The truth of faeries and names according to folklore:

The Internet has lead to many people thinking that faeries stealing names has always been a part of the lore. It’s actually not that common at all except in recent pop culture. The popularization of the idea of faeries wanting to steal names partly came about because of the same cross-pollination of lore that lead to the memes that perpetuate the idea. Anime like Spirited Away and modern fantasy literature stewed together with meme culture to perpetuate this idea.

In traditional Gaelic lore faeries don’t usually want to steal your name. They’re not out to get a credit card in your name while you sit there trying to remember your own birth certificate name but are drawing a blank. What they want, in most of the stories, is to *learn* your True Name. Not necessarily your given name, nickname, or even what everyone calls you. It’s not necessarily your legal name or what’s on your birth certificate. (But it can be any of those things). What they want is your TRUE name with a capital T. Your True name is NOT necessarily your legal name though that is a possibility. And no, it’s not necessarily the name you take during confirmation if you are Catholic. It’s the name that you carry deep inside. It might even be a secret name that no one knows but it IS the name you identify as deep inside, a name you associate with who and what you truly are. Everyone has a true name, whether they realize it or not.

I’ll give an example from pop culture. In Batman Beyond you see Bruce Wayne beint tornented by the villain, Vertigo. Vertigo tries to pass himself off as Brue’s subconscious but Bruce figures out it’s not his own mind because Vertigo is not calling him by his TRUE name. And in his mind Bruce’s True name, even in old age, is Batman. Terry tries telling Bruce later “You know you’re not Batman anymore, right?” and Bruce responds with “Tell that to my subconsicous.”

Bruce sees himself utterly as Batman, not as Bruce Wayne. In The Sandman: The Wake Clark Kent (Superman), and Martian Manhunter appear at The Wake but Bruce Wayne is there as Batman because that’s who he sees himself as deep down inside.

In the 1985 film Fright Night we meet has-been horror actor and TV horror host, Peter Vincent. The character Charlie Brewster has discovered that his neighbor is a real vampire and he seeks Peter’s help. When Peter finally comes to realize that Charlie is actually right and that Jerry Dandridge is, in fact, a vampire, he’s terrified. He protests that Peter Vincent is only a character and not even his real name. However, after some soul searching and character growth, and circumstances force Peter Vicent to kill a boy who recently was turned into a vampire, Peter Vincent comes to embrace his persona. He realizes that Peter Vincent isn’t merely a character. He is the hero he always secretly wanted to be, the hero he NEEDS to be. And so he repeats to himself “I am Peter Vincent, the Great vampire Killer!” until he finally accepts that yes, this is who he is. This is who he must be now. He finally becomes the character he had played, the persona of who he had always secretly longed to be but was afraid of. By the end of the film he was, indeed, Peter Vincent. You never even learn his “real” name in the movie because that does not matter. It’s not who he truly is. He IS Peter Vincent.

In Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman the main character (who is the living embodiment of dreams) is over ten-billion-years-old but he seems to consider the relatively recent (only a few thousand years old) name of Morpheus to be his true name. He can be summoned by calling out this name. This is why it annoyed me that G. Willow Wilson (In The Dreaming: Waking Hours comic) depicted Heather After (who is trans) as having her deadname being her true name and the story tried to make it empowering that she determined that true names have no real power. I think it would have been more satisfying if her chosen name of Heather After turned out to be her true name. Heather is a great character but that was a terrible plot point. Her Deadname should NEVER be perceived as her true name even if true names hold no power in the story. Heather After (her chosen name) should have been her True Name and it would have been a confirmation of this if there was power in it. A True Name is not necessarily a legal name or birth name or even the most well known name that you answer to though it can be any of those things. What matters is that it is the name you consider yourself. Sometimes you, yourself, may not even know your own true name but if someone calls it, you’ll know it, your very soul will feel it. One could even surmise that the historic Vlad (Vladislaus) the Third of Wallachia AKA Vlad Tepes (The impaler), known as Kazıklı Bey by the Ottomans, had chosen his own true name when he chose the patronymic of Dracula (with various archaic spellings) to honor his father and his membership to the Order of the Dragon (Dracul). Dracula means Son of the Dragon.

And yes, a True Name can change over time but it is not common and does not happen often. Some people take years trying to find out their own True Name.

