#117 – FAIRIES! AN ARCHYFANTASIES CROSSOVER

🎙️ In this special Halloween crossover, Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow of MonsterTalk join forces with the crew from the Archaeological Fantasies Podcast — host and archaeologist Sarah, repeat MonsterTalk guest and archaeologist Kenny Fader, and archaeologist Jeb Card — to dig into one of folklore’s most misunderstood and persistently terrifying creatures: the fairy.

Forget Tinkerbell. Historically, fairies are dangerous, capricious entities that could dry up your livestock, ruin your harvest, and abduct your children — leaving behind something deeply wrong in their place. As Blake notes in his introduction, in an era before grocery stores, a fairy cursing your cattle wasn’t an inconvenience. It was a death sentence. This episode traces the fairy from its pre-Christian roots through Victorian domestication, its entanglement with early archaeology, and its surprising echoes in modern paranormal belief.

👽 Fairies as the Aliens of Their Day

Jeb Card opens with a reframe that anchors the whole conversation: before the children’s-book era, fairies occupied roughly the same cultural space that alien beings do today. They were powerful, hidden, morally ambiguous, associated with strange aerial phenomena and mysterious objects, and tied to sites that defied easy explanation. The parallel runs deep: just as ancient-astronaut theorists attribute megalithic construction to extraterrestrials, Victorian antiquarians attributed prehistoric stone tools and burial mounds to fairy races. The logic — “somebody made this, and it wasn’t us” — is structurally identical across centuries.

Karen adds the skeptical frame: across cultures, people reliably attribute agency to unexplained phenomena. Whether the hidden agents are called fairies, jinn, the alux of Yucatán, or the little people of Native North American tradition, the underlying cognitive pattern is consistent. Jeb notes that colleagues working at Maya house mounds in the 2000s still encountered active belief that certain mounds were inhabited by aluxo’ob — clay figurines that come alive at night — and should not be disturbed.

🪨 Elf-Shot, Fairy Stones, and the Archaeology of Wonder

One of the richest threads in the conversation is the way prehistoric stone tools became embedded in fairy and elf lore. Jeb describes a flint projectile point mounted in silver on display in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Room — preserved as elf-shot, the missile by which elves caused illness. Scottish witch-trial documents from the 17th century describe practitioners acquiring these ancient points, grinding them up, and using them as medicine, on the theory that only elf magic could counter elf magic (an echo of Tolkien’s Morgul blade, Jeb notes, which is not accidental).

Acheulean hand axes — far older still — were called “fairy stones” and “thunderstones.” Sarah points out that in some Southwest Native American traditions, the little people are credited with teaching stoneworking to humans, making the connection between fairy-like beings and lithic technology run in both directions. Ken connects the iron-repelling quality of traditional fairy lore to the plausible folk memory of iron-age peoples displacing stone-age ones — which is why a horseshoe hung above a door was considered protective: cold iron wards off the fair folk.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Victorian Fairy Mania, MacRitchie, and the Ancient-Race Hypothesis

The group traces how the Victorians — reeling from the shocks of Darwinian evolution, deep time, and industrialization — domesticated the fairy into a safe, pretty creature while simultaneously generating serious academic debate about whether fairy lore preserved memories of a real, vanished, pre-Iron Age pygmy race. Jeb cites David MacRitchie, the folklorist whose books — freely available on archive.org — systematically mapped fairy lore onto Neolithic tombs and stone tools. MacRitchie believed fairies were a racial memory, not supernatural, but his framework was thoroughly colonial in its assumptions, imagining dark-skinned pygmy servants (“brownies”) kept in castle basements by conquering newcomers.

That euhemeristic framework — the idea that myths encode real historical events — fed directly into early weird fiction. Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard all drew directly from MacRitchie’s work, giving us goblins under the earth, hidden savage races, and tunneling horrors — the furniture of modern fantasy and horror. W. B. Yeats, meanwhile, was mining Irish folk tradition to build a nationalist artistic mythology, codifying much of what we think of as “fairy lore” today. Carol Silver’s 📚 Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness 💵 (1999) is recommended for deeper reading on this phenomenon.

