The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition

This essay examines the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that a very clear change in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different types of text to a coherent sense of a fairy kingdom, leading in turn to an intense interest in and discussion of the nature of fairies. These literary developments were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for , changes in perception in culture at large.