For a de-centred ethnographic exploration of social structures and habits of action and feeling, fairies are an excellent vehicle. Fairies have a long history of being conceived of as alien to humans, mischievous, cruel, ‘an invention that almost wholly lacks moral engagement’, or, in Warner’s words, inventions grounded in ‘the calm negation on which all Elfindom reposes’ (199). While they mirror us, for example in their social stratifications, they are very different from humans, in their longevity, atheism, and general amorality. As John Simons has noted, in Kingdoms of Elfin Warner draws on a wide range of historical sources, and ‘appears to spend as much time on the loving reconstruction of the fine detail of fairy ritual and material culture as she does on the pursuit of the twists and turns of her narrative’. Warner found this work of ‘reconstruction’ exhilarating, commenting on a story having ‘a great deal of information about Elfhame unknown till now as I have just invented it. Oh, how I long to give it learned footnotes, and references. There is such heartless happiness in scholarship’. Kingdoms of Elfin is thus an exuberant ethnography of two communities that share human concerns (love, power, freedom, faith, social custom) while one of these also has a dimension of alien characteristics: inhuman longevity, extreme atheism, freedom from shame, and an indifference to human suffering.

One year it so happened that the beginning of March brought a spell of hot weather. As this was six weeks before the Spring Ceremony, when Brocéliande acknowledged the season by changing from furs and velvets into silks and gossamer lawn, the courtiers sweltered on in winter clothes and kept up their courage by boasting about their inheritance of the laws of the Medes and Persians. The heat continued, a note of merit sharpened the boasting, general conversation became listless. Aquilon, on a pretext of his obligations as Master of the Royal Pack of Werewolves, excused himself from attendance and went for a stroll in the forest. When he was safely out of view, he took off his furred mantle, hat, and gauntlet gloves, and blew his whistle. His valet came flying at the call, and was told to carry them and follow at a distance. Bareheaded and bare-handed, Aquilon walked on the edge of the forest and looked out on the brilliant gaunt landscape, where two peasants were breaking the clods and proclaiming in loud, uncouthly cheerful voices that a peck of March dust was worth a king’s ransom. As he stood watching them with a naturalist’s unimpassioned interest in some familiar variety of the lesser creation, he heard a rapid wingbeat, and Puck, the whipper-in of the Royal Pack, alighted beside him.