Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

***Dedicated to Pater Beach*** Yes, sorry, Beach has not respected his only one-fairy-post a week rule. But this just proved too interesting to let go AND it was keeping him awake while Mrs B was gently snoring besides him. First the facts. In many modern works fairies are portrayed as ‘nature spirits’ actively working for [...]

The family crisis continues here and so Beach offers a modest little post on a fairy sighting in Skye: perhaps Beachcombing’s favourite witness account of the ‘good folk’.  This was written out in the early 1960s that puts the experience back c. 1880. In the darkening of an Autumn evening over eighty years ago a [...]

***Dedicated to Mike Dash (who practically wrote this piece) and to Kithra*** In Beachcombing’s recent gambol through the records of false fairies, he put up the picture above and confessed that he had no idea where it had come from, though it was frequently ascribed to witches in Devon or Cornwall in his sources. For [...]

Beachcombing has spent rather more time than is good for him over the last year looking at cases of, what are in legal terms, child abuse. Nineteenth-century Irish families who (to use an inadequate word) ‘punished’ children because they believed that they were fairies or ‘changelings’: the real child had, the families believed, been spirited [...]

***Dedicated to Invisible who sent in two of these fakes***  Beachcombing apologies because he does normally try and limit his fairy nonsense to a post a week. But this was just too good to miss. He stumbled across a curious reference in the works of Robert Southey (obit 1843). While wandering through Bristol Southey saw [...]

Ok there has been a lot of energy and desperation spent on this one: Beach has wasted, in fact, about six hours of his life trying to chase down the story. If any reader should happen to find a newspaper version there will be a bright shiny book of some description put in the post [...]

The elves were Anglo-Saxon fairies and as such deserve a bizarrist’s respect. They are though – not unlike the medieval fairies that come after – gone almost without trace. But there is, every so often, a Dark Age charm, a riddle, a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry that recalls belief in this receding people. Make no [...]

Beachcombing had a melancholy moment this morning. He turned up a report from the mid nineteenth-century (a letter) of a forgotten bit of fairylore from the county of Leicestershire: a county (for those in less happy lands) in the English Midlands. In the lordship of Humberston, on the estate of Mr. Poohin [try looking for [...]

Beach’s endless reading in the literature of fairies has led him to a couple of unusual passages. He honestly doesn’t know that to make of them. In truth, they frighten him. The first is from a south-western fairy tale where a man is reunited with his ‘dead’ fiancé who is actually trapped in fairy land. [...]

***Dedicated to Leif: apologies ahead of time for the picture and butchering of any Icelandic accents*** Beachcombing has just, through extraordinary and characteristic, incompetence lost a week of his life. He thought that he began teaching the 23 Jan, when, instead, it seems that he is to start on the 16. He now has two [...]

Scary Fairies… While Barrie, Nesbit and others were trying to anodize* and castrate fairies c. 1900 out in the wilds of Britain, Man and Ireland there will still those who were terrified of the elfen beggars. This terror finds a little known reflex in the literature of the time. Various authors including Buchan, Machen, Le [...]

***Dedicated to Adrian Sterling*** A lead up to tomorrow’s epiphany gift to all readers: Scary Fairies: the Proto Edition. Bede begins his Ecclesiastical History of the English in 731 with a geographical overview of the island of Britain and also, given its importance in the conversion of the English to Christianity, Ireland. It is a [...]

Beachcombing knows that not everyone appreciates his endless posts on fairies, but here is – he promises – the last one for 2011. He might even wait a week before he starts again in 2012. Anyway, apologies apart, he recently stumbled on a rather beautiful book about Yorkshire in the late nineteenth century, one that [...]

The demography of this blog is unusual: it is about 30% history buffs, 30% anomalists/Forteans and 40% hybrid types. Beachcombing belongs very much to the first of these three and he certainly did not plan, when he started, a year and a half ago, to write for anyone but his dry-as-dust friends. He is glad, [...]

Beachcombing’s fairy year continues. In his grazing through the accounts of the fairy faith on the western and northern fringe of Europe one of the things that has most fascinated him is the belief of the connection between Catholicism and things fairy. There is a famous early modern comment – irritatingly Beach can’t remember by [...]