Everyone has heard of the infamous witch-hunt craze of Early Modern Europe, resulting in the executions of thousands of people, mainly women, based on groundless accusations. The figure in this image from 1629 of “Robin Goodfellow,” is of course the fairy-type known as Puck, made famous by Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Magical witches and the Puck-sprites were both human inventions, yet were both believed to have been real.
Puck — and other fairies — were not viewed the same across all cultures, however. In England and Lowland Scotland, fairies had the ambiguous image of being mischievous but sometimes helpful. But scholar Ronald Hutton has argued that in areas with a Celtic-based population, such sprites were considered to be much more sinister, causing harm to people (killing children or replacing them with changelings, etc). He thinks that this view actually prevented the witchcraft trials from becoming so brutal in these areas. The idea is that since Pucks/fairies were siphoning the blame for harmful events, the impulse to make a scapegoat out of disliked neighbors with accusations of witchcraft was diminished.
Source(s): Ronald Hutton, _The Witch: a history of fear from Ancient times to the present_ pp 246-248, Yale UP, 2017. Image wikipedia.
