ABSTRACT
Tales about fairies are elaborate narratives that depict the fairy kingdom and elfland; the leprechauns, kobolds, gnomes, elves, and little people (Briggs 1976, 1978) that populate its stories are authors of unintelligible actions that often have no moral point and frequently lead to troublingly amoral consequences and conclusions. Based on surviving Celtic lore, tales about fairies flowered in ornate seventeenth-century versions composed during the reign of Louis XIV by the French précieuses and their followers. Their fairies and giantesses, invented for literate adult aristocratic French audiences, soon found favour among children. A representative example, Mme d'Aulnoy's Yellow Dwarf, opens with a princess disdainful of her suitors and continues with an unfortunate promise of betrothal to a physically deformed yellow dwarf. When the princess finally meets and falls in love with the valorous and virtuous King of the Gold Mines, a worthy suitor, the yellow dwarf kills him and the princess swoons and dies in sympathy. The tale ends in a manner hardly calculated to delight seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moralists: ‘The wicked dwarf was better pleased to see his princess void of life, than in the arms of another’ (1721 vol. 1, story VII; here Opie 1974:80).
