Also called fairy offering, fairy circle, elf ring, pixie ring, offering to the fair folk
Fairy rings are natural circles of mushrooms that European folklore blamed on dancing fairies or witches, and stepping inside one was said to be dangerous. Across Britain and Ireland, households left milk, bread or butter for the fairies to keep on good terms with them.
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Take care: Never pick or eat mushrooms from a ring unless an expert has identified them; several poisonous species grow in rings and look like edible ones. Do not ingest foxglove or other garden plants tied to fairy lore.
German tradition called the circles Hexenringe and said witches danced there on Walpurgis Night, while Dutch lore said the Devil set his milk churn down on the spot. The French name ronds de sorcières also means witches' circles.
Welsh stories tell of people pulled into a fairy dance who lose years in what feels like a night. Rescuers were told to touch the victim with iron, or to throw wild marjoram and thyme into the circle to confuse the fairies.
Uses: iron, wild marjoram, thyme
A farm lad frees a tiny creature who works for him on condition that he is never thanked. When the lad thanks him, the creature turns spiteful and curses his life. The tale is a source for the modern rule of not saying thank you to fairies.
Fairy rings form when a fungus spreads outward underground, leaving circles of mushrooms, dead grass or extra-green grass. About sixty species grow in rings, the best known being the edible Scotch bonnet, Marasmius oreades. Before mycology explained them, people across Europe saw the rings as places where fairies, elves or witches danced. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream mentions fairies dancing ringlets, and Welsh accounts of the nineteenth century described fairies almost always met dancing in a circle.
The lore warned that stepping into a ring, especially on May Eve or Halloween, could trap a person in the fairy dance or shorten their life. Alongside these warnings went everyday courtesy: households across Ireland and Scotland put out milk, butter or bread, kept the hearth swept, and avoided building over fairy paths. Folklorist Katharine Briggs gathered much of this material in her Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976).
A pebble with a natural hole worn through it, hung by a cord over a bed, a door or a stable to keep away nightmares, witches and bad luck.
The old belief that 'seed' gathered from a fern at midnight on Midsummer Eve would make its carrier invisible. Ferns have no seeds, only spores, and the modern version treats invisibility as going unnoticed and unbothered.
The night of 30 April, when German folklore said witches gathered on the Brocken mountain, and people lit hilltop fires, rang bells and made noise to drive them and winter away. It is still kept with bonfires in Sweden, Finland, Germany and the Czech Republic.
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