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British Fairy Origins
{ 15.34 x 23.59 cms} Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2021 with the help of original edition published long back [1946]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume, if you wish to order a specific or all the volumes you may contact us. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - English, Pages 220. EXTRA 10 DAYS APART FROM THE NORMAL SHIPPING PERIOD WILL BE REQUIRED FOR LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} Complete British Fairy Origins 1946 Lewis Spence
- GenresNonfiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
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About the author
Lewis Spence
402 books52 followersJames Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence was a Scottish journalist, poet, author, folklorist and student of the occult.
After graduating from Edinburgh University he pursued a career in journalism. He was an editor at The Scotsman 1899-1906, editor of The Edinburgh Magazine for a year, 1904–05, then an editor at The British Weekly, 1906-09. In this time his interest was sparked in the myth and folklore of Mexico and Central America, resulting in his popularisation of the Mayan Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Mayas (1908). He compiled A Dictionary of Mythology (1910 and numerous additional volumes).
Spence was an ardent Scottish nationalist, He was the founder of the Scottish National Movement which later merged to form the National Party of Scotland and which in turn merged to form the Scottish National Party. He unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary seat for Midlothian and Peebles Northern at a by-election in 1929.
He also wrote poetry in English and Scots. His Collected Poems were published in 1953. He investigated Scottish folklore and wrote about Brythonic rites and traditions in Mysteries of Celtic Britain (1905). In this book, Spence theorized that the original Britons were descendants of a people that migrated from Northwest Africa and were probably related to the Berbers and the Basques.
Spence's researches into the mythology and culture of the New World, together with his examination of the cultures of western Europe and north-west Africa, led him almost inevitably to the question of Atlantis. During the 1920s he published a series of books which sought to rescue the topic from the occultists who had more or less brought it into disrepute. These works, amongst which were The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and History of Atlantis (1927), continued the line of research inaugurated by Ignatius Donnelly and looked at the lost island as a Bronze Age civilization, that formed a cultural link with the New World, which he invoked through examples he found of striking parallels between the early civilizations of the Old and New Worlds.
Spence's erudition and the width of his reading, his industry and imagination were all impressive; yet the conclusions he reached, avoiding peer-reviewed journals, have been almost universally rejected by mainstream scholarship. His popularisations met stiff criticism in professional journals, but his continued appeal among theory hobbyists is summed up by a reviewer of The Problem of Atlantis (1924) in The Geographical Journal: "Mr. Spence is an industrious writer, and, even if he fails to convince, has done service in marshalling the evidence and has produced an entertaining volume which is well worth reading." Nevertheless, he seems to have had some influence upon the ideas of controversial author Immanuel Velikovsky, and as his books have come into the public domain, they have been successfully reprinted and some have been scanned for the Internet.
Spence's 1940 book Occult Causes of the Present War seems to have been the first book in the field of Nazi occultism.
Over his long career, he published more than forty books, many of which remain in print to this day.
After graduating from Edinburgh University he pursued a career in journalism. He was an editor at The Scotsman 1899-1906, editor of The Edinburgh Magazine for a year, 1904–05, then an editor at The British Weekly, 1906-09. In this time his interest was sparked in the myth and folklore of Mexico and Central America, resulting in his popularisation of the Mayan Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Mayas (1908). He compiled A Dictionary of Mythology (1910 and numerous additional volumes).
Spence was an ardent Scottish nationalist, He was the founder of the Scottish National Movement which later merged to form the National Party of Scotland and which in turn merged to form the Scottish National Party. He unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary seat for Midlothian and Peebles Northern at a by-election in 1929.
He also wrote poetry in English and Scots. His Collected Poems were published in 1953. He investigated Scottish folklore and wrote about Brythonic rites and traditions in Mysteries of Celtic Britain (1905). In this book, Spence theorized that the original Britons were descendants of a people that migrated from Northwest Africa and were probably related to the Berbers and the Basques.
