Faerie Lore....
The Wind Singer
On a remote isle alive with sea winds and sweet melody lived the sylph known as Ariel -spirit avatar of the air. He slept in the cowlip's bell, rode merrily on the back of a bat and looked down from the curled clouds on the revels of humans below. Withe his singing (for all his speech was song), he enchanted men and sometimes drove them mad. He knew how to bind and loose the winds, and how to conjure rain or roaring flame. But his spirit parttok too much of the air to flourish in the mortal's world, and the time came when he disappeared, passing wholly into the element from which he long ago had come.
England's Boisterous Mischief-maker
"I am that merry wanderer of the night," cried the elf Robin Goodfellow, sometimes called Puck by countryfolk. Indeed, he was the jester of Faerie, a cutup who lured travelers into swamps, pinched lazy housemaids and pulled stools from beneath inverterate gossips. It was said that humans danced to his seductive piping as trained bears to a circus drum, and that he took his pleasure in causing confusion among mortals, whose various follies he never tired of watching.
Haven for a Host of Spirits
When magic pervaded the woodlands of Europe, no tree was more revered than the mighty oak -the Monarch of the Forest, as a chronicler called it. In the rustling of its leaves could be heard the voice of a hamadryad, that tree's own spirit, whose face peered from the wrinkled bark as if through a murky glass. And other spirits -given different names in different countries -lived in the branches, leaves and roots of the oak.
Most easily visible of the arboreal band were the tree elves -gnarled little men and graceful women who might be spied dancing along the branches to the music of crickets and frogs in the shifting, speckled light of a summer's day. More difficult to detect were the Moss Maidens of Germany -beneficient fairies wise in the healing properties of plants - who camouflaged their old, furrowed faces and bodies in moss that they wore to dress the roots of the tree.
Within the root systems of German trees lived tiny Kobolds - malignant spirits given to plaguing homeowners unless wooed with bribes of food. In Italy, salvanelli occupied cavities in the oak, these playful imps dressed in worn red overalls or jerkins and were much addicted to stealing the milk of farmers and riding their horses to exhaustion.
In Sweden, the great horned owls that wheeled through the forest twilight and settled on the branches of the oak trees were said to be the dangerous, shape-shifting wood elves known as skogsra. And the British said that the wildflowers - cowslips, wild thyme, foxglove and bluebells - found at the foot of the oak each enfolded a pillywiggin, a dimunitive fairy that dwelled where only a bee can fly.
these small pieces of lore came from "The Enchanted World Fairies and Elves"-Time-Life Books
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