http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheFairFolk



they They will not go gently into the night;they are the night.



Down the rushy glen

We dare not go a-hunting

For fear of little men." — The Fairies, William Allingham "Up the airy mountainDown the rushy glenWe dare not go a-huntingFor fear of little men."

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Modern society has lived with the Disneyfied version of fairies for so long  the Fairy Godmothers of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Tinker Bell in Peter Pan  that it seems hard to imagine that some would consider fairies evil. And yet, some of them were.

The fairies of old weren't cute little bewinged pixies who fluttered happily around humans. Elves didn't make children toys or live deep in forests with no interaction with mortals. At best, they would interact with humans with either no thought to the consequences of their actions on the less-robust, time-and-consequences-dependent mortals (say, the Little People who put Rip Van Winkle to sleep: yay, not accidentally corpsifying him; boo, effectively stranding him in a foreign time period with no social ties)note that was the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew; however, traditionally, the line between fairies and ghosts has not been exactly sharp or as tricksters that delight in the utter mess they're making of mortal (and their own) lives (everything that Titania, Oberon, Puck and the rest get up to in A Midsummer Night's Dream). At worst, they're like The Joker with magic: otherworldly horrors who kidnap humans for explicit use as playthings to torment, assault, torture, maim, or eat  or, sometimes, to find even worse, very abstract things to do to them (some versions of "Tam Lin" get dark). The Fair Folk almost always live in the Land of Faerie, often have Faerie Courts, and may be depicted as an Inhumanly Beautiful Race. They are usually vulnerable to Cold Iron, though not always (Dullahan are weak to gold).

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For more information, including much of what used to be this page's description, please see the Analysis tab.

In a manner of speaking, the old version of fairies has been replaced with aliens. In both cases, you have creatures who are ineffable and don't understand humanity, who randomly abduct humans, play with them, and return them with Time Loss and occasionally strange powers/afflictions. Periodically, there are tales of those who have dealt with them and benefited, but for the most part, mundane people are merely their playthings. For more on this interpretation of this trope, see Alien Fair Folk.

Frequently found in concert with Grimmification, as the original folklore of the darker breeds of fairies needs little exaggeration. Compare and contrast Fairy Companion, Fairy Devilmother (a more lore-accurate equivalent of Fairy Godmother), Witch Species, Our Elves Are Better, Our Fairies Are Different, Our Goblins Are Different, Our Mermaids Are Different, Nature Spirit and All Trolls Are Different. See also Changeling Tale, a specific subtrope having to do with fairy abduction, doppelgangers, and the like. Not to be confused with Changeling Fantasy, which is a type of Cinderella Situation.

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All of the above aside, it's entirely possible for the fairies to be as diverse in their beliefs and actions as humans. Some fairies may be malevolent, but others may be friendly to humans, or at least willing to leave humans alone as long as the humans do the same. In some cases, the fairies may be more in conflict with each other than humans, and act accordingly.

Whatever the case, no matter how aloof, curious, silly, chaotic, flippant, ignorant, and/or light-hearted any may appear, they'll switch to their Game Faces if fundamental rules are broken near them  or even by them. Which will not go well for somebody.

The Wild Hunt is an often-overlapping trope from Celtic Mythology. Youkai are a rough Japanese equivalent. The Greys is a more modern trope with many similarities. Demons  when not The Legions of Hell  are often also portrayed this way (and sometimes there is rather little distinction). An extreme example may be a Humanoid Abomination.

Examples:

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Animation

Mermaid is about a rusalka, the Russian version of a mermaid. She's actually more like an Enthralling Siren, having a fully human body, and using her beauty and singing to lure young men into the water, where she drowns them.

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Fairy Tales

"Rumpelstiltskin": Rumpelstiltskin helps a young woman spin straw into gold, but then demands her first-born child as payment.

It's never explained in-story who or what The Pied Piper of Hamelin was, but some theorize he may have been one of the Fair Folk.

Joseph Jacobs's "Kate Crackernuts", the prince is forced to leave his bed every night to dance at the fairy hall, and is deathly ill because of it. (One notes that this was a folk explanation of TB — the victims wasted away because they got no sleep by night.) Fortunately Kate eavesdrops on the fairies and learns not only how to cure him, but how to undo an unrelated curse on her step-sister. The same thing, albeit gender-flipped, happens in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

"Sleeping Beauty" is gifted by six fairy godmothers with beauty, grace, wit, and great skill in music, singing and dancing, then cursed out of spite to prick her hand on a spindle on her sixteenth year and die by a seventh fairy. The curse is softened, but cannot be completely removed, by the final fairy.

The Fairy of the Desert in Madame d'Aulnoy's "The Yellow Dwarf" could count as one of these — she is a wise but malevolent being who looks more like a witch than a stereotypical fairy. She is allied with the Yellow Dwarf, and when Princess Toutebelle breaks her promise to marry the dwarf, the Fairy of the Desert and the Yellow Dwarf show up at her wedding to wreak havoc at the celebration. Madame d'Aulnoy's works feature several other fairies who fit in this category, such as the Fairy of the Spring in "The White Doe", who curses Princess Desiree to not see sunlight for fifteen years in revenge for the queen forgetting to invite her (after she helped the queen out) and Carabosse in "Princess Mayblossom" (who curses the titular princess to spend her first twenty years miserable).

