We Built Fairyland and Moved In

I wanted nothing more than to escape into a world more vital and alive than the dusty desert flyover town I lived in where high school football was the most riveting thing in town. I scoffed at those old folk stories because in every instance, the protagonist always decides to leave the Fae realm, desperate to return home. Who would want to come back to my crappy little town? I'd rather stay with my elven prince exploring and sword fighting, and enjoying lavish banquets, thank you very much.

At the summer solstice, the Veil between the worlds is at one of its thin points, the Fae wander the earth, and it is easier for us to slip into their world, often by seeking them at a crossroads. Most who encounter the Fair Folk are lost forever, unable to withstand the temptation of the riches, beauty, and delectable food they offer. With the state of our modern world and the alternating stress and banality of the life offered to us, it's easy to pine for the Fae's realm. But we should fear the sidhe:

"Because they will steal us from earth, and beautiful as fairyland is, there is a shadow upon it. However much one eats of fairy food, one is never full; however much one drinks of fairy mead, one is never drunk. Something - some foyson, some essential vitality - is missing in that perfect shadowless world. Our world of growth and death, death and growth, interlaced and intertwined, holds something that fairies need, something so compelling they resort to theft and kidnapping to taste it." - Patricia Moynahan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog

Had my angsty teen self taken the test and sat at the crossroads at Midsummer, I would have been easy prey for the sidhe. So tempted by Fae prince and his glittering hall, I'd have been sucked dry of my vitality and cast aside like all his prior lovers. It can be no other way, for as Moynahan so perfectly states:

"Without an ending, we do not really understand a story; without shadow, we cannot see the shape of things. Thus the Land of Youth is ultimately terrible in its unnatural beauty.

Here is what my younger self could not have known: I didn't need the Fae to come for me. I would grow up to live in their realm anyway, and so would nearly everyone I knew. We built it ourselves. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

Why is it that in every one of those old tales, the mortal in fairyland who gets everything they ever wanted eventually claws their way back home? The easy answer is hedonic adaptation, that inside the never-ending perfection of the Fae realm we quickly acclimate to its pleasures, the way we do with everything else we receive after our striving. That new car that was the apple of our eye a year ago, we barely notice now. Fairyland is often called the Land of Youth, not just because no one there ages physically, but also because, in a land without death, like children, no one need bear responsibility for their actions. There are no stakes. Nothing at all to strive for. But hedonic adaptation isn't the real answer.

While the pleasures of the Fae feel initially irresistible, the reason we tire of them runs deeper than mere adaptation. Neurologically, our senses are built to detect change, not steady states. You cannot enjoy warmth without first being cold, or sink into the satisfaction of a good meal without first being hungry. A world of endless, unchanging pleasure would dull into a sea of nothingness.

But the deepest answer lies not in our neurology but in our nature. Viktor Frankl, after surviving a Nazi concentration camp, observed that the prisoners who held onto some core sense of meaning and purpose were far more resilient against the despair of that place. They had something greater than themselves to live for. The central thesis of his Man's Search for Meaning is that humans do not primarily seek pleasure. We seek meaning.

And meaning requires stakes. Without the possibility of loss, nothing can matter. In the gleaming forests of the faerie world, where nothing is ever risked and nothing ever ends, nothing can mean anything at all. The sunset in our world is arresting precisely because one day we will not be here to see it. Death is what gives every choice its weight. With limited time, you must choose this and not that, and the choosing is what makes a life. Grant a person infinite time and every choice becomes weightless, endlessly deferrable, ultimately empty. This is the rot that sets in the longer a mortal lingers among the Fae.

Put more simply: 

 a world without death or consequence has no story. 

Those who dwell in the faerie realm exist in an eternal now that has the shape of a life but none of its vitality, none of the very essence, the foyson, they hunger for.

And so the longing that eventually takes root in those who wander into Fairyland is something stranger and more profound than homesickness. It is a self-sickness. The ache of a creature built for becoming, trapped in a place of endless being.

The summer solstice is a time of increased Fae activity because while our world basks in summer's peak glow, theirs is in the depths of winter, making them crave that bursting vitality our world is rich with. So they pass through the Veil to steal it any way they can.

The folklorist Lady Augusta Gregory collected several folk accounts of Fae joining humans at their Midsummer revels. At Cnoc Áine, it is said the fairy queen Áine appeared to a group of girls and had them peer into a ring where they saw the fae dancing in the otherworld.

