Shakespeare’s plays changed almost everything that we think about faeries.
Before Shakespeare wrote about them, most people were terrified of faeries.  One of the most frightening was a faerie called Robin Goodfellow.  He was blamed for bad luck, poor harvests, and even death.
Then, Shakespeare suggested that faeries might not be evil… just mischievous.
During Shakespeare’s era, that [...]

Someone asked me if the faeries are basically all the same. The resounding answer is, “No.” They are very different kinds of beings, and different kinds may have starkly different ancestry. Here’s my email about this:
There are many words that categorize the beings who are able [...]

Faeries… would you like to see them? Many of us who see faeries are artists, or have had some art training.
This is a quick lesson in seeing faeries. It’s not difficult, but it might take some practice.
What people usually see
People usually see what’s in front of them. They mentally discard the [...]

First of all, hardly anyone sees faeries (or fairies), full-face and in bright light. Most people see them slightly out of straight-on vision, or out of the corner of an eye. (When you look straight at them, they vanish. Part of this may [...]

Here are my notes from my first “gnome door,” years ago. It was a far more formal design than the faerie door shown at left, but the process of making it is very similar.
The “door” that I made is actually a door and staircase. I went to a dollhouse store and [...]

(click on image to see it larger)This faerie door is the second one I made, around 1997. The first one was simpler in terms of buying parts, painting them, and assembling them. It was too formal for my home, so I replaced it. The first one is in a [...]

Those who have touched the faerie world have sometimes written poetry about it.
Thomas the Rhymer is one of the most famous faerie / fairy poems. [Note: The "Eildon Tree" refers to a tree that once stood near the Eildon Hills. Today, a monument to the tree remains, just [...]

Where do faeries come from? There are many theories. Fortunately, faeries appear in stories dating back to ancient times.  We have tremendous information to work with.
The written history of faeries
Faeries appear in literature at least as early as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (approx. 850 BCE), in which he mentions nymphs and [...]

Mermaids–and mermen–appear as consistently in history as faeries and dragons. Like their “mythological” counterparts, mermaids were considered real until the early 20th century.
In fact, although we think of Disney’s Ariel when we hear the word “mermaids,” their actual history is ancient, well-founded, and–until recent years–treated as fact, not fantasy.
In this [...]

Similar to people, merfolk come in different colors and different sizes.
In one of the earliest written reports of modern times, the 1608 log of Henry Hudson described a mermaid on his second voyage. Two of his crewmen, Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner, saw her at about 71 degrees north in the Barrents [...]