Even as the number of unbelievers continues to rise, religion in America still gets unwarrantably good press. The tenets and teachings, however nonsensical, of each and every “community of faith” may not be attacked. Secular academics who would never be caught in a synagogue, church, or mosque seldom fail to manifest politically correct reverence for the creeds, codes, and cults of the religious. Unfortunately, the central religious concept of the “sacred” proves, upon closer inspection, to be fictitious. The understandably popular “holy” times, places, deities, peoples, books, laws, and scenarios for the afterlife are fantasies projected into everyday experience by human beings trapped in time and unwilling to accept their own transiency and long-term insignificance. This book surveys the various traditional “fortresses” of the sacred and finds them all empty and indefensible.

Ever since the Middle Ages the Otherworld of Faerie has been the object of serious intellectual scrutiny. What science in the end dismissed as airy nothings was given a local habitation and a name by art. This book presents some of the main chapters from the history and tradition of otherworldly spirits and fairies in the folklore and literature of the British Isles and Northern Europe. In eleven contributions different experts deal with some of the main problems posed by the scholarly and artistic confrontation with the Otherworld, which not only fuelled the imagination, but also led to the ultimate redundancy of learned perceptions of that Otherworld as it was finally obfuscated by the clarity of an enlightened age. Contributors include: Henk Dragstra, John Flood, Julian Goodare, Tette Hofstra, Robert Maslen, Richard North, Karin E. Olsen, David J. Parkinson, Rudolf Suntrup, Jan R. Veenstra, and Helen Wilcox.