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    Finding Faeries: Discovering Sprites, Pixies, Redcaps, and Other Fantastical Creatures in an Urban Environment
    Finding Faeries: Discovering Sprites, Pixies, Redcaps, and Other Fantastical Creatures in an Urban Environment
    Finding Faeries: Discovering Sprites, Pixies, Redcaps, and Other Fantastical Creatures in an Urban Environment
    Ebook206 pages1 hour

    Finding Faeries: Discovering Sprites, Pixies, Redcaps, and Other Fantastical Creatures in an Urban Environment

    By Alexandra Rowland

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    About this ebook

    Discover where faeries and other mythical creatures are hiding in our modern, urban environment with this beautifully illustrated guide to uncovering magical beings.

    Like every other being in our world, fantastical creatures have been forced to adapt to the climate, industrial, and cultural changes of the modern era. Countless formerly common creatures including akeki and cave trolls have been driven out by urban sprawl and climate change while others, like ether sprites and brownies, have been able to thrive in abundance, creating homes in city environments.

    Featuring descriptions of magical creatures from around the globe, this encyclopedic collection details the history and adaptability of more than fifty different species of fae. Within these pages, you’ll learn about:

    -The History of the Land of Faerie and who you might find there
    -Immigration’s Effect on legendary creatures, who often travel with us when we move
    -The Native Species of the Americas, including the Thunderbird and wendigo
    -The Impacts of Climate Change and Conservation, and how you can help preserve these mythical creatures
    -And Beginner Tips for Fae-Spotting, including safety tips for interacting with fae​

    Combining scholarship with modern lore and environmentalism, and featuring stunning hand-drawn illustrations, Finding Faeries is a captivating look at the fantastical beings that inhabit our world today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateOct 20, 2020
    ISBN9781982150273
    Author

    Alexandra Rowland

    Alexandra Rowland is the author of A Taste of Gold and Iron, Running Close to the Wind, A Conspiracy of Truths, A Choir of Lies, and Some by Virtue Fall, as well as a Hugo Award-nominated podcaster (all sternly supervised by their feline quality control manager). They hold a degree in world literature, mythology, and folklore from Truman State University.

    Read more from Alexandra Rowland

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      It is full of great information and ended way to quickly for me!

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    Book preview

    Finding Faeries - Alexandra Rowland

    Cover: Finding Faeries, by Alexandra Rowland

    Praise for

    FINDING

    FAERIES

    Like the liminal spaces inhabited by its denizens, this book brilliantly occupies its own in-between place, spanning the realms of anthropology, mythology, and natural history. I have nothing like its particular combination of imagination and research on my bookshelves to date. Buy it for the gorgeous illustrations and fascinating anecdotes, but prepare to chuckle your way through the wise and funny hints on road trips, fae-watching, and how to unsubscribe if a faerie gets your email address.

    —Premee Mohammed, author of Beneath of the Ring

    "There’s a certain space between the most rigid of folklore researches and the highest of the fantastical that is so barely populated that sightings are as rare as will-o’-the-wisps; the hidden vale of the fanciful bestiary. And it is here we gratefully discover Alexandra Rowland’s Finding Faeries. Beautifully illustrated by Miles Äijälä, Rowland presents a coherent vista of the half-seen from all around the world. Nor are they all quite what you might expect, from the mutant faeries of Chernobyl via ‘Spirits of Inebriation’ (including absinthe, of course) to an interpretation of Redcaps that is quite a divergence from the usual ‘murder gnomes.’ If you loved Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, you need this on your shelf."

    —Jonathan L. Howard, author of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

    This book resurrected my sense of wonder by providing a lively, luminous look at the possible denizens of Faerie, and it also turned that illumination unflinchingly onto the murkier aspects—such as climate change, and colonization—of our mundane world.

    —Freya Markse, fantasy author

    "Finding Faeries presents a delightful, thoughtful journey through a world far more wondrous than our own. Alexandra Rowland’s gently academic prose welcomes us into fantastical whimsy—their post-industrial creations nestle gleefully alongside more traditional cryptids. This haunting and liminal guide, rife with telling details, shows that our era of concrete and climate change can still be home to eldritch wonders—if you know where to look."

    —Jennifer Mace, speculative fiction author and cohost of the Be the Serpent podcast

    "Finding Faeries is a refreshing delight! The fantastic melds with the ordinary on every page, and joyful whimsy is underpinned by insight into those most complicated of creatures—humans themselves."

