The origin of the fairy trope I. - Persia and the Peris

After a long slumber – longer than I expected – I’d like to continue our blog with interesting topics that aren’t closely related to publishing or our book. There are many more myths and creatures out there we haven’t touched yet buta re worth exploring, so I’ll take this opportunity to start a new series with one of the most popular creatures – fairies and other fae folk. It’s quite a chonky topic, something that’ll give us several posts’ worth of material (one reason I haven’t touched on fairies before), but it’s just as interesting!

Fairies don’t have a single origin, but are rather a collection of folk beliefs from different sources. In pagan traditions they are minor deities, spirits of the dead, spirits of nature or a race predating humankind. All of these can be seen in myths and in literature also, so in these blogposts I’ll go through the different cultures where fairies appear and try to find a literary piece where they used that interpretation of these diverse creatures.

I really didn’t want to end up at the Middle-East again, yet that’s exactly our first stop. According to some historians, such as Barthélemy d'Herbelot, a French orientalist, fairies were adopted from and influenced by Persian mythology, specifically a race called peris. Peris were angelic beings that were already mentioned in Pre-Islamic Persia as early as the Achaemenid Empire. Peris were later described in various Persian works in great detail such as the Shahnameh, The Book of Kings by Ferdowsi. It is a long epic poem written between circa 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran, that tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. 

A peri was pictured as a fair, beautiful, and extravagant nature spirit with wings, although their wing were more like angel wings with feathers than the traditional dragonfly-type. They appeared in romances and epics as well, and poets often used the world to describe the beauty of a woman. In mythology they were also part of the army that defeated Ahriman, an evil spirit in the Zoroastrian religion, and his demonic son. 

The peris were also the enemy of the evil divs (or daeva) and in later islamic tradition the djinns, as the forces of good. The belief in peris still persist among Muslims in India and Turkey as a type of spiritual creature besides the djinn and the shayatin (demons). According to the Tafsir al-Tabari, a Persian exegesis of the Quran, the peris are beatiful female spirits, who mostly believe in God and are benevolent to humans. They can appear before humans, punish them if they don’t respect nature and waste resources, even abduct humans to attend their events (so much about being benevolent). This mischievous and nature-protecting attribute can be spotted in many folk tales thousands of miles from Persia, and is a common shared concept about these beings. 

Marriage with a peri, although possible, is considered undue in Islamic lore. Because of humans’ impatience and distrust, relationship between humans and peris almost never works out in the myths. Bilqis, The Queen of Sheba from the Bible, is, according to one narrative, the daughter of such a failed relationship, and was half-peri.

The peris inspired western writers as well. One such tale describes how a man hid the wings of a peri, marrying her until the peri found out about this whole deal and—naturally—turned furious; a story oddly similar to the swan-maiden stories of other cultures. It took quite a journey from the supernatural shape-shifting wife to the fairies in A Court of Thorns and Roses… but more about that later. The term peri appears in the Vathek by William Thomas Beckford, written in french in 1782, then in Thomas Moor’s poem, Paradise and the Peri, a part of the Lalla-Rookh, an oriental romance from 1817.  They appeared not only in books but on stage as well. The french composer, Paul Dukas’s last major work was a ballet, titled La Péri from 1912. 

The tales of peris in ancient Persia may have potentially influenced the migrating Germanic and Eurasian settlers into Europe, or been transmitted during early exchanges. The similarities could also be attributed to a shared Proto-Indo-European mythology, and I’m with that latter opinion, because even the Greeks has their own version of fairies – the Nymphs. Also there are folklorists who think that a lot of our European tales, like Hansel and Gretel for example can be dated back to the Proto-Indo-European times, so why not fairies? 

To keep the chronological order, net week we’ll take a look at the nymphs of Ancient Greece, so stay tuned!

Cheers,

Lory