Prompt Week 1/14/05
There are all manner of ways to spell fairy.
Fairy of course. Faerie. Faierie. Faiery. Fairye. Farie. Fary. Fayerie. Feyrie. Feyrye. And even a few more. It is from the Latin Fata. Fates.
In the wizarding world, the term fairy is often applied to a vain and quarrelsome creature often of limited intelligence, human shaped but tiny, with wings. That is a generalization to be sure. There are sub species. Variations. Quite numerous and varied. Nothing at all like those fascinating Muggle movies with their Tinkerbells, though she might be a bit of a pretty distraction there from the true creature that inhabits the earth.
There are a great many individual fairies around the world. The Bakura e dheut in Albania. The Narnywo in Australia, not to mention the Snugglepot and the Nittersing Down Under too. There's the Serbian Oosood and the Hungarian Dames, Dame Hirip, Dame Jeno, Dame Rampson and Dame...I went and forgot one.
The French Befind, Mallebron, Cannered Noz. The German Frua Holle.
Dame Venetur, that was it.
There are many fairies, and that isn't even counting them that are in the fairy stories, but there aren't nearly as many fairies as it seems there are in the English hills. Ainsel. Ariel. Asrai. Brother Mike. Cobweb. Elaby. Habetrot. Hop. Im. Licke. Lull. Malekin. Micol. Mop. Nanny-Button-Cap. Nit. Oberon. Ouphe. Puck. Skilly Widden. Tib. Tick. Tit. Wap. Win. Zip. Zat. Zim. Just to name a few.
You wouldn't want to run into near half of those, on a bright summer day, let alone a dark midwinter night, but with so many fairies supposedly haunting the English countryside, we were restless to find something besides the troublesome gnomes in the gardens.
In the stories, fairies were so much fun you see.
Or terribly frightening, which when you were small, was near enough the same thing, at least when you were small boys of the sort that grew up to become such things as curse breakers and dragon keepers.
Perhaps Mum should have realized then we were a bit off in the head?
There were just the two of us then, me and Charlie, with Percy just swelling in Mum's tummy. We thought she was getting fat. Charlie even told her so. She didn't take kindly to that. Something broke. We tried a spell to fix it. A variation of something I thought I had heard Da use. It turned her hair blue.
Her face went an interesting shade of plum.
It seemed a rather good time for an adventure, which was funny and grand, in the way that children's adventures always were. We got into fearsome amounts of trouble for it.
I remember that much.
But the rest?
It all seems to blur in quite a bit of laughter, and chasing Charlie, who was chasing his fairies, or so he claimed. They all seemed like snowflakes caught on the wind to me, but who am I to say?
He grew to be the Seeker on the House Team; I just sat with my books as Head Boy.
The Oj is a Danish fairy, described as appearing to shimmer as if made of ice.
Not that one has ever been known to cross the Channel.
Not that they knew, but what do they know?
Fairy of course. Faerie. Faierie. Faiery. Fairye. Farie. Fary. Fayerie. Feyrie. Feyrye. And even a few more. It is from the Latin Fata. Fates.
In the wizarding world, the term fairy is often applied to a vain and quarrelsome creature often of limited intelligence, human shaped but tiny, with wings. That is a generalization to be sure. There are sub species. Variations. Quite numerous and varied. Nothing at all like those fascinating Muggle movies with their Tinkerbells, though she might be a bit of a pretty distraction there from the true creature that inhabits the earth.
There are a great many individual fairies around the world. The Bakura e dheut in Albania. The Narnywo in Australia, not to mention the Snugglepot and the Nittersing Down Under too. There's the Serbian Oosood and the Hungarian Dames, Dame Hirip, Dame Jeno, Dame Rampson and Dame...I went and forgot one.
The French Befind, Mallebron, Cannered Noz. The German Frua Holle.
Dame Venetur, that was it.
There are many fairies, and that isn't even counting them that are in the fairy stories, but there aren't nearly as many fairies as it seems there are in the English hills. Ainsel. Ariel. Asrai. Brother Mike. Cobweb. Elaby. Habetrot. Hop. Im. Licke. Lull. Malekin. Micol. Mop. Nanny-Button-Cap. Nit. Oberon. Ouphe. Puck. Skilly Widden. Tib. Tick. Tit. Wap. Win. Zip. Zat. Zim. Just to name a few.
You wouldn't want to run into near half of those, on a bright summer day, let alone a dark midwinter night, but with so many fairies supposedly haunting the English countryside, we were restless to find something besides the troublesome gnomes in the gardens.
In the stories, fairies were so much fun you see.
Or terribly frightening, which when you were small, was near enough the same thing, at least when you were small boys of the sort that grew up to become such things as curse breakers and dragon keepers.
Perhaps Mum should have realized then we were a bit off in the head?
There were just the two of us then, me and Charlie, with Percy just swelling in Mum's tummy. We thought she was getting fat. Charlie even told her so. She didn't take kindly to that. Something broke. We tried a spell to fix it. A variation of something I thought I had heard Da use. It turned her hair blue.
Her face went an interesting shade of plum.
It seemed a rather good time for an adventure, which was funny and grand, in the way that children's adventures always were. We got into fearsome amounts of trouble for it.
I remember that much.
But the rest?
It all seems to blur in quite a bit of laughter, and chasing Charlie, who was chasing his fairies, or so he claimed. They all seemed like snowflakes caught on the wind to me, but who am I to say?
He grew to be the Seeker on the House Team; I just sat with my books as Head Boy.
The Oj is a Danish fairy, described as appearing to shimmer as if made of ice.
Not that one has ever been known to cross the Channel.
Not that they knew, but what do they know?