    —Rowenna Miller, author of Torn, Fray, and Rule

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    Finding Faeries by Alexandra Rowland, Tiller Press

    Introduction

    From 1901 to 1957, a crossroads demon occupied Ellis Island, the conjunction of thousands of roads for hundreds of thousands of tired, desperate people. The demon’s presence is significant for a number of reasons.

    First, of course, because this crossroads demon was one of the earliest documented supernatural beings in the urban American environment. Second, because it encapsulates the way fae and other beings of the liminal world have been forced to adapt to the modern era, just as coyotes, raccoons, pigeons, and other urban creatures have. With the advent of the truly metropolitan age at the beginning of the eighteenth century, important crossroads have proliferated in very condensed spaces, leading to smaller territories for their guardian spirits and an overall weakening of their strength and power.

    The changes in the rhythm and arrangement of human life have not been the only factor impacting the supernatural ecology—beings that were once extraordinarily rare have found niches in which to thrive in abundance, while formerly commonplace native species have been driven out by urban sprawl, technological advancements, climate change, and especially by their invasive counterparts. (This is not only a concerning issue for environmentally minded fae-spotters, but also a grim parallel of the historical patterns of human history.)

    This encyclopedia covers merely a brief survey of some of the ways the activity of human civilization has influenced these creatures. Rather than discussing the supernatural creatures of the untouched wilderness or rural areas (which have already been exhaustively documented by others), we will instead focus on these urban and suburban environments and the creatures that have adapted to them. With all creatures of the liminal world, especially those associated with the darker and more terrifying aspects of life (such as the redcaps of Europe, which thrive in places where great and monstrous violence has been done), it is worth asking ourselves these questions: Are they causing these horrors? Are they a side effect of them? Do they make us do harm, or are they created in the moment when we give in to those impulses of our own will?

    Or are the darker aspects of the fae merely a gruesome mirror of the darkest parts of ourselves, external evidence of the internal capability—which all of us carry—to be truly monstrous?

    In the modern day, a crossroads demon is far more likely to appear as a tired, tattered vagrant rather than the elegant-suited gentlemen of folktales. However, regardless of their relative power, the old rules for dealing with fae endure: Treat them kindly, speak to them with care and respect, promise them nothing you are not willing to give freely and wholeheartedly, and be careful what you wish for.

    On Faerie

    When the rigorous and academic study of the liminal world was first being established in the early 1700s, European scholars (most of them white, male, well-to-do, and of a literary persuasion) referred to their field as the study of Faerie, meaning the study of the land where faeries come from. The term liminal world did not emerge until the early 1900s, when newer generations of scholars, feeling their work to be less literary and more scientific, began to aspire toward receiving the same sort of respect and adulation from the general public as did their counterparts in physics, engineering, and chemistry. The liminal world was therefore adopted as the prevailing term because it sounded more scholarly and less whimsical: liminal, from the Latin root for threshold, refers to the in-betweenness of many supernatural creatures and beings. It is not quite of our world, and neither quite outside it: the threshold world; the world of twilight, neither day nor night; the world of the moment between sleeping and waking; the world of no particular color.

    More prosaically, and as a fortunate side effect, the change in terminology also opened up the field to contributions from cultures whose local supernatural ecologies were definitively not within the Northwestern European model, no matter how many similarities and parallels there are across the world. These contributions have enriched the field immeasurably and have proven priceless in deepening our understanding and knowledge of something that, by its very nature, may never be fully understood or known.

    The term faerie is complicated for another reason. Though the term for the field of study has changed, faerie or fae is often still used as a catchall sort of term for beings of the liminal world. With many species, it seems natural to categorize them under the umbrella of faerie. With others, it seems unsettling or outright wrong. Is a cave troll a faerie? What about a mer-creature?

    In a field of study that itself, by its very nature, exists in a liminal space and is supported primarily by amateurs and hobbyists, one must only expect these sorts of disputes over terminology to be commonplace. There is no established foundation of knowledge, no canonized system of nomenclature. Scholars have not even agreed on whether it is appropriate to continue using Latin when structuring a taxonomy of species, due to the possibility of reinforcing Western (and specifically European) bias on a vibrant, worldwide field that we have only just begun to study in any kind of meaningful, formalized way. And yet, at least when speaking English, we nevertheless say faeries, though we mean a thousand different things.

    In this book, when using the word faeries, I will generally use it to mean liminal creatures that are tied in some way

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