Dissecting Literature

Hey there, traveler! It’s Darr here, with a crescendo to our fairy extravaganza. We’ve already mentioned some popular media featuring fae of all kind, but as a last note, I thought we should look at a couple of the ones we like best. Be aware, this one is super spoilery, so if you haven’t seen any of the series mentioned in the paragraph titles, proceed at your own risk! Ready? Let’s go! I. Mad Sweeney (American Gods) This one is special to me because of how perfectly it portrays the demystification of Irish mythology. Mad Sweeney is a character in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods , introduced as a leprechaun, a celtic fae creature similar to a dwarf associated with gold and luck. However, there are immediately a few bits somehow amiss. First, Sweeney is tall, like, really tall. Second, his magical pulling-coins-out-of-thin-air power is later revealed to work with basically anything he touches and stashes away in “the hoard of the sun”, something way cooler than a leprechaun can usually acc...

We are nearing the end of the fairy topic, so to end on a high note, let’s look at a really popular trope we haven’t touched until now: the fairy courts, the kings, queens and nobles of fairyland. People love the idea of having fairy royalties, a good and a bad court and – like everything – it has mythological origins. Now, the last few tropes almost always had some pseudohistory behind the myths, but while researching the courts, I couldn’t find anything similar. So let’s just stick with folklore for now. The fairies of today’s Great Britain are classified in many different ways, but the one leaking into popular culture is the Scottish Seelie and Unseelie courts. They are so popular, in fact, that they even have their own TV tropes page. The Seelie court is associated with light, beauty and summer, while the Unseelie court is dark, it’s inhabitants are often ugly and goblin-like, and belongs to the season of winter. In most modern literary works the difference is usually aesthetic, or...