In the fairy tale "Childe Rowland", Burd Ellen is kidnapped by elves when she inadvertently runs around a church "widershins" (counter-clockwise), and two of her brothers attempting to rescue her are trapped and enchanted by the King of Elfland, until Childe Rowland saves them.

In "The Jezinkas", the Jezinkas have the charming habit of gouging out men's eyes.

Iruoch in the second novel of the Widdershins Adventures trilogy is an evil faerie with a taste for human children, eight unnaturally long spider-like fingers, and a physics-defying hat and coat.

In Whuppity Stoorie, the "green gentlewoman" saves a woman's pig but demands her son in payment.

Fan Works

Folklore

Films — Animation

Film — Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Poetry

The Stolen Child, by William Butler Yeats, is about a child lead away by the fairies. The fairies here are Ambiguously Evil; while they believe they are doing the child a favor, as it's implied that he's unhappy (although he might just be overwhelmed by the misery around him), they show no sign of telling his parents or family that he's alright.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Erlkönig, along a very similar theme to the above. In this poem the "Erl-King" is a Faerie creature who wants a boy he finds pretty to come with him, but when the boy refuses, he seizes the boy's soul by force, killing him (though an alternative interpretation holds that the ill boy was feverishly hallucinating). The name Erlkönig is often anglicized as Erl-King or Alder-King, but it is ultimately a corruption of the Danish ellerkonge, which in fact means Elf-King.

A topical complement (and historically the inspiration) to Erlkönig is Herr Oluf (alternately titled Erlkönig's Daughter), another German ballad inspired by Danish folklore, by Goethe's contemporary Johann Herder. A young bridegroom is riding around to invite the guests for his wedding the other day, when he meets the elves. The Elf-Queen asks him to dance with her. When he adamantly refuses, she curses him with a sickness. Next morning, he's dead.

On the surface William Allingham's "The Fairies" appears to portray them as endearing: Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,

We daren't go a-hunting

For fear of little men. However he then emphasizes that they're anything but, abducting a little girl for seven years who then dies of sorrow, and putting thorns in humans' beds to punish them for interfering with their trees. Christina Rossetti's poem, "Goblin Market", is about a girl who starves herself after giving in to temptation and eating fairy food.

Neil Gaiman's "The Fairy Reel" is about a man with whom a fairy girl has fallen in love. She's so in love with him that she decides to steal his heart. Later she gets bored with it, and uses it to string a violin.

In "Tam Lin", Tam Lin is spirited away by the Queen of Elphame [Elfhome]. He enjoys his stay there, but learns that every seventh year, the elves have to pay a "tithe [tax] to Hell". Fearing he himself will be the tithe, he flees. The Queen denies that she would have offered Tam Lin, but that still seems to imply the elves regularly sacrifice one of their own to the Devil.

Professional Wrestling

MsChif is sometimes described as "demonic", the inferno listed among her places of residence, but as she has a banshee gimmick, she's really this trope.

Radio

In one Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama, Jamie has been giving it some thought, and has decided that the Doctor must be one of the Fair Folk. (Ironic, as he's actually an alien.)

Pilgrim is about a human (or "hotblood") who has been cursed into becoming The Ageless by the King of the Grey Folk or Fairie for vocally denying their existence. Many episodes involve Pilgrim helping humans who have been dragged willingly or unwillingly into a Fair Folk squabble.

The titular magical beings from The Hidden People are this, vicious and cruel and taking pleasure in kidnapping and exploiting human children.

Tabletop Games

Theater

Henrik Ibsen re-used the Shakesperean plot in one of his early plays: St. John´s Eve presents the elves as benign woodland creatures, mostly written as a part of the Scenery Porn.

Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland used elves as henchmen for the good guys in some of his more farcical plays. In one of his later plays, the fair folk trope is played straight, as the hulder herself abducts the titular character into the mountain to make him do the dirty work for her (This Hulder is plain evil). The abduction trope is subverted as the hulder´s daughter is lured out of the mountain by a young poet, and the fair folk wants him dead for it.

In John Milton's Comus, the Fair Folk have no powers over true virginity — not because they are weak, but because Virgin Power is that strong.

In Twice Charmed, Franco DiFortunato wagers the Tremaines' livelihood on their deal.

Frozen (2018) adapts the Fair Folk as a substitution for the Rock Trolls of the original film.

Video Games

Web Animation

Brackenwood: The YuYu are tiny, goblin-like beings who come out at night to steal people away to a dark netherworld, and can fuse with each other into a cloud of black smoke. The early short "Bingbong of Brackenwood" features another group of similar beings, perhaps an early "draft" of the YuYu or perhaps something different. They resemble tiny featureless humanoids that glow a soft yellow like a candle, and with flames for hair. Bingbong finds them in a clearing, dancing in a circle while others play pipes and drums. He runs in to join them, at which point the humanoids look at each other, nod, and begin to dance faster and faster around Bingbong as their yellow glow turns orange, then red... until Bingbong looks down to find them all lying dazed on the ground, at which point he loses interest and wanders away. This is a reference to Fairy Rings , which were believed to be where fairies would force the mortal entering it to dance to death.



Web Comics

Web Original

Western Animation

Now turn around thrice Widdershins, spit, and touch iron...