So why do faeries want to learn someone’s true name? Well, it’s simple. Knowledge has power and this is a particular type of power. In occult practices if you know a magical entity’s true name you can invoke them, summon them to you, banish them or bind and enslave them. This is why faeries want to know your true name. It’s much more potent than stealing the knowledge of a legal name. It is to gain utter power of you by knowing your truest self, the name by which you could be conjured and can pull at your essence.

To me this is far more interesting than the idea of a faery stealing your name. They can, through knowing your true name, lay claim to YOU!

(Faerie art by Brian Froud from his book Good Faeries / Bad Faeries).

“Is the word ‘Fae’ offensive?” The sort answer is No. No, it is not.

There is a strange debate on if the term fae would be considered a slur to the entities this term is in regard to. The Internet, in its “infinite wisdom” collectively decided that fae is incorrect because it is “new” and then someone made the logic-leap that the entities it refers to would find the term offensive, or slur-like. I have it on good authority that they would not find it offensive. Think of all the mischief that would mysteriously befall many works of fantasy literature if this was the case. It is true that the etymology of fae and fairy are from French and in turn from Latin meaning Fates however the usage of Fae by other cultures has a bit of a twisting, Labyrinthine, history. These beings, in Norse lore, were known as Alfir, Alfie, or Alfr and from this we get the word “elf.” In Gaelic lore these entities were called the sidhe (pronounced as “She”). The Banshee comes from the Gaelic Bean Sidhe (Woman fairy). However not all female faeries are the banshee. You may notice there’s an overlap with ghost stories and faery lore in old folk legends. The reason for this is in some lore a human or a human’s ghost could become a faery. The banshee was usually, formerly, a deceased mortal woman. Washington Irving even referred to The Headless Horseman, in his Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as a goblin. This may come from the Irish having a specific term for the souls of men who lost their heads in battle becoming a type of dangerous faerie known as a Dullahan. Despite The Legend of Sleepy Hollow being set in a Dutch New York colony, I can’t help but think there was some Irish influence here. Faeries are not always the tiny pixies like Tinkerbell. You get powerful and sometimes harmful beings like the Dullahan (headless Horsemen), Red Caps (Goblin-like creatures that soak their caps in the blood of those those kill), goblins, trolls, The Erlking, and many scary entities – some of which literally feed on fear. For this reason the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English were afraid to offend them. And they came up with euphemisms like The Good Neighbors, The Beautiful People, and The Fair Folk. When the word Fairy came to the English language it was tied to The Beautiful People euphemism and evolved into “The Fair Folk” before reverting back to Fairy, Faery (Older speller), and Fae. A winding path but the word found two passages into modern language. So no, these entities would probably not find the word fae offensive, especially if those using it are using it with the intention of flattery like with “Fair folk.” It’s similar to how The Greeks sometimes called The Furies (Erinyes) is The Kindly Ones, because you want them to act kindly. Calling the faeries by The Beautiful People or Fair Folk was to flatter them into not doing harm. And calling them The Good Neighbors was in the hope that they would behave as such. In works of fiction actual slurs for these sort of beings include “knife ears’ and in the now canceled TV show, Carnival Row, the word Critch, which is derived from “Creature” and sounds a little like a certain B word. Side Note: Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel was supposed to have pointed ears. Imagine how he would react to a slur targeting his anatomy like that. You probably would not survive the night. Now, what you probably should worry about is how virtually identical powerful entities exist in cultures all over Europe and parts of North America. Immortal or near-immortal entities that might pass for human but not quite. My own sources – The book Dark Faeries by Dr. Robert Curran, as well as many works of fantasy literature and folklore. Image by Brian Froud from the book Good Faeries / Bad Faeries.

Venting about a pretentious fan of Irish folklore

I'm going to vent a little here. Yesterday in my Facebook group dedicated to Neil Gaiman's The Sandman we started on a conversation about Irish folklore. It was a fine enough conversation which, almost predictably drifted to Banshees. I mentioned how the original word was the Gaelic "Bean Sidhe" (still pronounced like the modern Banshee) so it's almost like just saying "Woman faery." Somehow this earned a very pretentious and condescending response from someone who was insistent that Sidhe are not faeries. She said "Obviously you're not Irish." and then went on to tell me that Sidhe aren't "Fluttery little things with wings" and how they are "Not Tinkerbell" and that they are "More like Titania and Oberon from Shakespeare's a Midsummer Night's Dream. Two things had me seeing red with this. The first is the "Obviously you're not Irish." It was very condescending and dismissive. I think she had seen my American location on my Facebook account and then decided that I must not know folklore no matter what I said.

