faerie

Old French faerie derives from Late Latin fatāria, from fata (a fate, a goddess of destiny), from fātum (what has been spoken, destiny). The Latin Fata — the personified Fates — gave their name to the entire realm of enchantment. A fairy was originally a being connected to destiny, not a winged creature in a garden. The French word faerie meant both 'the state of enchantment' and 'the land of enchantment' before it meant an individual enchanted being. The fairy is a being of fate. The garden came later.

Shakespeare's fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595–1596) — Titania, Oberon, Puck — are small enough to hide in acorn cups and powerful enough to reshape human relationships. They are aristocratic, capricious, and amoral. They are not good or evil. They are other. The fairy court in Shakespeare mirrors the human court: both have kings, queens, servants, and power struggles. The parallel is the point. Fairies are humans seen from outside.

The Victorian era miniaturized the fairy. Illustrations by Richard Dadd (The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, 1855–1864), Arthur Rackham, and Cicely Mary Barker (Flower Fairies, 1923) shrank fairies to insect-size, gave them butterfly wings, and placed them among flowers. The Cottingley Fairies photographs (1917), staged by two girls using cardboard cutouts, were endorsed as genuine by Arthur Conan Doyle — the creator of Sherlock Holmes believed in fairies. The hoax was not admitted until 1983.

The modern 'fairy tale' — conte de fées in French, coined by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy in 1697 — was originally a literary genre for adult audiences. D'Aulnoy, Perrault, and their contemporaries wrote fairy tales as social criticism, moral instruction, and entertainment for the French salon. The idea that fairy tales are for children came later, largely through the Brothers Grimm and Victorian adaptations. The Latin Fates wrote stories for adults. The English fairy tells them to children.