§ Until 2961, Aufgaolaí citizens swore an archaic oath in order to vote or own land — forswearing kinship with the changelings’ hosts, the human families whose children, before Changing was outlawed in 2667 IT, had been taken in the long exchange. Faer Radiance’s Council retired the oath after review.
‡ Na beaga sí — transparent, levitative folk small enough to fit comfortably on a willow’s leaf — were granted special trespass rights through houses of greater scale by Kelly v. Fiade (2962). A privacy bill thirty-eight days later forbade them to give criminal witness. The bill was amended, in 2985, to admit such witness in police matters.
◊ Of eight million carvings attempted by paired clade-mates at each moot, sixteen survive to be ensouled and released — four of rivers, four of sky, four of land, four of deep places. Aufgaolaí reach the survival round at one-eleventh the rate of Sí. Most recently, three Aufgaolaí carvings survived to ensoulment.
‡ Following the Bródlainn Riots of 2983, the Faerieland National Council issued thirty-three recommendations to Faer Radiance’s Government. Of those, five were put to a bill. Two passed.
¶ Three causal factors were named for the riots: discrimination, precarity, and police misconduct. Ten years on, the first two are sharper; the third has stagnated. Diaér AfTír, in popular media, said of it: “Nowhere was given to sink — no darker depth.”
¶ Survey data collected after the Bródlainn Riots placed the proportion of outside travellers among the rioters between forty-five and sixty-five per cent. The Gate: Polls reported the lower bound. TheMoon: Research Centre, the upper. Neither has revised.
¶ Chief Superintendent Unsaích efNaofis, in faer comments on the riot aftermath: “I am accused of acting like a general in a war. But it is a war. And that is what I am. And if there is to be an end, it must be the sort of end that fits a war.” No charges have been laid.
¶ Ever frictionless are the ripples of the Aufgaolaí upon the ley-web — the motion of their souls invisible to Sí senses. During the Bródlainn Riots, three Aufgaol officer-deaths went initially unreported on the ground. Some reporters observed: “There could be more. But at this point, we just don’t know.”
⁂ An CN (the Independent Archive) and CsF (Justice Faerieland) jointly publish, every five years, the Index of Unspent Reform — a register of recommendations made by Faer Radiance’s Government’s own councils that Faer Radiance’s Government chose not to enact. The most recent edition runs to eleven thousand entries.
§ Aufgaolaí police-recruits were, until 2986, required to attend cultural tuitions not expected of Aos sí officers. Faer Radiance’s Council overturned the requirement after review.
¶ The most recent census records the beaga sí population of Greater Bródlainn at one hundred and sixty thousand, give or take a thousand — the smallest, an CN notes, are difficult to count.
◊ The moot-call sounds for seven or eleven hours, registered by Aufgaolaí as a sequence of household disturbances. Board-rattles, sunset-stains, alarm-bell tremors through the iron of the wall-frames. Sí experience the same call as a yawning procession of light, as the Shimmerlands expands to engulf them.
◊ Upon tally, the latest of Faer Radiance’s moots resolved to the election of three creatures — one of deep places, two of rivers — of Aufgaol invention, thrashing the Aufgaolaí’s former record of one. Despite popular backlash, the FR Ensoulment committee is yet to answer pleas for reconvention — as such, the implications for policy remain uncertain.
◊ Every Faerielander is paired during the moot with another of their own clade. Five rounding-error exceptions are recorded across eight million pairings. Faer Radiance’s All-Gleaning Eye is yet, to faer Council’s knowledge, to err from that margin.
✦ Beaga tattooists work at fingernail scale, their needles spider-mandible. Mid-task a Síog Bheag might fire faer entire form into rushing iron-hot sparks and jab-jab faerself through an Aufgaol’s limbs faster than any Sí or changed one,* all spot-scratch-scrape-scarring with flightless needles. *Speedy Ana may be an exception.
✦ Leystick — the iron-coloured crystalline residue of the ley-web — gathers on Aufgaolaí during long moots, sometimes dewing on the lid or under the chin. Aos sí absorb it, ungathered.
※ Anti-transmisoaufgynlaích literature — a register identified and named in Quivering Haecceities — operates on the joint axis of misogyny and miso-aufgaochas. The article is celebrated as an urtext of the field.
¶ Of comparable function to a catboat, the catscale is a Faerielander travelcraft specialised for cresting, ebbing, and hurling overtop the othersky’s web-tides, naught-wills, and Morning Glory cumuli.
† The Lebor Gabála Érenn — the Book of Invasions, compiled in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — narrates Ireland’s six successive settlements: Cessair, Partholón, Nemed, Fir Bolg, Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Sons of Míl. The Tuatha Dé Danann are the divine race later identified with the sídhe-folk; after the Milesian conquest they retreat into the sídhe, the hollow hills.
† The aos sí — the people of the mounds — are, in later tradition, the Tuatha Dé Danann placed beneath the earth after the Milesian victory. In Irish folk practice, milk is left at the threshold as offering; salt functions oppositely — protective substance, or something not lent across the threshold at certain times.
† The Cath Maige Tuired, the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, narrates the war between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians. Lugh Lámfada kills Balor of the evil eye, his own maternal grandfather — a pattern scholars place in the Indo-European inheritance.
† The Echtrae Conla — the Adventure of Conla, dated linguistically to the eighth or ninth century — tells of a fairy woman who calls a mortal prince away to Mag Mell, the Plain of Delights. He goes with her in a crystal boat and is not seen again. It is one of the earliest Irish otherworld-adventure tales (echtrae).
† Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth, sits west of Ireland over the sea. Time there passes at a different rate: Oisín, returning after centuries, falls from his horse and the years overtake him the moment he touches the soil of Ireland.
† The First Branch of the Mabinogi, preserved in medieval Welsh manuscripts, tells of Pwyll’s year-long exchange with Arawn of Annwfn — prince and otherworld lord swapping appearance and place for a year. The Four Branches sit within the wider Welsh prose corpus later called the Mabinogion.
† Math fab Mathonwy, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, recounts the making of Blodeuwedd, the woman of flowers, by Math and Gwydion — oak, broom, and meadowsweet conjured into wife-shape for Lleu. She betrays him with Gronw and is turned to an owl.
✥ Sir Orfeo (c. 1330) reworks Orpheus and Eurydice into a Breton-lay fairy romance. The king of fairy carries Heurodis off; Orfeo follows into the otherworld and wins her back by harping. The Christian afterlife is replaced by a fairy court; there is no backward-glance condition; she returns.
✥ Thomas the Rhymer — Child 37 — preserves the Scottish ballad tradition of Thomas’s seven years’ service to the Queen of Elfland and her gift, on his return, of the tongue that cannot lie. A related Middle English romance, Thomas of Erceldoune, survives in the Lincoln Thornton MS, c. 1430–1440.
✥ Tam Lin (Child 39) preserves the canonical English-language fae-recovery rite: the woman who loves the fairy-bound man must hold him through every shape they put him in — serpent, lion, burning brand — until he is restored to his human form. Janet does not let go.
✥ Lanval (Marie de France, twelfth century) figures a fairy lover who appears under a single condition: do not speak of me. Lanval breaks the condition under accusation by Guinevere; she withdraws — then returns to vindicate him at trial and carries him with her to Avalon.
✥ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) sets a Christmas-court game against the Green Chapel: a beheading-game enforced by a knight who can survive his own decapitation. The Green Knight is later revealed as Bertilak, enchanted by Morgan le Fay; in a fairy reading he functions as a wild otherworld tester of courtly truth.
❀ Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) is an unfinished allegorical epic in twelve planned books, of which six and the Mutabilitie fragment survive. Each book centres on a virtue and its knight; Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, is invoked and reported but never directly appears.
❀ Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh (1589) names the project’s intent: to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline. The faery machinery is allegorical and often Elizabethan, but not a simple map of England — Gloriana shadows Elizabeth without reducing to her.
❀ Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96) figures three overlapping worlds — the Athenian court, the rude mechanicals, and the fairy realm of Oberon and Titania. The play’s pharmacology, the love-in-idleness flower, is the play’s least implausible element.
❀ Reverend Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1691, first published 1815) is among the earliest sustained English/Scots-language quasi-ethnographies of fairies and second sight. Kirk died in 1692; tradition later claimed the fairies had taken him into Fairy Hill at Aberfoyle.
¶ Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782), set by Schubert in 1815, dramatises a child’s death-by-fae across the voices of narrator, father, child, and Erlking. The fae’s seduction is registered only by the child; the father rationalises the supernatural as the rustling of leaves.
¶ Coleridge’s Christabel (composed from 1797, published 1816) gives us Geraldine, the night-found lady whose “bosom and half her side” is “a sight to dream of, not to tell.” In critical reading she is the closest English Romanticism gets to the vampire-fae of the older ballads.
¶ Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) sells the eponymous fruit at no monetary price — Laura pays with a golden curl and a tear. Lizzie’s later attempt to pay with a silver penny fails; she withstands the goblins’ assault and brings the antidotal juice back smeared on her face.
¶ Andrew Lang’s twelve-volume Color Fairy Books (Blue, 1889 to Lilac, 1910) collected European and non-European fairy tales for English children. Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang and other women translated, adapted, and selected most of the contents; Andrew Lang’s name carried the brand.
¶ Yeats’s The Stolen Child (1880s) sets the refrain come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild against the implicit threat of the line’s promise. It is the cleanest English-language statement of the changeling abduction.
¶ Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) gathered the field at a politically charged moment for the Literary Revival. The anthology organises fairies into trooping/sociable and solitary types, framing Irish fairy lore for a generation of readers.
⁕ The Cottingley Fairies photographs (1917, 1920) were taken by Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, then about nine and sixteen, and were authenticated by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Coming of the Fairies (1922). The first four images were cardboard cutouts; the cousins confessed the hoax in 1983, while Frances continued to defend the fifth as genuine.
※ Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) figures fairy fruit as contraband across a border the bourgeois town denies the existence of. The smuggler’s name, Endymion Leer, reads (interpretively) as a Keatsian allusion. The novel was effectively out of print for four decades before its revival.
※ Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) collected sixteen New Yorker stories of fairy kingdoms across Europe — Norway, Wales, Persia, the Mediterranean. The fae are precisely bureaucratic; their courts have superannuation schemes.
※ Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) restored English fae fiction by treating Faerie as a documented adjacent polity — history, roads, treaties, scholarship. Its footnotes include extended pseudo-scholarly discussions of the King’s Roads.
※ Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock (1985) is a Tam Lin / Thomas the Rhymer retelling structured through recovered memory: Polly has been made to forget Thomas Lynn. The fae antagonism operates through forgetting.
※ Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light (1952) sends its heroine Halla, abandoned in infancy and raised among bears and dragons, eastward through Byzantium and beyond. The opening register is fairy-tale rather than specifically fae; the mythic mode holds throughout.
※ Marina Warner’s No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (1998) traces the figure of the child-eating monster from the ancient nursery to the modern playground. The fae change registers as needed; the function is what persists.