Warner’s technique can be described as ethnographic: a rich description of the local customs of Elfin and human worlds from the perspective of an observer who has access to people’s minds, but who tries to be dispassionate and, above all, neutral about what is being observed. In ‘The Revolt at Brocéliande’, for example, we witness the habits and rituals of a fairy court in Brittany where Queen Melior hits on a new fashion for the court that will emulate the supposed customs of the ancestral Fairy Courts in Persia: ‘no one had thought of eunuchs’ (66). What ensues is a thick description of this court, castrations included, and the life experiences, by no means merely horrific, of the two changelings chosen to become eunuchs. ‘The Late Sir Glamie’ explores the theological implications of that impossible thing, a fairy ghost (fairies have no souls and hence no afterlife), and the relative impact of short and long life-spans on human and fairy psychology and social custom. ‘Castor and Pollux’ features the fairy Hamlet, a ‘mental libertine’ (207) who adores all things human and their absurdities, among them the theatre. His eager but uncomprehending elfin wife becomes pregnant by a human actor, and dies inevitably in childbirth, twin humans proving fatal for the fairy birth canal. The twin boys pursue ecclesiastical careers and their father Hamlet founds a theological college for them in which they can indulge their (and his) fascination with theological questions strictly prohibited in fairyland: ‘Hamlet could not believe his luck. They were more innocent than the puppets, more wholeheartedly ludicrous than the players. Whatever the cost, he must keep them’ (221). ‘The Occupation’ shows us, in a series of dazzling reversals, the occupation of a parish church and Presbyterian rectory by a group of fairies, who embark on an Elfin ethnography of the parish priest and his life, driving him insane in the process (so much for the non-invasiveness of the ethnographic impulse).