Author Morgan Daimler shares this collected story:

"In another story a group of boys is going to a community celebration and runs into a strange boy who goes along with them; when they all arrive the boys see many strangers mixed in among their neighbours and it is later revealed to them that these are the Daoine Maithe (fairies) come to celebrate as well. The story is not entirely pleasant however, as several of the boys had been talking about how they didn't believe in fairies as they walked and to punish them for this they are drawn away from the celebration and ridden by the fairies across the country, waking up exhausted in the morning." - Morgan Daimler

Ancient communities developed rituals and practices in response to their increased presence: bonfires, and sitting at the crossroads. A function of bonfires was protection against the Fae, for livestock and crops as well as people. Those brave souls who ventured out to sit at the crossroads waiting for an encounter with the Fair Folk sought to test themselves.

In the Irish region of Lough Gur, the folklorist Evans-Wentz found that

made of straw and hay tied to poles. They would run through cultivated fields and among the cattle with these torches. The primary purpose of this ceremony was to exorcise the land of evil spirits and witches to ensure a bountiful harvest and a healthy increase in the flocks, similar to the widespread practice of driving cattle between two bonfires to ward off wandering Fae who might steal their vitality.

Indeed, Lady Gregory's research tells us that fire was not only used to compel the Fae to return a changeling child, but that in general the Folk can't bear fire. So as Midsummer draws near, a nice little campfire might just save you.

While Ireland has its share of harrowing tales of Fae encounters at the crossroads, the practice was particularly strong in Iceland. Just as Midsummer is a liminal time of year, the crossroads is a liminal place, and one where you are most likely to encounter Fae on the move. 

Not a fairy mound, not a threshold stone, not a well. A crossroads, specifically, because a crossroads is the place that belongs to no single road.

It is structurally neither here nor there, which is precisely why the hidden people pass through it on the nights when they move.

"It is supposed that among the hills there are certain cross-roads from the centre of which you can see four churches, one at the end of each road. If you sit at the crossing of these roads, elves come from every direction and cluster round you, and ask you, with all sorts of blandishments and fair promises, to go with them; but you must continue silent. Then they bring to you rarities and delicacies of every description, gold, silver, and precious stones, meats and wines, of which they beg you to accept; but you must neither move a limb nor accept a single thing they offer you. If you get so far as this without speaking, elf-women come to you in the likeness of your mother, your sister, or any other relation, and beg you to come with them, using every art and entreaty; but beware you neither move nor speak." - Icelandic Legends

The test of the crossroads is a practice where a lone person would sit from dusk until dawn, themselves between-times.

The madness that ensues is a natural consequence of having exited the web of exchange and obligation that gives us meaning and keeps us coherent.

Pass, and you reaffirm your identity as a human and your belonging to the human community. Perhaps the test reasserts your value to that community. At sunrise, those who passed were reputed to have retained the very gifts the Fair Folk used to tempt them. Some gained insight into the future, often by returning to the crossroads to divine coming events.

But why take this test at all? Why risk losing yourself to madness or slavery should you fail to resist? The real question the story is always asking is: what would you be tempted by? What would you reach for instinctively, before your better judgment caught up? That is where the madness lives. Not in the food itself but in the reaching, in the forgetting for one moment that you are a guest in a threshold that isn't yours, in a transaction whose terms you do not set.

For a clearer grasp of both the stakes and the true nature of the test, the Greeks offer a more familiar myth: Hercules at the Crossroads, recorded by the ancient historian Xenophon.

As he emerged from adolescence, Hercules set out from his home for the first time on his life's journey, hoping to decide what shape his life would take. Almost immediately he comes to a crossroads where two goddesses wait.

The first, Kakia, pulls him aside and gestures at the road running perpendicular to where he stands.

“Women will throw themselves at your feet. While others scrape by coaxing life from the land, all will come easily to you. It will be a long life filled with riches and pleasures to envy the gods."

The second goddess, Arete, moves immediately to interrupt Kakia's grand speech. "Choose this path, son of Zeus, and what awaits you is long toil and constant challenge. Monsters will rise, storms will rage, and your success against them is never guaranteed. You will weep, but you will also find joy, wisdom, honor, and perhaps even win your immortal legacy."

A key difference between myths like the deeds of Hercules and the folktales of everyday people like the story of the Fae at the Midsummer crossroads is the scale of the story. Myths tell us about cosmic events; folktales focus on individuals and communities. The crossroads narrative appears in both. Our willingness to take the test, the choices on offer, and the pivotal importance of choosing rightly, is of both cosmic and communal consequence.

