widely explained as the result of a gathering of fairies that ended with a circular dance. Such wasthe......

Some people still obviously believe in fairies as the Warin family at Cottingley, near Bingley, find to their amusement.They often get uninvited visitors knocking on the farmhouse door enquiring where they can find the elusive magical winged creatures.  It is not really surprising as the village is world-renowned for the fairy photographs brought to light just before the end of the First World War.A steady stream of visitors drift in and out of the village. And some of them end up in the farmyard at March Cote Farm, the home of George Warin and his wife, Jean, who farm in partnership with their son, Andrew. The Cottingley Fairies hoaxwas perpetrated in 1917 by two young girls Elsie Wright, 15, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, 10.In order to prove that fairies really did exist, Elsie took a picture showing Frances with a troop of sprites dancing in front of her.Sherlock Holmes author, Arthur Conan Doyle, was fascinated by the fairies and when the first of his articles on the subject was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1920 the girls had little option but to stick to their story.They revealed publicly, in 1983, however, that the fairies were paper cutouts, supported by hatpins.

Even in this day and age the Warin family find it difficult to tell their uninvited guests that it was all a deceptive trick.On a more serious note, George Warin has just been elected president of the Airedale Agricultural Society, organisers of Bingley Show,to be held this year on August 14 in its original setting of the town's Myrtle Park.Born on a dairy farm at Glusburn, near Skipton, he has been a stalwart member of the show's cattle committee for over 40 years, while Jean has served even longer in the handicrafts section.Mr Warin said: "This year's show will be the 125th and I am looking forward to my year of office."All the family will be involved on show day, including our grandchildren. We are hoping to beat last year's attendance figure of 15,000 and are keeping our fingers crossed for a fine day."This year will see a new venture at the show in the form of a fell race organised by Bingley Harriers and there will be the usual attractions such as a bowls competition, steam engines, vintage cars and motorcycles and a display by the AiredaleBeagle......

by Micha F. Lindemans

The original fairies, or faeries, bestowed gifts upon newborn children, such as beauty, wealth and kindness. In the subsequent centuries they continued this original function, but expanded their activities into other types of meddling in human affairs.

Fairies can only be seen clearly by animals and seldom by humans, although if one is fortunate enough, one might catch a fleeting glimpse. There are a few exceptions however. The first is when fairies use their power (known as 'glamour') to enable a human to see them. Also, during a full moon on Midsummer Eve a mortal witness fairy dances or celebrations. And finally, by looking through a self-bored stone (a stone in which a hole has been made by tumbling in the waters of a brook; not found on a beach) one can see fairies distinctly.

The rulers of the race of fairies are Queen Titania and her consort Prince Oberon, their court being in the vicinity of Stratford-on-Avon. Other synonyms and euphemisms for fairies are: the Little People, the Green Men, the Good Folk and the Lordly Ones. The name is probably a combination of the words fae "friend" and eire "green." So Faerie means "Green Friend."

the above article can be originally found in http://www.pantheon.org/articles/f/fairy.html

If you had asked your great-great-grandmother if she believed in fairies, she would have looked at you askance. Believe in fairies? Of course she did!Ninety-five per cent of Scots continued to believe in fairies right up until the middle of the 19th century. These were not the diminutive, be-winged fairies of 1800s children's books. No, these were strange folk who bewitched you, killed your cattle and kidnapped your wives and daughters.Fairy lore flowed through the centuries, their presence acknowledged in ballads, poems and stories. They came in all shapes and sizes and different parts ofScotland had different myths.

Even today they are remembered in the fairy glens and fairy hills found in every part of Scotland. This belief in fairies extended beyond Scotland; there was almost universal acknowledgement that they existed. There's no question that they existed. We have two fairy houses quite close by and we have records of conversations between fairies and people on the island.-- Sir Iain Noble "Fairy folklore was world-wide," says Dr Lizanne Henderson, a lecturer of history at the University of Glasgow's Crichton Campus. "They filled a need to explain the unexplainable. It was easier to look for a rational explanation for things that happened, and back then fairies were the rational explanation." Yet for all that was written on the subject, there was no consensus about what the fairies were. Earlier writings speak of them asbeing dead souls or fallen angels. When a more "rational explanation" was needed, there was a move away from describing fairies as mystical and an attempt to place them within the human world. John Frances Campbell of Islay was one of the first to go into print with his new theory. "I believe there once was a small race of people in these islands," he wrote in 1860. Campbell’s theory remained speculative until a remarkable archaeological discovery in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores. The skeletal remains of a dwarf man, similar to modern humans, were discovered in a cave. Carbon dating proved that this small humanoid co-existed with modern man and may have survived until fairly recently. In light of this discovery, Indonesian folk tales of "little people" are being re-evaluated and questions are being asked if these abnormally smallpeople hav......