It will come as no surprise that the most stimulating work on American fairies has focused on indigenous traditions. Hand Collection of American Popular Belief and Superstition (now on a million index cards at Utah State University), 2 has, on the evidence of Hand’s 1981 article (“European Fairy Lore” 146, n. It is certainly striking that Baughman’s Motif Index has literally scores of fairy stories from England, but only a handful from North America (xi and 203-233) and that the Wayland D. This idea is to be found in the works of major folklorists including Richard Dorson (14-15) and Wayland Hand (“European Fairy Lore” 141-148), while British historian Owen Davies made a similar point in his 2013 work on witchcraft in the United States (37-38). Longstanding consensus holds that European migrants to North America did not bring fairy beliefs 1 with them to the New World or that only a negligible number of beliefs made the journey.
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