Faerie Encounters

Aye - and there are many. After visiting hundreds of faerie "encounters," I have come to the conclusion that there are only two grouping of this genre. One "encounter" includes those sites which are for children, and contain the usual elements of castles, playful dragons, child-like faeries, Mother Goose, and links to sites which contain all manner of activities, games and wonderful children's books.

The second grouping are home pages which have a more mature theme, and contain not only the good faeries, but present the more sinister and capricious nature of the little people. Here is an arena that contains tenets of interest from sheer beauty, to fun, to an environmentalist nature to religion. Run the gamut to find your interest in faerie "encounters."

These little people are know by many names: fairy, elf, leprechaun, dwarf, brownie, hobgoblin, nisse, nunu, menehune, gnome, uldrad, troll, house ghost, river spirit, wood and mountain nymph, witch, spriggan, mermaid, selkie - and the list continues, seemingly, without end and with more names in each subgroup!

The famed anthropologist W. Y. Evans-Wentz, who studied the "fairy faith" in Scotland and Wales, was of the opinion that the little people represented a primitive concept of the human soul, imagined as a tiny version of the body. Some cultures, and religious denominations believe that they are spirits of the dead, which would, of course, explain the ghost-like qualities of "here and then gone." Others view them as pagan house gods, or spirits of nature, while some Christians see them as the fallen angels, who were exiled from heaven. That the fallen angels, demons as they are sometimes called, are the grotesque little people, seems plausible to many.

And, being abducted by aliens is not new. During the war between Charles I of England and Parliament, one Anne Jefferies became quite well known throughout the land based on her claims of having been abducted by the little people, and transported to a land of enchantment. She was thought to be either insane or possessed, if not both, and was duly arrested in 1646 and committed to prison, where it was reported that she was ministered to by the fae.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is usually associated with his tales of Sherlock Holmes, but he also wrote on fantasy and the occult. In his The Coming of the Fairies he related the experiences of a spinster, Miss Winter of Blarney, who lived in County Cork. He deftly combined his knowledge of

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