Spence's researches into the mythology and culture of the New World, together with his examination of the cultures of western Europe and north-west Africa, led him almost inevitably to the question of Atlantis. During the 1920s he published a series of books which sought to rescue the topic from the occultists who had more or less brought it into disrepute. These works, amongst which were The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and History of Atlantis (1927), continued the line of research inaugurated by Ignatius Donnelly and looked at the lost island as a Bronze Age civilization, that formed a cultural link with the New World, which he invoked through examples he found of striking parallels between the early civilizations of the Old and New Worlds.
Spence's erudition and the width of his reading, his industry and imagination were all impressive; yet the conclusions he reached, avoiding peer-reviewed journals, have been almost universally rejected by mainstream scholarship. His popularisations met stiff criticism in professional journals, but his continued appeal among theory hobbyists is summed up by a reviewer of The Problem of Atlantis (1924) in The Geographical Journal: "Mr. Spence is an industrious writer, and, even if he fails to convince, has done service in marshalling the evidence and has produced an entertaining volume which is well worth reading." Nevertheless, he seems to have had some influence upon the ideas of controversial author Immanuel Velikovsky, and as his books have come into the public domain, they have been successfully reprinted and some have been scanned for the Internet.
Spence's 1940 book Occult Causes of the Present War seems to have been the first book in the field of Nazi occultism.
Over his long career, he published more than forty books, many of which remain in print to this day.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 1, 2012
I bought this book decades ago and would dip into from time to time. Recently, looking for some "mental pallet-cleansers" to read before retuning to another round of horror fiction anthologies (and endless, endless, story submissions) - pulled it off the shelf and read it through as I'd recently been musing on the concept of "house elves" like Brownies and Lubberkins.
What a marvelous book. Spence was that rare thing - a popularizer who neither dumbed-down information for his audience nor compiled studies too dense and erudite for the common reader. He seems to have excelled at folklore study overviews (
,
) - books in which he compiled and condensed reams and reams of famous and journalistic studies on topics, sifting and sorting to compare and contrast - treasure troves of thinking (if that second noted title makes you imagine new-age foolishness, think again, most probably it's a compendium of various scholarly studies about the *stories* about Atlantis).
This book is subtitled - "The Genesis and Development of Fairy Legends in British Tradition" - and that pretty much sums it up. Spence looks at the various theories about how and why the singularly British concept of "the fairy folk" came about - the ways it is similar to and different from parallel tradition in other lands. Each chapter lays out the arguments as supported by the research of various experts (in this case, "research" means folklore studies and comparisons, mostly, as actual records of how these beliefs developed are scant to non-existent), then offers his own take. The book wraps up with a fascinating distillation of these ideas, with a very sharp argument from Spence that ties some concepts together.
Fairies are fascinating - neither the friendly sprites of traditional fairy tales, the noble lords of Tolkien and Shakespeare, nor - sorry to say to modern writers, the completely diabolical and evil creatures whose real nature was hidden from us by parents. In truth, fairy tradition has it that fairies are all these things and more, which is what makes them fascinating. In a sense, they are like the Gods of Olympus - slightly warped reflections of ourselves, our drives and emotional swings, our love of ritual and order, and our impulsiveness and vindictiveness, all wrapped up in enigmatic, magical beings.
Spence and his cadre of researchers from the previous centuries are quick to point out something that becomes almost immediately obvious once you look at it - fairies exist in so many shapes, forms and traditions, with such a wide variety of characters and natures passed on to us from folk tale and tradition - that they are almost certainly an amalgamation of multiple ideas that have accrued over centuries from various levels of primitive development, from varied tribes conquering and defeated. Thus, at first, we realize that the basic arguments made here are almost all "true" in a sense:
Fairies are elemental spirits - personifications of natural features and processes that allowed primitive man to interact with the great forces that moved around him daily. Thus water sprites and tree nymphs and mountain dwarfs and green men of crops and vegetation.
Fairies are primitive man's ancestors - dead but not forgotten, ensouled in nature (the great unknown outside the living places), always demanding tithes and honoring for having birthed the present peoples.