📸 The Cottingley Fairies and Arthur Conan Doyle

No fairy episode is complete without the Cottingley Fairies. The group discusses how Arthur Conan Doyle‘s endorsement of the photographs taken by Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright gave them a cultural weight they would never otherwise have achieved. Jeb and Karen point out the delicious irony: Doyle created in Sherlock Holmes a character who explicitly invokes something close to Occam’s razor and states flatly that paranormal explanations should be the last resort — “the world is wide enough for us; no ghosts need apply.” Jeb’s reading: a man burdened by public ridicule for his spiritualist beliefs found it cathartic to write a character who would tell him, to his face, that he was being irrational. The 1997 Paramount film 🎬 FairyTale: A True Story 💵, with Peter O’Toole as Doyle and Harvey Keitel as Harry Houdini, dramatizes this moment.

Doyle’s occult enthusiasms extended further: the group notes he believed a friend’s death was caused by a mummy’s curse, and that his story Lot No. 249 is among the earliest killer-mummy narratives in fiction. Meanwhile, E. A. Wallis Budge — described as smuggling mummies out of Egypt as “bone meal” — was simultaneously a rigorous museum keeper and a member of the Ghost Club, whose translation of the Book of the Dead became a touchstone of early 20th-century occult culture. The walls between academia and the occult underground were, as Jeb puts it, “very porous.”

🧒 Changelings, Autism, and Postpartum Depression

Blake brings the conversation to the darkest corner of fairy belief: the changeling. The core belief — that fairies abduct human children and leave behind a sickly, wrong-seeming replacement — carried lethal consequences. People historically abused, neglected, or killed children suspected of being changelings in order to compel the fairies to return the “real” child. Blake, as the parent of a child with autism, notes that Martin Luther‘s written description of encountering a changeling maps closely onto what we now recognize as autism spectrum presentation — a child who develops typically for a year or two and then changes significantly. The group also discusses the suggestion that changeling lore served as a cultural framework for postpartum depression — a mother’s failure to bond was explained not as illness but as instinctive recognition that the child was not truly hers.

The modern equivalents are not hard to spot: indigo children repurpose the changeling as a star child; alien abduction narratives repurpose “away with the fairies.” Jacques Vallée was among the first to make the fairy–UFO parallel explicit, though the group notes he drew the opposite conclusion from the one a skeptic would.

🏺 Fairy Artifacts: The Real, the Misidentified, and the Fabulous

Sarah runs through a few candidate “fairy artifacts”:

– The MacLeod Clan Fairy Flag, supposedly gifted by Queen Titania herself, is preserved at Dunvegan Castle. Sarah’s verdict: it looks like a dish rag someone decided was significant.

– The San Pedro Mountains Mummy, a tiny seated figure found in Wyoming that has since disappeared, generated enormous excitement — until X-rays, compared to Egyptian mummified cats, strongly suggested it was exactly that: a posed, mummified cat.

– The Broighter Gold hoard (found by a metal detectorist) includes a spectacular miniature gold boat — 7.25 inches long, complete with oars, rowlocks, a paddle rudder, and tiny grappling tools, all to scale. The mainstream interpretation is a Celtic votive offering to the sea god Manannán mac Lir. Sarah’s fairy-enthusiast counter: obviously a royal fairy Viking raiding vessel.

– Jeb’s personal favorite is the Luck of Edenhall, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum — a gorgeous 13th-century Syrian glass that the Musgrave family claimed to have stolen from the fairies. Its real provenance (almost certainly a Crusade-era import) is arguably more interesting than the legend. Lovecraft, Jeb notes, considered the Musgraves part of his own family lineage, and Conan Doyle wrote a Holmes story, The Musgrave Ritual, that involves the family’s hidden treasure — not far off thematically.

🌲 New England Stone Chambers and the Politics of the Past

Ken Fader describes a situation playing out in Connecticut and across New England: the ruins of 17th- and 18th-century Colonial farmsteads — stone foundations, root-cellar beehive structures, field-clearing walls — have been reclaimed by forest over 150 years of agricultural abandonment. Stripped of their known history, they get mystified. The New England Antiquities Research Association and the Barry Fell crowd proposed ancient European ceremonial alignments for farmers’ outbuildings. Now, Jeb adds, Mohegan and Pequot communities are reclaiming those same landscapes, asserting that the stone chambers were built by their ancestors or by the little people — a move that is simultaneously archaeologically complicated and politically understandable as an act of reasserting presence on a landscape from which they were displaced. Archaeologists, Ken notes, end up annoying everyone: the structures are almost certainly Colonial-era farming infrastructure, which is neither romantic nor politically convenient for any of the competing claimants.

📚 Further Reading



Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

The cast of archaeologists from the Archaeological Fantasies podcast join Blake and Karen to talk about fairies, how they’ve evolved culturally, and the ways that archaeology, folklore and the fair folk overlap.

Music

• Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys