While there are various explanations for the origins of fairies and the nature of them and their lands, there is little explanation in any study of where the modern conception of winged fairies came from.

None of the books suggest that fairies have wings like dragonflies or butterflies. The little people of Celtic mythology are generally believed to be the size of small children or dwarfs, rather than the size of insects as is thought today. but perfect grown-up fairies in modern storybooks. It is likely that these modern representations of fairies arose more from the minds of individual humans than from any specific culture or mythology.

Almost as long as people have been seeing fairies, people have been writing about them. The countries of the world have a wide variety of myths and legends, but the “little people” crop up in most of them. In more modern times, we have Spenser’s “The Fairy Queen” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Elizabethan times, both of which did much to cement the modern conception of what a “fairy” is.

A wide variety of cultures believe in fairies similar to the Celtic version, with some cultures seeing fairies as animistic nature spirits. None of these fairies closely resemble modern fairies and if they did have wings, it is a detail that is often overlooked. Spencer’s fairies were like the Celtic version, Shakespeare’s were like a combination of tall, graceful elves and little people, but it wasn’t until the Victorian era that fairies became established as little winged beings.

Thomas Croker (1789-1854) in his collection of Irish fairy tales, described the fairies as “a few inches high, airy, and almost transparent in body; so delicate in form, that a drop of dew, when dancing on she trembles, certainly, but she never breaks”.

One of the first of these “delicate” fairies to break into popular consciousness was probably Tinkerbell in JM Barrie’s Peter Pan. At that time, there was also a great deal of sentimental art, creating cutesy depictions of fairies and cherubs. There was also a huge uproar over fairy photographs taken by two girls in England at Cottingsley. These photographs sparked a worldwide debate that did much to “fix” the image of the little winged fairy in the public mind, and if you ask any group of people, there is bound to be someone who remembers seeing the photographs. sometime. The Victorians had a soft spot for “pretty,” and much of the modern conception of the dainty little bug-sized fairy came from them.

Disney also has a role to play from the 1950s onward, pushing sanitized Tinkerbell as some kind of happy-go-lucky nature elf, making the fairies happy and non-threatening, further reinforced by having Julia Roberts play her. perform in the live action version.

From these images, people have come to see fairies as a happy and positive image…a far cry from the baby snatchers of Celtic mythology from which they derive.