Book Review: Fairies of Northern Appalachia

 Andrew Warburton has written several books which explore fairy beliefs and stories in the United States, a topic which has sadly been very underappreciated and often ignored both within academia and without. When I was writing my own book on fairy beliefs in north america I found that Appalachia was a particularly difficult area to research with many stories still kept in an oral form so I was very excited to find out that Warburton recently came out with a book focused on that area specifically.

The book is divided up into 7 chapters, each with a different focus: German fairies, Irish fairies, Underground fairies, Virginia's fairy stone park, Fairies by other names, Appalachian pygmies, and Modern fairy stories. The book also includes a glossary of northern Appalachian fairies which I found quite helpful as was the introduction which established the books purpose and approach to these stories. I felt that the way it was divided up was as logical as possible given how convoluted the subject is and appreciated that it looked at beliefs by grouping the subjects rather than sorting by geography; while breaking things down by region or area can often be a good way to go in this case it would have resulted in a lot of redundancy. By looking at beliefs based on the subject of those beliefs instead of specific source areas I think the work was easier to read and flowed better. 

I especially liked the chapter on fairies by other names as I think that gets to the heart of why people so quickly dismiss the US as having no fairylore - instead of looking for the word 'fairy' in sources Warburton wisely looks instead at the descriptions of beings known under different terms and finds a common thread with european fairy belief that. In this way we find the fairies of Appalachia not only in immigrant communities where we'd expect them but also more widely across the area under terms like 'the witchie folk', 'hobyahs;, and 'muryans', showing that even if the term didn't survive the beliefs in the beings themselves did. 

Overall I really liked this book and think it's a great addition both to fairylore more generally and to the corpus on US fairylore specifically. For those interested in the subject all of Warburton's books are worth reading.