↟peikkotanssi↟

“In early modern Scotland the term “fairy” seems to have covered a wide range of spirits and supernatural beings who were condemned, or whose existence was disputed, by the church. And among the most controversial of these were “spirits of the dead”. Although the reformed church taught that the dead were not able to re-appear to the living after death, people often claimed that they had seen deceased friends and relatives among the fairies or, less commonly, that a deceased friend or relative was a fairy. Both fairies and spirits of the dead who consorted with them resembled saints in the sense that they were believed to possess supernatural powers and could be petitioned for a variety of benefits, but they differed from their holier counterparts in that they displayed more moral ambivalence and enjoyed a more ambiguous relationship with Christianity. This dissonance was further reflected in the fact that these categories of spirit did not live in heaven, but in fairyland or “elphame”, where they adopted a strange, similacrum of human life: feasting under fairy hills, hunting with horses and packs of hounds, and following the fairy king and queen on their nocturnal processions through houses and across the night skies.”