[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

By 'Pre-Enlightenment,' I literally meant 'before the time-period that was called the Enlightenment, Age of Enlightenment, or Age of Reason.' I put a link in the OP so that people wouldn't need to ask that.

But you still have to ask it on another level, because you have to define what 'post-Enlightenment' people think/do/believe to understand what would be different before the Enlightenment.

Originally Posted by Inky

Possibly not quite as dark as that. In old-fashioned folklore, pre-Victorian, the fairies generally seem to play the role of a wild card. They're not necessarily bad, but they have the potential to be highly dangerous if they feel like it. What will happen depends very much on the circumstances and the fairy, and in a game you could reasonably have fairies as either (doubtful) allies or (possibly convinceable) enemies. (I'd be inclined to not stat their powers, in a game, at least not all of them. They're often cast in the role of "Does obviously OP thing to advance the plot and then disappears again".) The implication that they somehow exist to be nice, or at least educational, to humans doesn't exist in the pre-Victorian versions. They're independent, neutral beings with their own opinions and a wildly unpredictable amount of magic power, and some of them can do very good things for you or very bad things. And which it'll be is very unpredictable - in some stories, there's a reason for it, in others it's just for amusement, or because of some arcane fairy custom that the human didn't know about.

They're also often portrayed as heartless or as not really seeing humans as people - a spiteful fairy might well kill or permanently maim a human just for fun, as a mean little boy might do to a frog.

Generally, someone finding themselves in that kind of a story should stay well away from these people, unless desperate - the potential rewards are big, but they're too risky. (Good game adventure material.) If you have inside knowledge of their society and what they might want, or some kind of magic that gives you an edge (fairy ancestry of your own, say, or "second sight" that lets you see more about what's really going on), the odds are more generous, but there's still no guarantee that they won't turn you into a pickled onion.

There are theories that these stories are garbled survivals of stories about the Tuatha de Danann (the legendary race that supposedly lived in Ireland before its current inhabitants arrived), or the Celtic gods. They make more sense from that perspective. These are meant to be beings who were here before humans were, and they think the land still belongs to them, and there is a serious risk that the land may agree with them.

I've heard the tithe thing in Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, but those had it as a tithe of fairy souls, one in every seven years - but there was cheating. Again, the fairies are described as seeing humans as expendable if it came down to it. Tam Lin is kidnapped and trained as one of the fairy knights, with the intention of using him as the sacrifice when the time came. Thomas the Rhymer makes friends with the fairy queen and is taken to live at her court, but she eventually smuggles him away because the time for the sacrifice is coming up and "I fear, Thomas, it will be yourself".

Which, from a practical human POV, makes them a pretty good candidate for being 'bad'. Yeah, their own motives may be different and complicated, but what matters from our POV is how that impacts us, and that unpredictability and alienness, combined with power, means they need to be looked at as a threat.

Which is what most pre-Enlightenment people did look at them as. The highly abstract, 'look at it from all sides' mindset is itself an instance of Enlightenment thinking. It wouldn't be the first impulse of a farmer or sailor or city merchant in 1500 or earlier.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

The supernatural has never been seen as purely a horror-show. For fae-adjacent matters, there's Brownies. I can't locate even a guess at when they entered folklore but apparently the name dates to the early 15th century, not a Victorian invention by any stretch.

But they were most definitely affected by the same Victorian impulse that prettied up the other Fae-folk. The old stories make Brownies potentially a double-edged benefit. Yeah, they help you with your work. But there are all kinds of hidden trip-wires that can cause your 'friendly' Brownie to suddenly abandon you (if you're lucky) or turn dangerously hostile if you're not lucky. The trip wires don't necessarily make any kind of sense to a human, either, a very well-intentioned, even kind and sympathetic, gesture can drive a Brownie away or turn it into a boggart or worse.

Here again is a case where, once you strip away the Victorian/post-Enlightenment overlay, the stories of Brownies suddenly look a lot less reassuring. A good case can be made (even aside from issues that allowing the Fae in your home might imperil your soul) that purely practical considerations mean you're safer without a Brownie, and doing your own work.