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RE: Does Anyone Like Thorn Trees
@kate-m
Thank you for your information. Most of what you have written and posted is new to me.
And very likely others as well. The "faeries" as you call them, is quite a humor also.
I wonder about such things. And how it could get started to the point of being thought of as being true.
Doesn't matter. Superstition has always been and always will be. My thinking at least.
Francis
I could probably write a long essay about that (but I don't have time). A lot of people still believe in faeries in Ireland. I think there's a certain evolutionary advantage to certain folklores and superstitions. Secular Westerner's shouldn't be so quick to dismiss superstitions as irrelevant. For example this paper below is quite interesting, unfortunately I'm not sure it's readily available without an institutional subscription to get through pay walls. But in brief, it details how Irish myths of changelings may have quite effectively protected people against infection by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). But as you say, true, useful, or whatever, superstition is hard-wired to always be! And who knows, maybe it is true in some sense, the faeries are essentially beings that live in a parallel universe linked to our own via special portals. Start chatting to a quantum physicist and it might start to seem not quite so bonkers. (I personally prefer not to chat to quantum physicists as it tends to give me a head-ache!)
Monaghan, P. (2010). Calamity meat and cows of abundance: traditional ecological knowledge in Irish Folklore. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 19:44–61.