Everyone has heard at least a bit about Fairyland.  And like almost everything else about The Good People, the stories we are told are full of contradictions.  The problem seems to be that all the reports are from human witnesses who sometimes see Fairyland through ordinary eyes and other times through the eyes of magic.

The first thing that must be said about Fairyland is that it is very hard to tell, from all the information that we have, if it is another place, or whether it is right here but invisible to most people most of the time.

We hear often of a person wandering in the night who happens upon a group of fairies dancing (which they love to do) or riding in the hunt, or in ceremonial procession.  The person follows them, and sees them all come to a hill which opens up and admits them. Now, this hill is often well-known to the witness as an ordinary mound of earth, and it can't be made to open up except at the fairies' command.  So we must ask ourselves, is the place that opened up an entrance to fairy-land, or was the person who saw it all actually "in fairyland" from the moment he saw the fairies on the hill?  The enchanted place seems to exist in the same spot as the real place.  Is it a place, or a state of mind?

Consider, also, that the fairies seem to be in Fairyland all the time, whether they are in our realm or not.

Entering Fairyland

Fairies are well-known to live underground, most often under hills, in what are called "fairy raths."  The ancient hilltop earthen-forts found all over the British Isles are commonly referred to as "fairy-forts", and most reports of entrances to Fairyland happen in such places.  Less frequently, we hear of an entrance that was simply a hole in the earth.

Perhaps the most famous place that has been reported as a portal to Fairyland is Glastonbury Tor ("hill") in England, a place that has been considered holy since long before Christian times.  St. Collen, a early Welsh saint who lived in a hermitage on the hill, reported entering it and confronting Gwynn ap Nudd himself, the king of the Welsh fairies.  In more recent centuries, a church dedicated to St. Michael was built on the top of the hill, perhaps because it was feared that the fairies were really servants of the devil, and St. Michael was revered for his power to suppress the demonic flames.

Lucky observers in many different places have told of seeing a hill open up, with its top raised up on pillars and light streaming out, usually on a special night of the year such as All Hallows Eve (Hallowe'en) or May Eve.  Others have told of coming to an ancient ruin when the fairies were at their revels within and seeing light stream out of it.

The question of light is important, because most visitors to the fairies' underground homes have mentioned how they were lit up within by neither sunlight nor torch nor lantern, yet there was light, sometimes a dull glow, sometimes light almost as brilliant as day.  (Some sources relate that the fairies grow crops under the earth, particularly barley.  But it is generally thought that they are able to provide little of their own food, and so are forced to "borrow" from mortals so very often.  This is why those who would befriend the Good People often leave them gifts of food or milk.  When they are not forced to steal, but can obtain a willing loan, they often show their gratitude with a magickal gift in return.)  The source of fairy light remains unknown.

Protection

Nowadays, when fairies are so very rare, most people would be delighted to meet them.  But in olden times, when they were more plentiful and, it would seem, more powerful, people were often quite afraid of them.  These fears chiefly centered around the dangers of offending them and around the possibility of being lost  in Fairyland.  It was considered worthwhile to be able to ward off fairies.  Rue is a powerful anti-fairy herb.  So are St. John's Wort and yarrow.  Carrying a piece of iron (especially a cross or a horseshoe), four leaf clovers, walking sticks made of mountain ash or rowan wood, and trinkets made of coral or amber were also said to be good protection.  Fairies are also repelled by the sound of church bells, and it has been said that the decline of the fairy population (in the British isles, at least) directly parallels the increase in the number of churches across the land.

Getting Lost

It has often been reported that one can be "lost in Fairyland" without going anywhere at all.  Sometimes a person is "with the fairies" but seemingly still in a place on the Earth.  If you set both feet in a fairy-ring, you may well see the fairies dancing madly there, and suddenly hear their music, often described as the sweetest ever heard.  People who experience this are often drawn irresistibly to joining the dance.  Meanwhile, anyone who might have been with them, but outside the fairy-ring, thought their companion had disappeared, and saw nothing of the fairies and heard nothing of the music.  The person who stepped into the ring became quite as invisible as the fairies, and there is good reason to believe he was then in Fairyland...even though he had not left the fairy-ring.

Altered Time

Often, the person who has crossed over into Fairyland lives in a different frame of time than we do here.  The stories of those who've wandered into the fairy-ring and joined the dance sometimes tell of the vanished person being rescued from the fairy-ring a year-and-a-day later, only to have the rescued victim complain that he just wanted to finish the dance and he'd only been dancing there a few minutes.  More mysterious yet are those travelers who've entered fairyland, whether by accident or foolishness or by the lure of the music or some other fairy trickery, and stayed at their revels and feasts for what seemed to be a few days or weeks.  But when they returned to their own land, to their home town, they saw not a single person they knew.  Those who they questioned had not ever heard the name of the traveler or his family.  Often the only person who'd ever heard of them was the oldest person in the village, for the traveler was one who was said to have disappeared with the fairies two or three hundred years before!

Glamour

The reason that human travelers in Fairyland are so often confused is that the fairies use their magic, called Glamour, to make things seem as they want them to be.  And this trickery would be completely impenetrable to us, we would not know of it at all, were it not for those few who have chanced to undo its magic and see the truth.  This has happened more than once when a human midwife was summoned in the night to aid a woman in child-birth, only to find it was a fairy-woman.  The midwife is brought to a strange place and sees within a grand and luxurious palace.  The fairy noblewoman and her husband wear fine and beautiful clothes and are themselves as beautiful as the eye can bear.  When the baby is born, the midwife is instructed to rub it all over with a special ointment.  But if she happens to rub a bit of it near her eye, suddenly that eye sees the scene quite differently.  The palace now appears as nothing but a dank, dirty cave, the rich bed but a pallet of straw, the rich clothing merely rags, the beautiful fairies now old and drawn and wizened.  The ointment has removed the "glamourous" magick from her eye and what she sees is...the truth?  Hard to say, for people who have seen fairies without their knowledge or consent have still reported them as beautiful creatures.  It is a mystery.

One point on which there seems little argument is that you must not take food or drink in Fairyland, nor pick the flowers, or you risk becoming a captive there.  As noted earlier, the visitor to Fairyland scarcely notices the passage of time, and that delusion alone serves as an effective prison.

Capture & Rescue