Fairies are totemic spirits of families and clans, often in animal form, conceived as progenitors with magic powers that were now alive in their descendents, half-human, half-nature. They are also spirits who oversee the correct application of hard won wisdom about crops, planting, childbirth, etc. - the rules literally personified in figures.
Fairies were the dead in general - something like ghosts, but not again (this difference becomes the focal point of Spence's final theory), visually resembling the elderly and ill (long bony fingers, wan, drawn faces with hollowed eye sockets) or the "mannikin soul" (the primitive conception of the soul as a tiny man inside of man proper - and, as Spence points out in a fascinating detail, primitives often conceived of "death" as a flip-side of life, a state of being in which time ran in reverse, thus dead souls became younger and smaller after death).
Some aspects of fairies were degradations of the gods of previous, conquered or distant peoples, kept alive in diminutive form (the origin of figures like "Morgan Le Fay" and names like "Titania" from classic mythologies is particularly fascinating).
Interestingly, a theory popular in the 18th/19th century (Walter Scott was a fan, as were horror/fantasy writers Arthur Machen and Robert E. Howard) that fairies were an ancestral memory of an actual, aboriginal predecessor races of small stature that lived in the British Isles before varied tribal incursions, is picked apart to almost nothing - not completely debunked but seriously left as doubtful.
At the start of the book, Spence articulates the "one from many"/"accrual" theory - pointing out that fairy lore encompasses so many beings and figures (rarely kept straight or ordered in a taxonomy - in a sense that "pixies did this but brownies did only that" - no matter what DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and modern writer types would have you believe) that, in a sense, "fairy" is almost a coverall for almost any kind of supernatural creature. But in his wrap up, Spence argues that by teasing out the links in the folklore, he believes an argument can be made for a solid core around which the other types of folklore and folk tradition accreted - a "fairy cult" belief, as he calls it, the roots of a religious "tradition" - and this tradition had to do specifically with the idea of fairy beings as the spirit of the dead, ancestors generally, waiting in nature to return to life in the bodies of newborn children, a primitive conception of the natural cycle as applied to man's own identity, a pagan reincarnation in which the un-embodied souls, both alive and dead in a sense, both old and young in a sense, temporarily returned to natural dwelling places (crops, springs, rocks, the sea) until a new child waited for them. From this you get fairies in animal and vegetal forms, from this you get the tradition of changelings, from this you get the strange appearances of fairies (wings were a later addition by Renaissance writers) as both child-like and withered beings, from this you get their trickster and "opposite" (to life) nature. From this you get a core, to which stick various other traditions (as just one example - the "regal fairies" tall and vaguely Aryan, are a reduction of the Celtic pantheon of gods, the Tuatha de Danan, reduced by time, circumstance and conquerings, until they become melded with the older tradition, some aspects of which they already share as crop and nature gods).
This is a fascinating book and I suggest all those interested in fairy lore to hunt it down! But turn your coat, first!
What a marvelous book. Spence was that rare thing - a popularizer who neither dumbed-down information for his audience nor compiled studies too dense and erudite for the common reader. He seems to have excelled at folklore study overviews (
,
) - books in which he compiled and condensed reams and reams of famous and journalistic studies on topics, sifting and sorting to compare and contrast - treasure troves of thinking (if that second noted title makes you imagine new-age foolishness, think again, most probably it's a compendium of various scholarly studies about the *stories* about Atlantis).This book is subtitled - "The Genesis and Development of Fairy Legends in British Tradition" - and that pretty much sums it up. Spence looks at the various theories about how and why the singularly British concept of "the fairy folk" came about - the ways it is similar to and different from parallel tradition in other lands. Each chapter lays out the arguments as supported by the research of various experts (in this case, "research" means folklore studies and comparisons, mostly, as actual records of how these beliefs developed are scant to non-existent), then offers his own take. The book wraps up with a fascinating distillation of these ideas, with a very sharp argument from Spence that ties some concepts together.
