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A review by emmalthompson85
Fairies: A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg
3.0
I'd really expected more of this book. It sounds like it should be my jam and parts of it definitely were but others were not. So, first this is an academic book which means that sometimes the language makes it hard to access. Sugg favours long sentences and long words and while his language is more poetic than most academic texts, that doesn't necessarily help. The first half of the book is an examination of fairy folklore. A lot of it focuses around why people believed in fairies and what it meant for their lives that they did, and that was excellent, then the whole thing takes a weird turn where the author tries to convince you to believe that fairies exist.
This effort mostly consists of pointing at witness testimony and saying, there, that one. That one must be true because it's different from the rest of the folklore or it contains a specific detail or, in one case, because every person who experiences the phenomenon experiences it differently. That last one I'd say was more an argument against it being true than for. If ten people see the thing it's more likely to be a thing than if ten people see different things. But, at their core, these are all arguments to incredulity which hinge on the idea that people couldn't and won't make this stuff up and my dude, they can and they will. People make stuff up. They lie. They add specific detail to try to make it feel more real. People enjoy fooling others and we have no proof that anything mentioned in this book happened. For example, there was a story of a woman who vanished periodically and claimed it was the fairies. The author strongly implied that she was going somewhere so why not the fairies, but how do we know that? How do we know that this old woman went anywhere, or even existed? We don't. We have a story. That's all.
And it doesn't even have to be conscious lying. People might, even, perceive something that then becomes exaggerated through retelling to these fairy stories. Human perception is unreliable, as is memory and transmission of story. Maybe the old woman I mentioned above went somewhere once and didn't want to be caught so said she was in fairy, then through the story being passed down and misremembered and exaggerated for effect we get a woman who routinely goes off with the fairies.
The thing is, if the book has just jumped into the permits that fairies, if not materially real, were at least real to the people who believed in them, I can accept that premise. I can work within that framework. But when an author is over here telling me that this story has one novel element so must be a true and accurate record of events and I'm not saying fairies exist but look at this, well, it makes you doubt then on a number of levels.
The back half of the book featured a review of some literature relating to fairies and how our views of fairies have changed over time as they've been sanitised and turned into children's entertainment.
This effort mostly consists of pointing at witness testimony and saying, there, that one. That one must be true because it's different from the rest of the folklore or it contains a specific detail or, in one case, because every person who experiences the phenomenon experiences it differently. That last one I'd say was more an argument against it being true than for. If ten people see the thing it's more likely to be a thing than if ten people see different things. But, at their core, these are all arguments to incredulity which hinge on the idea that people couldn't and won't make this stuff up and my dude, they can and they will. People make stuff up. They lie. They add specific detail to try to make it feel more real. People enjoy fooling others and we have no proof that anything mentioned in this book happened. For example, there was a story of a woman who vanished periodically and claimed it was the fairies. The author strongly implied that she was going somewhere so why not the fairies, but how do we know that? How do we know that this old woman went anywhere, or even existed? We don't. We have a story. That's all.
And it doesn't even have to be conscious lying. People might, even, perceive something that then becomes exaggerated through retelling to these fairy stories. Human perception is unreliable, as is memory and transmission of story. Maybe the old woman I mentioned above went somewhere once and didn't want to be caught so said she was in fairy, then through the story being passed down and misremembered and exaggerated for effect we get a woman who routinely goes off with the fairies.
The thing is, if the book has just jumped into the permits that fairies, if not materially real, were at least real to the people who believed in them, I can accept that premise. I can work within that framework. But when an author is over here telling me that this story has one novel element so must be a true and accurate record of events and I'm not saying fairies exist but look at this, well, it makes you doubt then on a number of levels.
The back half of the book featured a review of some literature relating to fairies and how our views of fairies have changed over time as they've been sanitised and turned into children's entertainment.