As a society, we fail that choice every day in the modern world. We've fallen prey to the madness of the Fae touch. We live the empty lives of the immortal Fae in their glittering halls, except we have the worst of both worlds, because death still stalks us in the end, and yet we all too often die without ever having lived at all.

The scroll that hands us a momentary burst of dopamine, that brain chemical that makes us feel good anticipating a reward but leaves us craving ever more, never full. After all, you can't eat just one.

Just as our ancestors entered the Fae realm through a reflective surface, a lake or the long sail over water, we enter our ever-present fairyland through the soft reflective glow of our screens. Where the ancients approached the crossroads on a handful of nights a year, we place ourselves there every single day, and fail the test hundreds of times before lunch. We gorge on fairy food that dazzles but never nourishes, and like those sweet and salty processed foods engineered to defeat our appetite, it leaves us with the strange sickness of being overfed and starving at once.

All too many of our jobs, which consume an ever-growing share of our time, lack foyson, any vitality of meaning. Too few of them truly make our communities or our world a better place.

Our culture has so perfectly emulated the hollow beauty and decadence of the Fae realm, and we daily affirm our acceptance of the Fairy Queen's ephemeral gifts, with similar results. The modern world seems one of ease and abundance and constant entertainment, and like the Fae world it is sterile precisely because it is the easy path. We end up trapped in the beautiful void by our own appetites, as life passes us by.

Skyrocketing mental health problems tied to chatbot and social media overuse, epidemic loneliness, degraded landscapes, and the dark sense that modern life is devoid of meaning permeate our current moment of polycrisis. To live in the Fae realm, just like to live in the world we have built, is to drift through a soporific place devoid of connection, where we feel largely unnecessary, as though we have no place and are not really needed.

Back in the early days of the Iraq war, when the first waves of soldiers were coming home, I volunteered with a group of therapists counseling returning veterans who had been waitlisted by the VA. What I learned from them changed how I understood my own youth, and the old stories both.

I had some understanding of the mechanics of the trauma that can come from the horrors of war, but the struggle these men and women carried wasn't only about that.

Before I dismissed that as the usual anhedonia that so often comprises part of clinical depression, I let my curiosity investigate.

Overseas the bonds they had with their units were strong, forged in the intense situations they faced together, and every day they had a chance to prove their worth through their actions for the unit. War held its horrors, but it also brought them alive in a way being stateside could not. Upon return, society felt like a void. Some struggled to find work and contribute, and the social bonds outside combat seemed thin and superficial. Some simply signed up for another deployment to return to the community where they felt bonded and needed. They had mission. Community. They tested themselves daily. And they had meaning. Modern American life could only offer them shadows of that, and so their symptoms were less depression than grief.

Their stories held an eerie familiarity. I resonated to their alienation, but the way they described civilian life echoed the emptiness of the Fae world, the same yearning for messy, difficult, necessary belonging that our fairyland wanderers express in the old stories.

The journalist Sebastian Junger found the same thing when he studied how people come alive in war and disaster. He put the question more sharply than I could:

"How do you become an adult in a society that doesn't ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn't require courage?"

That is the question hiding inside the crossroads test. The Fae offer you a world that asks nothing of you. No sacrifice, no courage, no risk, no end. And that is precisely why it hollows you out. The test was never about resisting beauty. It was about knowing that a life worth living has to cost you something.

So perhaps this year at Midsummer, alongside the usual reveling in the peak of the light, we honor the other tradition. We seek the Fae at the crossroads and take the test my teen self would have failed so miserably. We sit out for a while and let them offer us their empty gifts. We let Kakia sing her siren song of Instacart and Netflix and the endless scroll, doom-flavored or otherwise, and we stay silent, and we do not reach.

And at dawn, we get up and walk the harder road. Start the mutual aid network. Run for the local office. Sign up for the marathon and actually train for it. Build the thing with your own hands that your community needs and does not yet have. Make yourself necessary. Not because it is easy, but because the reaching toward something difficult and real is the only thing that was ever going to fill us. It's the friction, not the easy path, that shapes us. And a life, to mean anything at all, has to be spent on something that can be lost.

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Further Reading:

Lady Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920). 

W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1911).

Moynahan, Patricia. The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit. New World Library, 2004.

Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. New York: Twelve, 2016.

Árnason, Jón. Icelandic Legends. Translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkur Magnússon. London: Richard Bentley, 1864.

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I write urban fantasy books that continue Celtic myth where the Fae are not your boyfriends, and they certainly don't grant wishes (without a horrific price). They're the alien, strange apex predators they were in the old stories.

Find out what they're doing on a suburban island near Portland Oregon in the free series prequel.