Fairies are fascinating - neither the friendly sprites of traditional fairy tales, the noble lords of Tolkien and Shakespeare, nor - sorry to say to modern writers, the completely diabolical and evil creatures whose real nature was hidden from us by parents. In truth, fairy tradition has it that fairies are all these things and more, which is what makes them fascinating. In a sense, they are like the Gods of Olympus - slightly warped reflections of ourselves, our drives and emotional swings, our love of ritual and order, and our impulsiveness and vindictiveness, all wrapped up in enigmatic, magical beings.
Spence and his cadre of researchers from the previous centuries are quick to point out something that becomes almost immediately obvious once you look at it - fairies exist in so many shapes, forms and traditions, with such a wide variety of characters and natures passed on to us from folk tale and tradition - that they are almost certainly an amalgamation of multiple ideas that have accrued over centuries from various levels of primitive development, from varied tribes conquering and defeated. Thus, at first, we realize that the basic arguments made here are almost all "true" in a sense:
Fairies are elemental spirits - personifications of natural features and processes that allowed primitive man to interact with the great forces that moved around him daily. Thus water sprites and tree nymphs and mountain dwarfs and green men of crops and vegetation.
Fairies are primitive man's ancestors - dead but not forgotten, ensouled in nature (the great unknown outside the living places), always demanding tithes and honoring for having birthed the present peoples.
Fairies are totemic spirits of families and clans, often in animal form, conceived as progenitors with magic powers that were now alive in their descendents, half-human, half-nature. They are also spirits who oversee the correct application of hard won wisdom about crops, planting, childbirth, etc. - the rules literally personified in figures.
Fairies were the dead in general - something like ghosts, but not again (this difference becomes the focal point of Spence's final theory), visually resembling the elderly and ill (long bony fingers, wan, drawn faces with hollowed eye sockets) or the "mannikin soul" (the primitive conception of the soul as a tiny man inside of man proper - and, as Spence points out in a fascinating detail, primitives often conceived of "death" as a flip-side of life, a state of being in which time ran in reverse, thus dead souls became younger and smaller after death).
Some aspects of fairies were degradations of the gods of previous, conquered or distant peoples, kept alive in diminutive form (the origin of figures like "Morgan Le Fay" and names like "Titania" from classic mythologies is particularly fascinating).
Interestingly, a theory popular in the 18th/19th century (Walter Scott was a fan, as were horror/fantasy writers Arthur Machen and Robert E. Howard) that fairies were an ancestral memory of an actual, aboriginal predecessor races of small stature that lived in the British Isles before varied tribal incursions, is picked apart to almost nothing - not completely debunked but seriously left as doubtful.
At the start of the book, Spence articulates the "one from many"/"accrual" theory - pointing out that fairy lore encompasses so many beings and figures (rarely kept straight or ordered in a taxonomy - in a sense that "pixies did this but brownies did only that" - no matter what DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and modern writer types would have you believe) that, in a sense, "fairy" is almost a coverall for almost any kind of supernatural creature. But in his wrap up, Spence argues that by teasing out the links in the folklore, he believes an argument can be made for a solid core around which the other types of folklore and folk tradition accreted - a "fairy cult" belief, as he calls it, the roots of a religious "tradition" - and this tradition had to do specifically with the idea of fairy beings as the spirit of the dead, ancestors generally, waiting in nature to return to life in the bodies of newborn children, a primitive conception of the natural cycle as applied to man's own identity, a pagan reincarnation in which the un-embodied souls, both alive and dead in a sense, both old and young in a sense, temporarily returned to natural dwelling places (crops, springs, rocks, the sea) until a new child waited for them. From this you get fairies in animal and vegetal forms, from this you get the tradition of changelings, from this you get the strange appearances of fairies (wings were a later addition by Renaissance writers) as both child-like and withered beings, from this you get their trickster and "opposite" (to life) nature. From this you get a core, to which stick various other traditions (as just one example - the "regal fairies" tall and vaguely Aryan, are a reduction of the Celtic pantheon of gods, the Tuatha de Danan, reduced by time, circumstance and conquerings, until they become melded with the older tradition, some aspects of which they already share as crop and nature gods).
This is a fascinating book and I suggest all those interested in fairy lore to hunt it down! But turn your coat, first!
Displaying 1 of 1 review