 WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- When her home was part of a College Park tour three
years ago, Crece Vojtas sprinkled the dining table with fairy dust.
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- "My husband thought it would end up all over the
house," she says. "Sure enough, six months later we were still
finding fairy dust on the hardwood floors.
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- "But it looked so cool."
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- That's just it with fairies. They look so cool!
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- Delicately pretty but powerful (Don't you wish you had
their ability to change size?), fairies are princesses with wings, butterflies
with human bodies.
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- They're flying high these days and alighting on T-shirts
and in calendars, morphing into garden sculptures and greeting cards, and
shilling for Covergirl, as part of the brand's latest "pixie magic"
ad campaign. Sprites can be spotted at any New Age emporium.
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- Fairies are having a field day because the mortal world
is currently so murderous: "Human kind cannot bear very much reality,"
said T.S. Eliot.
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- Bookshops stock an increasing number of fantasy and science
fiction titles, which have traditionally taken up the biggest chunk of
store shelves, says Charles William Nelson, associate professor of language
and literature at Michigan Technological University. "But now fantasy
is outdoing science fiction in actual sales."
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- Movies in the Harry Potter and "Lord of the Rings"
series are pushing book sales, believes Nelson, who was one of the first
academics to devote an entire class to "Rings" author J.R.R.
Tolkien.
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- "The charge that is almost always leveled at fantasy
is that it's escapism, as if that's bad," Nelson says. "Tolkein
himself said, 'What's wrong with that?' If you want to look at reality,
you have to get away from reality."
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 Fantasy and
folklore have always provided a way of explaining real things we don't
understand. "Today people say, 'I saw a UFO,' if they saw a light
in the distance. In Victorian times they would say it was the Will o' the
Wisp or a jack o' lantern or some other type of fairy being," says
David Ellwand, author of the new book "Fairie-ality: The Fashion Collection."
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- One of the difficulties in researching fairy lore is
it's hard to understand what it's about, says J. Joseph Edgette, professor
of education at Widener University in Chester, Pa., and an expert on mythology
and folklore. "There are some people who believe you shouldn't even
discuss them because it's bad luck. In "Peter Pan," every time
you say you don't believe in fairies, one dies."
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- How did the fairy fixation begin? Over the centuries,
people have come up with all kinds of wacky ideas:
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- Fairies are unbaptized souls, destined to live in limbo
for eternity.
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- Or they are fallen angels, tossed out of heaven by God
but stopped in midflight on their way to hell.
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 Or they are
nature spirits.
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- Or they began as regular-sized human beings, but when
invaders entered Ireland, they retreated to the mounds and caves and shrunk
to sprite-size.
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- "It was believed that they had magic powers and
that if you saw them, you had to be quiet, because if they saw you, they
would put bad luck on you," Edgette says.
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- Does Vojtas of Lake Worth believe fairies are real?
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- "I don't know. What do you think?"
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- Staci Sturrock writes for the Palm Beach Post.
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- © 2003 Cox Newspapers, Inc.
- http://www.gjsentinel.com/news/content/coxnet/headlines/0303_fairies.html
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