A few hundred years ago, meeting a fairy in the woods was a life-or-death encounter, and people refused to even say the word aloud, calling them the good folk or the people of peace instead. This episode traces the fairy from the Latin fata, meaning fate, through wingless shapeshifters who rode ragwort stems and wore gray armor on the Orkney Islands, to three competing origin theories: demoted angels stranded between heaven and hell, the shrunken Celtic gods of the Tuatha De Danann, and a hidden prehistoric people driven underground by invaders with iron weapons.

We look at the daily defenses of inside-out clothes, St. John’s wort, stale bread, and houses built to avoid fairy paths, the dark legend of the fairy ointment, and the heartbreaking role of changeling and consumption lore as a coping mechanism for illness and infant mortality. Then comes the great shrinking, from Morgan le Fay to Shakespeare’s Puck to the Victorian fairy craze and Peter Pan, and Tolkien’s question about what we lost when we stopped living on the land.

• Why speaking a fairy’s true name was believed to summon it
• How elf-shot arrowheads may have been Neolithic artifacts turned up by the plow
• What a piece of bread in your pocket asserted against the wild
• Why the Industrial Revolution triggered a nostalgic fairy boom instead of killing belief
• J.M. Barrie’s idea that fairies are born from a baby’s first laugh