Everyone knows–or ought to–that fairies can fly.  All the thoroughly modern tooth fairies illustrated in this summer’s post about “Rewriting the Tooth Fairy’s Job Description,” no matter what they were wearing, had wings.  These magical beings may not have acquired this essential power until relatively late in their history.

Unfortunately, fairies frequently disguise themselves when they need to test mortals.  In Perrault’s “La fee”–often known in English as “Diamonds and Toads”–the cruel stepmother sends her detested stepdaughter to the well to draw water for the family.  The kind girl stops to give a poor old woman (a fairy transformed beyond recognition) a drink before hurrying back home with the the full pitcher. The illustration does not blow the fairy’s cover then or at the end of the story, so the reader has no idea what she really looks like.  Maybe she has wings, maybe she doesn’t…

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My guess is that she probably didn’t.  Here is one of the earliest pictures I have ever seen of fairies in the wood cut frontispiece to a selection of original fairy tales by Mme. d’Aulnoy published by Ebenezer Tracy in 1716, just a few years after they were first translated into English.  (Cotsen 25203).   A group of tiny fairies are dancing in a ring before their king and queen, who are, rather incongruously, the size of human beings (the bird and insect in the upper left and right also were not drawn to the expected scale). The dancers are wearing brimmed hats with steeple crowns, the kind that Mother Goose and witches wear, but they have no wings.

The book was owned by a George Jones who wrote his name in the back of the book.  George tried to copy a portion of the frontispiece on its blank side.  He, or whoever the artist was, had some trouble drawing the fairies, but they don’t any wings.

Cotsen 25203.

William Blake, who claimed to have seen a fairy funeral, ought to be a reliable source. The Tate holds a charming  drawing ca. 1786 of the fairies dancing in a ring before their  king Oberon and his queen Titania, in which everyone is wingless. 

A little over ten years later, the French illustrator of  Perrault’s “Peau d’ane” in an edition of 1798.  The girl with the donkey’s skin thrown over the blue dress must be the heroine, so the fairy has to be the lady in the rose gown with the billowing yellow scarf descending in a cloud.  No wings necessary seems a reasonable explanation.

But in forty years, there has been a major change in the representation of the appearance and attributes of fairies.  The fairy Cri-Cri shown in the frontispiece of  Fairy Tales, Consisting of Seven Delightful Stories (London: T. Hughes, 1829;  Cotsen 33142) has gauzy pink wings and an accessory that is clearly some kind of wand.

It is impossible to mistake the fairy in the Walter Crane illustration below.  Her blue chiton harmonizes perfectly with her gorgeous (and very prominent) wings.

Lucy Crane, The Baby’s Bouquet: A Fresh Bunch of Old Rhymes and Tunes. Illustrated by Walter Crane. London: George Routledge & Sons 1878 (Cotsen 21153).

Why did the appearance of fairies change so dramatically?  I strongly suspect it was the  influence of the popular theater in London, but it will take an enterprising enterprising scholar to establish a more precise history of fairy wings…