Steve Bull and Samuel Gillis-Hogan

In this episode, Sam and Steve discuss faeries from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Whether conjured as a magician’s familiar to to teach hidden knowledge and find treasure, or encountered by questing knights in Arthurian legends, faeries were mysterious figures existing on the borders between reality and fiction, our world and the otherworld, and balanced precariously between good and evil. Sam and Steve consider how different texts and sources attempted to define and understand faeries from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, and how that image has changed over the years.