The Good Neighbours

The Good Neighbours is one of the most significant and revealing names in the British and Irish tradition for the fairy folk, a name that communicates both the status of these beings and the delicate social contract that governed human-fairy relations. By calling them neighbors, communities acknowledged what the tradition consistently maintained: the fairy folk share the land with humans, they have their own rights and territories within that shared space, and the relationship between the two kinds of being is one of proximity that requires management, courtesy, and mutual acknowledgment.

The word “Good” in the name is simultaneously sincere and strategic. It is partly an expression of genuine respect for beings of considerable power and partly a practice of favorable framing: by consistently calling them Good, the human speaker hopes to encourage the quality they are naming, or at least to avoid the alternative.

History and origins

The tradition of euphemistic naming for supernatural beings is ancient and widespread. In many cultures, speaking the name of a powerful being directly was understood to call its attention, and calling the attention of powerful beings without cause or preparation was unwise. The alternative names provided a way to discuss these beings in the course of everyday life without the risk of direct invocation.

In the British Isles, the practice of euphemism for the fairy folk is documented from at least the medieval period and appears across every region where fairy belief was recorded. The Scottish records are particularly rich, with regional collectors documenting the specific terms used in different districts. In Ireland, “the Gentry” and “the Good People” appear consistently in nineteenth-century folklore collections as the terms that actual community members used in preference to direct naming. Walter Evans-Wentz, collecting material for his 1911 study The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, found living communities throughout Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, and Galicia in which the fairy folk were discussed with this careful indirection.

The euphemisms also reveal something about the social model underlying fairy belief. “Good Neighbours” and “Good People” position the fairy folk as members of the local community, albeit an invisible and powerful stratum of it. This framing implies corresponding obligations: as neighbors, they are entitled to neighborly behavior, to not being spoken of disrespectfully, to having their territory acknowledged, and to receiving the basic courtesies that a functional community extends to all its members. The human community’s safety in the presence of the fairy folk depended in part on maintaining this fiction of ordinary neighborly relations.

The folk belief that naming the fairy folk directly could cause harm appears in various specific forms. In some accounts, using the word “fairy” outdoors after dark was inadvisable. In others, the naming was acceptable in certain contexts but not others. The underlying principle was that speech is a form of contact and that uninvited contact with powerful beings is inherently risky. Euphemism created a communicative buffer.

What the names reveal

The cluster of euphemisms used for the fairy folk across the British Isles constitutes a kind of distributed theology of the fairy world. The different names emphasize different aspects of the beings’ nature and of human-fairy relations.

“The Fair Folk” and “the Gentry” acknowledge the traditional association of the fairy folk with beauty and aristocratic status: they are understood as superior beings, not in a moral sense but in a social and aesthetic one, and the names reflect the respect due to such beings.

“The Wee Folk” and “the Little People” are more familiar and diminutive, reflecting the tradition that many fairy beings are small, though this was always one attribute among many rather than a universal descriptor. These terms convey a slightly more domesticated relationship, suggesting beings whose smallness makes them less overtly threatening even while their power remains intact.

“The Hidden People” or “the Invisible Ones” acknowledge the most fundamental fact about the fairy folk in tradition: they share the land with humans but are not normally visible to human perception. They occupy a parallel presence, a different layer of the same territory.

“The Other Crowd” and “the Other Folk,” most common in Irish usage, establish the fundamental distinction that underlies all fairy discourse: there are humans, and there are the Others, and the boundary between these categories must be maintained with care.

In practice

Contemporary practitioners who engage with Faery tradition typically absorb the convention of careful naming as part of developing a respectful relationship with the fairy folk of their area. This does not necessarily mean that all modern practitioners refuse to use the word “fairy,” but it does mean treating the naming of these beings as something that carries weight and deserves intention.

The deeper practice the euphemism tradition teaches is attentiveness to how speech functions in the context of nonhuman relationships. What you say about the fairy folk, how you say it, where you say it, and in what spirit all register in the tradition as aspects of your relationship with them. Maintaining basic courtesy in speech is one of the simplest and most consistent pieces of advice across all traditions of fairy engagement.

Leaving a threshold acknowledgment when moving between indoor and outdoor space, speaking well of the local land when walking in natural areas, and refraining from denigrating or mocking the fairy folk in casual conversation are all contemporary applications of the principle the euphemism tradition encodes.

In myth and popular culture

The Good Neighbours and their associated euphemisms appear throughout British and Irish literary tradition as a marker of respectful engagement with an older worldview. W.B. Yeats, who collected fairy folklore extensively and incorporated it into his poetry and essays, consistently used the term “the Good People” alongside other respectful designations in his 1888 collection Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. His play The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) dramatizes the danger of fairy attraction, with the fairy child using the language of gifts and neighborly exchange to lure a mortal away.

In Scottish literary tradition, the name “the Good Neighbours” appears in works documenting and drawing on fairy belief from at least the seventeenth century. The Reverend Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle and author of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (written around 1691, first published 1815), described the fairy folk with careful circumspection, and local tradition held that his untimely death was connected to the beings he had written about too presumptuously. The story of Kirk’s fate was absorbed into Aberfoyle’s local legendary tradition and remains a touchstone for the danger of speaking too freely about these beings.

Contemporary novelist Susanna Clarke used the tradition of careful naming and respectful fairy engagement extensively in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004), in which the return of fairy magic to England brings with it all the ancient protocols of respectful address and the dangers of careless speech. Her fictional fairy king, the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair, embodies the older fairy nature: beautiful, powerful, capricious, and genuinely indifferent to human welfare in the way that a neighbor of enormous power might be indifferent to a weaker neighbor’s distress.

In Ireland, the tradition of calling the fairy folk “the Good People” or “the Other Crowd” remains alive in oral tradition in parts of Connacht and Munster, documented by folklorists through the twentieth century and still reported by contemporary researchers.

Myths and facts

Several misunderstandings about the Good Neighbours tradition and fairy belief more broadly circulate in both popular culture and some contemporary pagan communities.

• The euphemistic naming of the fairy folk is sometimes assumed to be simply a sign of superstition that modern practitioners have outgrown. The tradition encodes a sophisticated understanding of how speech functions as a form of relationship and contact with nonhuman presences; many contemporary practitioners find the practice as meaningful as ever.
• Many people assume that using the word “fairy” is always disrespectful or dangerous in a traditional folk-magic context. Regional and temporal variation was significant; the word “fairy” itself derives from medieval French and was used in some traditions without the specific risks associated with more direct local names. The concern was more about attitude and intention than any particular word.
• The Good Neighbours are sometimes equated straightforwardly with angels or with deceased human spirits in popular presentations that seek to make them familiar. In the folk tradition they are a distinct category of being, neither angelic nor ancestral in the human sense, with their own nature, courts, and concerns.
• It is sometimes claimed that leaving offerings for the Good Neighbours is a survival of pagan deity worship Christianized into fairy belief. The relationship between pre-Christian polytheism and fairy belief is complex and regionally variable; the offering tradition reflects a pragmatic management of a perceived powerful local presence as much as any religious devotion.
• Popular culture consistently depicts the fairy folk as small, winged, and benevolent in the manner of Tinker Bell. The Good Neighbours of British and Irish folk tradition include beings of varying size, none of whom are consistently described as having wings, and whose relationship to human welfare ranged from actively helpful to actively dangerous.