The second issue is how wrong she was. For starters, I never once claimed that sidhe are "Tiny fluttering things with wings." and ironically we (others in the group and myself) had discussed Titania and Oberon previously in that very thread. The Fae Court turn up quite a few times in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Also it was kind of baffling that she felt the need to imply that Titania and Oberon are not faeries. "My Fairy Lord, this must be done with haste" is literally something Robin Goodfellow (Puck) says in Shakespeare's a Midsummer Night's Dream.

I think she, herself, was confusing the word faery and pixie. For though pixies are faeries not all faeries are pixies. Faery is a blanket term for many entities of Irish folklore including the Sidhe, and even the Dullahan (headless Horsemen). She felt the need to lecture me about how dangerous faeries can be. Ma'am, this is a Sandman group. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman features a homocidal hobgoblin version of The Puck. Most of us are well-aware of how dangerous these beings are in traditional folklore.

What made it even more infuriating was in her effort to "correct" me even though there was nothing to correct, she had somehow earned eight likes and loves on the comment. I pride myself on my knowledge of folklore. I have read Dark Faeries by Dr. Robert Curran, An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures by Katherine Briggs, Irish Fairy and Folktales (leatherbound Barnes and Noble edition). And several others but those are the titles that come to mind.

What made this extra baffling is I said nothing that contradicts anything she said here about the Sidhe being dangerous, and closer to Oberon and Titania than Tinkerbell.

I think she, herself, was confusing the word faery and Pixie.

On a final note, I understand the frustration of those that think faeries are all tiny pixies but that's not what I had said at all and. And ironically, Tinkerbell isn't all that nice, herself. In the original story she tried to have Wendy killed out of jealousy.

I’m so tired of the posts talking about fae “stealing” names. Fae don't actually "steal" your name.   They gain power over you by knowing your true name.  Honestly, I'm not sure how this lore got so mixed up recently and suspiciously mostly on Tumblr... Do all of you just read the memes and never the actual folklore?!

So I just found out there is a breed of snail called the  scaly-foot snail (which some people online are calling the "Volcano Snail.")  Anyway, it turns out this snail's shell is made of iron sulfide.  That's right.   His shell is iron.   That means there is a snail out there, whose shell can kill a faerie.  

For the hundredth time for people who THINK they know faerie lore!

Fae don't "take the name" as in "steal" the name and leave you nameless.  That's something some confused folkloric newbie got from an anime and brutally misunderstood.   Names have power.  A fae KNOWING your true name gives them power over you, the ability to possibly summon you if you're a magick user.   This isn't just true with fae.  It's true with sorcerers.  It's why late nineteenth century and early twentieth century occultists always used names that they wanted to be called instead of their "true" name.  True names aren't necessarily the name you are born to, by the way.  It's the name you most associate with yourself. It was common in fantasy fiction for years.  It's even common in fairy tales.  It's why the Queen knowing Rumpelstiltskin's name enabled her to banish him.   Honestly, it's like some idiots saw Spirited Away and got "confused" and started to think fae simply leave you nameless or some bullshit and as someone who has actually read folklore it's REALLY annoying.

Ten years? The deal is usually for eternity. You got a good deal!

Only ten years?   Most fae get you for eternity.   She got a good deal.

The Fae Agenda!

Thoughts on faeries and Iron

Thoughts on faeries.  I recently found out human beings can be allergic to iron.   They can absorb it in ordinary foods but supplements like iron tablets can be dangerous for them.   The fact that they can take it through ordinary means (i.e. iron rich foods) but other means would cause an allergic reaction has solved a mystery for me as to how Red Caps (blood thirsty faeries) and other fae don't die horribly or get hurt just from exposure to human blood or high iron foods like spinach, Cream of Wheat, and beef.

Once Upon a Time vs. Faery Lore

This post is to discuss actual faery lore vs. Once Upon a Time faery lore and a little commentary on pop culture faery lore.  I am going to explain why the actual faery lore (traditional faery lore) would have worked best for Rumplestiltskin being the Black Faery's Son.