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http://icsurreyonline.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0200surreyheadlines/tm_
A fairy story you can't tell to children
Nov 22 2005
By Post Reporter
A LEADING author of the mysterious has won a prestigious award from the Folklore Society for a book about fairies. Jeremy Harte, 45, of Bourne Hall Museum, in Spring Street, Ewell Village, scooped the Katherine Briggs prize for the best book about folklore at a ceremony held at the Warburg Institute in Woburn Square, London. "It was a well-kept secret and I feel honoured and utterly delighted," said Jeremy after receiving the crystal goblet at the presentation on November 8. Published a year ago, his book, Explore Fairy Traditions, reveals that the origins of fairy lore are far "darker" than the wee or twee fairies of our storybook childhood. The author's innovative approach reveals how the meaning and significance of fairy lore has changed, often quite radically, over the centuries and is still providing valid insights into present-day beliefs. Jeremy owns up to a lifelong interest in folklore and sacred spaces, with a particular fascination in tales of encounters with the supernatural. His previous books include Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows and The Green Man. Explore Fairy Traditions is illustrated with specially-commissioned drawings by Ian Brown. Delving through the pages, we soon learn that we are not alone. In the shadows of our countryside there lives a fairy race, older than humans, and not necessarily friendly towards them. For hundreds of years, men and women have told stories about the strange people, beautiful as starlight, fierce as wolves, and heartless as ice. These are not tales for children. They reveal the fairies as a passionate, proud, brutal people. Explore Fairy Traditions draws on legends, ballads and testimony from throughout Britain and Ireland to reveal what the fairies were really like. It looks at changelings, brownies, demon lovers, the fairy host and abduction into the Otherworld. Stories and motifs are followed down the centuries to reveal the changing nature of fairy lore as it was told to famous figures like WB Yeats and Sir Walter Scott. All the research is based on primary sources and many errors about fairy tradition are laid to rest. Jeremy combines folklore scholarship with a lively style to show what the presence of fairies meant to people's lives. He said: "Like their human counterparts, the secret people could kill as well as heal. They knew marriage, seduction, rape and divorce. They adored some children and rejected others. If we are frightened of the fairies, it may be because their world offers an uncomfortable mirror of our own." The next subject Jeremy is to write about is holy wells -water sources such as springs and streams that have a spiritual connection. Copies of Explore Fairy Traditions are available from bookshops and the Bourne Hall museum.
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