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way there, well, too bad for you We called them the Fair Folk and the Little People although their power was not little and their attitudes were often far from fair They were not worshipped so much as they were propitiated Bowls of milk and small cakes were left out, not in hopes of reward but as payment, so these spirits would turn their attentions elsewhere and leave those who believed in them in peace They were little gods, masters of domains that only extended as far as they could reach and for as long as they chose to pay attention These ancient fey were by turns both noble and mischievous, both superior and stealthy, both wise and capricious This dualism has remained with them through the ages Shakespeare presents us both with royal Oberon and Titania and with — viii — prankish Puck They had the wisdom of things unseen and the mercurial selfishness to get their way By the Victorian era, though, the fey diminished, both literarily and physically This was a time of rings of stones or mushrooms ascribed to the power of these people, and when portrayed (or even photographed), they were small and childish and winged and in no way a threat to the greater world So they threatened to diminish into nothingness They became cautionary figures in old folktales and creatures to entertain children Fairy tales lost their fearsome edge, and the word itself became a hallmark for the childlike and the imaginary The fey entered the nursery and threatened never to leave JRR Tolkien sheered the elves clean off from the rest of the fey, hewing more tightly to noble Oberon than to flighty Puck They were magical and mighty and benign, and their time had come and gone And they were disappearing themselves Tolkien, though he hewed the elves from the rest of their fey brethren, also split them into twain as well: there were the wood elves of The Hobbit and the high elves of The Lord of the Rings, which would have repercussions further down the line Fired by a growing interest in fantasy in the 60s and 70s, Dungeons & Dragons arrived with the central casting of its player character races right out of The Lord of the Rings Now, elf was different from dwarf, and neither was an ethereal spirit The dualism between high and low, between the noble elves and the more arboreal versions continued But the pucks, the fairies, the little people remained diminutive Griggs, sprigga ns, nixies, pixies, leprechauns, quicklings, dryads, and all manner of other regional folktales