On Lost Children

Faeries are often associated with lost children. In some accounts, their role is that of the sinister abductor, snatching the child as it played next to a treeline bounding a pasture behind the house. That child experiences an unchanging lifetime in the stasis of Faerie, returning to the material world only to find a hundred or more years have passed. Other stories present faeries in a more fanciful light, as pranksters and tricksters, misplacing objects of sentimental value rather than children. Still other accounts, adorn faeries with human virtues, such as the story of the faerie that protected a lost child from a ravenous wolf by spiriting it away to the topmost boughs of a tree, which, when the child was eventually located by its cries for help, required a tall ladder to effect the rescue. Only some of these stories have an origin in fact. It is true that children make good servants in Faerie and that the distortion of time exaggerates their absence to the external world. It is also a valid point that sentiment endows objects with a powerful magic when brought to Faerie. It is, however, generally not true that faeries express themselves in virtuous ways toward children. Rather, faeries save what little store of virtue they possess to be expended on the elderly who have succumbed to senility and dementia for these old folks have known both worlds, Faerie and the other, and have the good grace not to mistake the faerie's aid for anything but what it is, a tender though meaningless measure of reprieve before the end.