page_title: Fairy ring
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Fairy ring / Cultural references / Literature
caption_attribution_description: "Come, now a roundel." One of Arthur Rackham's illustrations to Shakespeare's en:A Midsummer Night's Dream.
context_page_description: A fairy ring, also known as fairy circle, elf circle, elf ring or pixie ring, is a naturally occurring ring or arc of mushrooms. They are found mainly in forested areas, but also appear in grasslands or rangelands. Fairy rings are detectable by sporocarps in rings or arcs, as well as by a necrotic zone, or a ring of dark green grass. Fungus mycelium is present in the ring or arc underneath. The rings may grow to over 10 metres in diameter, and they become stable over time as the fungus grows and seeks food underground. A fairy ring in France is over 700 years old.
  Fairy rings are the subject of much folklore and myth worldwide—particularly in Western Europe. They are often seen as hazardous or dangerous places, and linked with witches or the Devil in folklore. Conversely, they can sometimes be linked with good fortune.
context_section_description: Fairy rings have featured in the works of European authors, playwrights, and artists since the 13th century. In his Arthurian romance Meraugis de Portlesguez, Raoul de Houdenc describes a scene clearly derived from Celtic fairy-ring lore: The title character visits the Château des Caroles and sees a circle of women and a knight dancing around a pine in the castle courtyard. Meraugis is unable to fight the intense desire to join in, thus freeing the previous knight from the spell. Meraugis is helpless to leave the dance until, ten weeks later, another knight joins it and frees him. Fairy circles feature in works by several Elizabethan poets and playwrights. William Shakespeare alludes to them in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene I ("And I serve the fairy queen, / To dew her orbs upon the green" and "To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind"), and The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:
  ... you demi-puppets that
  
  By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
  
  Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
  
  Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
  
  To hear the solemn curfew ...
  Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Randolph speaks of fairy rings in his Amyntas, or the Impossible Dowry (1638), and Michael Drayton describes one in Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy:
  And in their courses make that round
  
  In meadows and in marshes found,
  
  Of them so called the Fairy Ground,
  
     Of which they have the keeping.
  Fairy imagery became especially popular in the Victorian era. Thomas Hardy uses a fairy ring as a symbol of lost love in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); the character Michael Henchard passes a fairy ring and remembers that he last saw his wife Susan there when he sold her to a sailor in a drunken rage. Victorian poets who have referred to fairy rings in their works include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliza Cook, Robert Stephen Hawker, Felicia Hemans, Gerald Massey, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.W. H. Cummings composed the cantata The Fairy Ring, and William Butler Yeats wrote of them in The Land of Heart's Desire (1894).
caption: "Come, now a roundel." One of Arthur Rackham's illustrations to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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