Volume 26, Number 3 · March 8, 1979
Braking for Elves
By Alison Lurie
The World Guide to Gnomes, Fairies, Elves, and Other Little People
by Thomas Keightley
Avenel Books, 560 pp., $3.98
A Field Guide to the Little People
by Nancy Arrowsmith, by George Moore
Pocket Books, 296 pp., $3.95
Gnomes
by Wil Huygen, with illustrations by Rien Poortvliet
Abrams, 212 pp., $17.50
Faeries
described and illustrated by Brian Froud, by Alan Lee, edited and designed by David Larkin
Abrams, 208 pp., $17.50
The Fairies in Tradition and Literature
by Katharine Briggs
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 261 pp., $6.50 (paper)
The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends
by Katharine Briggs
Pantheon, 218 pp., $8.95
An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatural Creatures
by Katharine Briggs
Pantheon, 481 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E.B. White
by Roger Sale
Harvard University Press, 280 pp., $11.00
Media surveys of contemporary fads and cults always leave one out—although it is widespread today here and in Europe, attracts many more followers than Synanon or Krishna Consciousness, and has been around longer than Sun Myung Moon. I refer, naturally, to the obsession with fairies, elves, gnomes, hobbits, and the like which is now so common and sells so many books, posters, calendars, and T-shirts. Like other cults it attracts mainly young people, often the most privileged and best educated among them: in a recent survey of 350 undergraduates at Brown University, for instance, nearly a hundred declared that they believed in hobbits, while only forty claimed to believe in angels.
Review, 3628 words
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