Fungi and Fairies: Five Fairy Mushroom Secrets

Fairy Ring Basics

Of course, fairies are associated with mushrooms, toadstools, and all kinds of fungi. But until some recent correspondence with fellow fairyist Anastasia Robinson, I had not appreciated how mycology — the study of fungi — can inform our understanding of fairylore, and particularly that most mysterious part of fairy life, fairy dancing. The basics are well known. For centuries, it was believed that fairies dancing at night could cause rings of mushrooms, ‘sour ringlets’ (i.e. dead grass), or lush circles of grass.

Thanks to Anastasia – who will soon, I understand, be bringing a book out on the subject – I have a better understanding of why fairy rings appear and how they prosper. This, I now realise, is not just abstract knowledge: it explains fairy-lore.

So when a daddy mushroom and a mummy mushroom… No, no, no. Reset, reset... A spore nestles in the ground and sends out mycelium — fungal threads — through the earth with a constant but growing radius. As the months and years pass, the mycelium, and therefore the circumference of this fungal colony, expands outwards. A twenty-foot circle would take a decade or two to develop. The ring can survive for hundreds of years. There are circles in Britain today that are older than anyone reading this post: there are a couple older than the Napoleonic wars. For most of the time, the circle will be invisible, but sometimes the circumference shows up as lush grass, sometimes as dead grass, and sometimes mushrooms spring up. These rings particularly favour large grassy areas and homogeneous soils, e.g. the Downs. They are less likely to be found in woodland.

Five Secrets

What does the science tell us about fairy-lore? There are five points I would like to bring out, each of which will have affected the way that those who believed (or sometimes believed) in fairies experienced fairy rings.

1. Speed. Fairy-ring mushrooms shocked because they appeared overnight, especially after rainfall. Fairies, of course, were believed to live — and especially to dance — in the dark, so this made perfect sense. But we shouldn’t underestimate the sense of surprise. I have a daily walk that takes me through Italian woodland and I have been struck by the sudden appearance of fungi where there had been nothing the day before. With my smattering of science, I can shrug this off. But imagine the jolt of walking past familiar ground and seeing a perfect geometric circle of mushrooms in a place where there had been nothing the evening before.

2. Repetition. Fairy rings were intermittent. The mushrooms might come up one year in September, stay for three or four days, and then wither away to nothing. The fairies had danced; life moved on. But six months, nine months, or a year later, the ring would reappear in the same place: and possibly in a different form (e.g. mushrooms replaced by a circle of dead grass). As a people of habit, the fairies came back to that corner of the field or to the squire’s bowling green. This too must have been impressive.

3. Invasion. Fairy circles were likely to appear close to human habitation. The fact that they established themselves on grass or pasture brought them out of the wilder regions and closer to communities. There would have been a sense that the fairies were straying from the wilds into ‘our’ territory. Encroaching, looking through windows at midnight... Imagine the unease created in a village when a perfect circle of mushrooms appeared on the rector’s lawn.

4. Growth. Fairy rings got bigger over time. If we suppose, as our ancestors did, that the fairies were dancing, holding hands in a circle, then this suggests that the fairy population was gradually getting larger. The change in size would not have been noticeable over two years, but over two decades it would have started to register. Not only, then, had the fairies slithered into the human world, but there were more and more of them... And, of course, as the fairy ring grew, it was likely to become more dramatic (surround a tree, say) or impossible (e.g. pass through a fence).

5. Invulnerable. No one could get rid of fairy rings. Even today, with modern fungicides, it is difficult for householders to remove fairy rings; if for some bizarre reason they would want to! But in the nineteenth century, it was an absolute non-starter. We have an interesting reference from the English Midlands in the mid 1800s to attempts to get rid of a fairy ring. Thomas Sternberg, who tells us about this attempt to extirpate the fairies, also tells us that the impudent men and women responsible were punished by the fairies. Many farmers will have been reluctant to meddle with fairy objects. However, their lack of success when they did try would have been another proof that this was something supernatural.

Thanks to Anastasia!!!

PS sorry for lack of footnotes but travelling. Hope to be back to normality soon.