Why Do Fairies Have Wings?

While there are assorted accounts of the beginnings of faeries and the nature of them and their lands, there is small account in any surveys of where the modern construct of winged faeries have got come up from.

None of the books propose that faeries have wings like darning needles or butterflies. The wee-folk of Celtic Language mythology are generally thought to be the size of little children or dwarfs, rather than the size of insects as they are thought of today.They also be given to be suitably disproportionate, like chunky hobbits or shadows rather than the bantam but perfect grownup faeries in modern storybooks. It is likely that these modern word pictures of faeries sprang more than from the heads of individual world than any specific civilization or mythology.

For almost as long as people have got got been seeing fairies, people have been authorship about them. The states of the human race have got a broad assortment of myths and legends, but the "little people" harvest up in a great many of them. Into more modern times, we have got Spenser's "The Fairie Queen", and Shakespeare's "A Midsummers Night's Dream" in Elizabethan times, both of which did much to cement the modern construct of what a "fairy" is.

A broad assortment of civilizations believe in faeries similar to the Celtic Language version, and some civilizations see faeries as the animistic liquor of nature. None of these faeries bear much resemblance to the modern faeries and if they had wings, it is a item that is usually left out. Spencer's faeries were like the Celtic Language version, Shakespeare's were like a combination of tall elegant elves and the wee-folk, but it was not until the Victorian epoch that faeries were established as small winged beings.

Thomas Croker (1789-1854) in his aggregation of Irish Fairy Tales, described faeries as being "a few ins high, airy and almost crystalline in body; so delicate in their word form that a dew drop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles, indeed, but never breaks."

One of the first of these "delicate" faeries to impinge on popular consciousness was probably Tinkerbell in J.M. Barrie's Simon Peter Pan. Around that time, there was also a big amount of sentimental art, creating cutesy portraitures of faeries and cherubs. There was also a big dither made about the faery photos taken by two immature misses in England at Cottingsley. These photos sparked a world-wide debate that did much to "fix" the mental image of the small, winged, faery in the public mind, and if you inquire any grouping of people, there'll no doubt be person who retrieves seeing the images at some time. The Victorians had a soft topographic point for the "cute", and much of the modern construct of the small delicate, insect size faery came from them.

Disney also have got a portion to drama from the 1950s onward, pushing the sanitised Tinkerbell as a kind of happy go-lucky nature sprite, making faeries happy and unthreatening, reinforced even more than by having Julia Richard J. Roberts play her in the unrecorded action version.

From these mental images people have come up to see faeries as a happy, positive, image... a far shout from the baby-stealing wee common people of Celtic Language mythology from which they derived.