29 September 2012 THE FAIRY RING, OR ELSIE AND FRANCES FOOL THE WORLD by Mary Losure, Candlewick, March 2012, 192p., ISBN: 978-0-7636-5670-6

“I know you won’t believe me

But I’m certain that I did see

A mouse playing daffodil”

-- Ray Thomas, “Nice to Be Here”

“How was she supposed to know that she had taken her photographs at a time when a number of very respectable, well-educated city people were starting to think that maybe fairies weren’t ‘magic’ at all?

“Maybe, these people thought, fairies were just something science didn’t understand yet but would soon.  After all, many things seemed like magic if you didn’t understand them.  Telegraphs that sent messages through wires!  X-rays that could see the bones inside your hand!

“To some, it seemed quite likely that a camera could take pictures of fairies.  After all, an X-ray could see pictures of things people couldn’t see.  Why couldn’t a camera?

“In discussions going on in faraway London, people suggested that maybe soon, scientists would be able to study fairies.  Soon, they reasoned, fairies, hobgoblins, brownies, and so on could be sorted into scientific groups such as order, genus, and species.

“And that – though Elsie had no way of knowing this – was why Mr. Gardner’s letter asked Elsie to take ‘actual photographs of some of the orders.’”

 “Anthroposophy, a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner, postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development.  More specifically, it aims to develop faculties of perceptive imagination, inspiration and intuition, through cultivating a form of thinking independent of sensory experience, and to present the results thus derived in a manner subject to rational verification.  In its investigations of the spiritual world, anthroposophy aims to attain the precision and clarity attained by the natural sciences in their investigations of the natural world.”

-- from the Wikipedia article, “Anthroposophy”

I have to say that fairies typically annoy the heck out of me.  Why?  Well, although I grew up with a live-and-let-live indifference toward such things, I spent some months in the late eighties hanging out with a woman who coincidentally was the niece of the late Sylvia Plath.  And it so happened that this woman’s son and daughter were attending the local Waldorf (Steiner) school.  As I spent some time with her kids and got to learn of the seeming obsession of Steiner education with fairies and other fantastical woodland beings, it eventually began to grate on me, and I developed an aversion to reading about these mythical creatures.

That’s why, when I received an advance reading copy of THE FAIRY RING last fall, I took one look at the cover – a photo of a girl and a fairy – and didn’t even get far enough to figure out that it was a piece of nonfiction.  I just took one look and knew it wasn’t something I wanted any part of – thanks in large part to Rudolf Steiner.

So it is pretty interesting to now read this true story about a hoax perpetrated by two cousins a century ago – in apparent reaction to parental teasing -- and learn from Wikipedia that Rudolf Steiner (just the sort of well-educated city people to whom this book might refer) established his first school in 1919, right when this hoax was spinning out of control.  Therefore, I reckon, thousands of past and current Steiner school students can, in part, thank these two cousins/perpetrators we meet in THE FAIRY RING for an assist in this facet of their education.

The author leaves it ambiguous as to whether the younger cousin Frances did, actually, see fairies in the first place.  I assume that this is consistent with the historical record and, thus, is the unsolved mystery here.

In addition to this book, therefore, being a surreal tale on several fronts, I see there being a mighty interesting information literacy lesson here.  I guess that the first obvious thing we take away from THE FAIRY RING is that photographs can lie and so we should take with a grain of salt all that we see on the covers of those scandal sheets that line the conveyor belt at the supermarket.  Given that one of those fooled by the two girls was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we should also recognize that so-called wise men can be as easily duped as anyone when they have their own underlying beliefs, hopes, and prejudices.  (It was a shocker when the author belatedly gives us the low-down on Doyle.)

And we are left wondering what Frances actually saw (or thought she saw) down at the beck (stream) in the first place that led to the adults teasing her and, then, to the cousins taking the original hoax photos.  And how they kept their secret so dang long.

I still can’t stand fairies, but this was a pretty cool read.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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