FAIRIES. Fay, the old word for "fairy," is thought to come from the Latin fata, which signifies the Fates, supernatural women who appear beside the cradle of a newborn infant to decide its future. The fairies invited to Sleeping Beauty's christening are an echo of this belief. During the Middle Ages fairy meant the state of enchantment and the land of enchanted beings as well as those who live in it.

Fairies are found under various names in many countries, but they are more typical of Europe and Asia than of the Americas and Africa. To some extent their social organization reflects the world of humans. In Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (1893) the poet William Butler Yeats distinguished between trooping fairies and solitary fairies. The trooping fairies appear in medieval Arthurian legend and romance and are most popular in the literature of Elizabethan England; since that time stories...