The Sidhe Courts

The idea of Seelie and Unseelie Courts, as well as many other details about them in this setting, is a bit syncretic. The terms come from the British Isles, where various local variations of those words were used to distinguish between kind and unkind faeries. (I use the spelling fae and faerie both because of etymology and the cultural associations around “fairy” not fitting well. Fey is a very different, archaic word I use as an adjective, not as a term for the fae; the etymology is unrelated.) But a lot of the details are things I had to fit together from a wide variety of source material, much of which contradicts itself. Odd responses to iron are common, as is a deep fixation on debts and oaths. The idea that they cannot tell a lie is something that shows up often in modern fiction; the source I use for it, though, is mostly the legend of Thomas the Rhymer. In a traditional Scottish ballad, he met “the Queen of Elfland” and returned with an uncanny gift of prophecy and an inability to tell any kind of lie. Because this is the first mention of a Faerie Queen as a concrete idea I can find, I assign that ballad a fair amount of weight when I work with these ideas. Elfland and Fairyland are common motifs throughout the British Isles in one form or another, all the way back to the Celtic Otherworld which features in stories about the Tuatha Dé Danann of myth.

So these stories do have common elements, but patching them together into a cohesive whole is difficult. It’s not clear how far back the idea of a Faerie Queen goes; it has parallels in the Celtic mythical sources, but details are sparse. It can at least be traced back to the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (c. 1200AD), but that’s as far back as I can find concrete mention of the idea. The Sidhe are generally thought to be the descendants and inheritors of the Tuatha Dé Danann, but also got mixed up with Christian elements in ways that can be hard to parse out. Much of the material is oral tradition, and there’s no definitive version of it. It’s spread across a number of cultures, which introduces extensive contrast in things like how a name is pronounced, or the qualities of what it describes; it is not always clear whether two stories should be considered to be about the same or different creatures. There’s a great deal of internal contradiction as a result.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I try to be respectful to the source material I draw upon and the cultural ideas I use in my writing. In this case, that had to be balanced against the need for a specific, concrete setting element. The Otherworld, or Elfland in the later material, became a part of the broader system of worlds referred to as the Otherside in this setting, which will be discussed in much greater depth later. I prefer the name Faerie for this domain because I find that Fairyland has all the wrong connotations. The Seelie and Unseelie Courts do exist. They are ruled by Faerie Queens, but the names and details of that will have to wait for later.

The use of Sunlit and Midnight for the two is my addition, but for a number of reasons it seems like a reasonable one. It’s not indicative of the fundamental nature of either, and it’s not indicative of good or evil. Those are very rarely useful models for understanding the fae. The Kindly and Unkindly split in the traditional material sort of works, but kindness is not the same as good any more than light is. The three might show up together often, sure, but a person can be very kind and still cause massive harm to people. Sometimes, particularly with the fae, this is both deliberate (i.e., the intended outcome of their choice, rather than an accident or misunderstanding) and sincere. Darkness and unkindness are associated with evil, but tough love is a thing, and some of the Unseelie aren’t particularly malicious. Some of them will direct cruelty at a specific group, in which case that group’s enemies would certainly say they were doing good things. As is often the case, and even more so with the fae, it’s all a matter of perspective.