Dedicated to the study of fairy tales and fairies.              .

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Fairy Tale Stories      Children's Fairy Tales      Fairies       Faery Woodlands Magazine      Blog     About Norse-Franko-German Fairies The Synthesis of Cultures The Proto-Germanic peoples find their origins in Southern Scandinavia around 1200 BC in a land which most likely was previously occupied by the Finno-Ugric peoples. What we see then are two strong influences on the Germanic with many aspects of their culture being adopted from the Finno-Ugric peoples, while at the same time they are an Indo-European people (for more on the Indo-European beliefs see Origins of Europe’s Fairies). It would be difficult to over emphasize the importance of the shamanistic beleifs of the Finno-Ugric peoples to the later belief systems of the Germanic peoples. Their lead deity Odin is clearly a shamanistic figure of Ugric origin. From the spirits of the rocks which were of such importance to the people of Iceland that they outlawed things such as dragon heads on ships which might frighten or scare the rock spirits to the importance of the World Tree it is often difficult to separate the Proto-Germanic belief systems from that of the Finnish peoples. Yet at the same time they retained some of the oldest Indo-European tales, ones that were lost to the Greeks, the Romans and the Slavic peoples. We would not know for example that the Vedic myth about the world being made from the body of a dead pre-deity was Indo-European if the Germanic peoples did not share this story with the peoples of India. The story of the Germanic peoples fairy tales then is that of the syntheses between the Shamanistic Finno-Ugric peoples and the structured Indo-European peoples. It is also however the saga of a people as they made the transition from a pre-industrial society through the various stages of Industrialization. From having Odin be the lead deity, the decider of fate to the fairy figure which headed the wild hunt and then at last to becoming one of the figures which makes up the “ripe jolly old elf” we call Santa Claus. One sees in the most famous of all Germanic fairies, those taken down by the brothers Grimm the clear influence of the Industrial era and cities in which they collected their stories. There is in these stories an obvious wearing down of the fairy elements into something hardly recognizable as fairy. In the beginning of the Sleeping Beauty tales the King and Queen seek out a water fairy in order to be able to have a child, yet the significance of this is lost most readers of the story as is the significance of the spindle as the cause of death in the story (spindles and weaving were the tool by which fairies and wise women could control the fate of humanity. At one time women could gain greater power through spinning and weaving fate then a man could gain through battle in which their fate was controlled by spinning and weaving). This industrialization makes understanding Germanic fairy tales particularly troublesome because while the elements of the original fairy faith are all still there in many of these tales, they have been so diluted that one must search for them before they can even begin to piece together their meaning.