[…fairies…] which from Chaucer’s time onwards have been supposed to belong to the last generation and to be lost to the present one. The strange thing is that rare, tenuous and fragile as it is, the tradition is still there, and lingers on from generation to generation substantially unchanged. Every now and then poets and writers draw on the tradition, and make out of it something suitable to the spirit of their age. …there is a school of thought that believes that we owe the race of tiny English fairies to the literary fancies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This is not so, for some of our earliest fairies, the Portunes, are said by Gervase of Tilbury to be only half an inch in height. The mentions of fairies in medieval manuscripts are, indeed, sparse, but they cover most of the types that we shall come across later. … And we have giants and dragons as well. Even down to the last generation, before the First World War, all of these types were still to be found, and I have little doubt that most of them could be found now if the secrecy which the fairies enjoin did not still bind the tongues of the scattered and obscure people who still believe in them.
Chap. 1, Historical Survey, _The Fairies in Tradition and Literature_ Katherine Briggs, ©1967
