how to survive an encounter with the fae

If you’ve had any exposure to faeries past Tinkerbell, you probably know that they’re dangerous. (And let’s be honest, Tinkerbell was more than a little homicidal in the original Peter Pan.) The Fae are vengeful, manipulative, and easily offended.

They’re best avoided.

A good way to ward them off is to wear iron. It burns their skin, so they’ll leave you alone. They also don’t like crosses or salt. So if you’re in a church or a Long John Silver’s, you should be good.

But if you must interact with faeries, here are some tips to follow.

• Never eat food that they give you.

Eating their food will do two things. First, assuming that you’re in the land of the Fae, eating their food will force you to stay there. Second, eating their food will make you no longer hunger for human food. Which means that you will both starve and not want to eat chocolate. I’m not sure which one is worse.

• Never give them your name.

Names hold power. If a faerie asks for your name and you say it, you’re giving them power (and possibly complete control) over you. The best thing to do in this situation is to give the faerie a made-up name or your nickname.

However, if you know their name and say it, then they will leave you alone.

• Never stand in a fairy ring.

Fairy rings are the rings of mushrooms that sometimes grow where a tree has died, and they’re also portals to the Faerie realm. So standing in them is a rather stupid idea. Even if you’re not teleported, you could get stuck in the ring, and time moves much slower in there. Centuries could pass outside, while seconds pass inside.

And if you are transported to the Faerie realm, you could be treated as their guest, or you could become their prisoner. Once you eat the Fae’s food you’ll never be able to leave.

• Never be rude to a faerie.

Being unhospitable and selfish are frowned upon among the Fae. It is critical to meet their standards. Punishments for not doing so range from being pricked with sharp weapons for spying, to being given seven years of lameness for laziness, to drowning in a bog for being a bully. So. That seems bad.

• Never accept a gift from the Fae.

Or rather, be very careful with any gift you are given. If you don’t trust the faerie who gave you the gift, it’s best to destroy it. And never, ever say thank you for a gift. It implies that you owe them something, like a cheeseburger, or your firstborn.

Just like in this post, I got most of my information from Katharine Briggs’s An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. (And I got the rest of my info by Googling the same thing like twenty times, because I kept forgetting everything I read.)