Airy Nothings: Imagining the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason

Book excerpt: Ever since the Middle Ages the Otherworld of Faerie has been the object of serious intellectual scrutiny. What science in the end dismissed as airy nothings was given a local habitation and a name by art. This book presents some of the main chapters from the history and tradition of otherworldly spirits and fairies in the folklore and literature of the British Isles and Northern Europe. In eleven contributions different experts deal with some of the main problems posed by the scholarly and artistic confrontation with the Otherworld, which not only fuelled the imagination, but also led to the ultimate redundancy of learned perceptions of that Otherworld as it was finally obfuscated by the clarity of an enlightened age. Contributors include: Henk Dragstra, John Flood, Julian Goodare, Tette Hofstra, Robert Maslen, Richard North, Karin E. Olsen, David J. Parkinson, Rudolf Suntrup, Jan R. Veenstra, and Helen Wilcox.