Faerie Folklore

What do you need to know about faerie folklore before reading Good Neighbors?

So going into my books I don’t think you need to know anything about faerie folklore. Hopefully in Good Neighbors you’ll be able to figure it out along the way, but if there were a few things I could tell you about faeries they would be the following...

A lot people think of faeries as being little girls with wings and flowers, but in folklore, faeries were actually thought of as being quite dangerous, so dangerous that people wouldn’t say the word faerie.

This is why they say things like the ‘Little People’ or the ‘People of Peace’ or the ‘Good Neighbors.’ It was not because they were good or little or peaceful, but because people thought, well if we don’t say faerie then they won’t take notice on us, they won’t bled our crops, steal the milk out of our cow, and take our family away, leaving a changeling.

People wanted to avoid that as much as possible and they thought that the best way do that was to avoid all interaction with faeries.

So I think that the more people that know about faerie folklore, the more interesting it becomes to them, the more unexpected is it. There is a great deal of it. Not all fairies even look human.

There’s faerie folklore around the world which is fairly consistent. They’re in every culture often as a kind of being that lives under ground, a little sort of mischievous being, and are often spirits of trees. It’s the commonalities that just fascinate me.