Briggs is apparently one of the major figures of folklore as an academic discipline, with a PhD from Oxford, and later president of the Folklore Society. The Personnell of Fairyland is an odd little volume. Even if it doesn’t quite match modern standards, the organization and ‘facticity’ of the book make it clear that this is a serious and scholarly collection of British fairy-stories. However, the subtitle is “for those who tell Stories to children,” and every third story or so has a darling little woodcut illustration.

As expected, this is a book of fairy tales. Each individual story is brief, and I recall the longest being no more than seven pages or so. The stories are divided into four major sections, heroic fairies who have great and mythical powers, brownies or little fairies who work in great swarms, tutelary families connected to a particular family or house, nature fairies, and finally assorted giants, witches, and monsters. Additionally, there’s a dictionary of different types of fairies. Generally, the stories involve humans interacting with fairies, sometimes tricking them but usually being tricked by the Fair Folk. There’s some deaths and maimings, although less than you’d see in unbowdlerized Grimm’s fairy tales. The worst thing that English fairies do in these stories is abandon humanity. Some of the tales are in plain English, some in dialect, without much pattern or explanation as to why.

As an introduction and basic reference, this is a decent enough introduction to English fairies. However, it entirely lacks context, and unless you are a particularly gifted reader, I can’t see reading these stories to children.