between the rock and the cold, cold sea

There is a thing which gets my goat in fantasy, subtype urban.

Actually, there are several things. But for now, I'll confine myself to one. To whit: Seelie and Unseelie Sidhe, conventions thereof.

Perhaps you wonder why this annoys me? It's right there in the name: British and Irish folklore all scrambled up in one big Americanised basket.

Seelie and unseelie are archaic English forms related to the word silly [from O.E. gesælig "happy" (related to sæl "happiness"), from W.Gmc. *sæligas (cf. O.N. sæll "happy," Goth. sels "good, kindhearted," O.S. salig, M.Du. salich, O.H.G. salig, Ger. selig "blessed, happy, blissful")], in its older sense of "blessed", "innocent" or "pure".

Sídhe is the not-quite-modern Irish spelling of Old Irish síd, which means "mound." The daoine sídhe, the Irish "people of the mound," have been assimilated to the English early modern Fair Folk, Gentry -

Aside from the fact they're not the same thing, it irks me to see the M.E. (un)seelie jammed up beside the O.I. sídhe, as if there's no problem with equating English and Irish, as if there's no complicated history there.

There's no hard line separating early modern Irish folklore from English folkloric influence, of course. The tangled relationship between English and Irish cultures engendered by the Plantations, and complicated by the Penal Laws and the 19th century introduction of the National School system to Ireland (which, by mandating education through English only, contributed measurably to the decline of Irish as a spoken language and a written literature) would have seen to that even without the geographical closeness of our respective islands. Irish folklore has its own version of the Fair Folk, the daoine mhaithe, which in some locations and some stories are seen as related to the stories and locations of the daoine sídhe.

But the earliest literature dealing with the daoine sídhe - some of which is readily available in English translation in the Oxford Classics edition of Tales of the Elders of Ireland and the Penguin Classics Early Irish Myths and Sagas - sees the daoine sídhe as part of a warrior-heroic tradition. An occasionally weird - if no weirder than the Mabinogion - warrior-heroic tradition, one which reflects the values of pre-Christian Ireland and incorporates the invasion traditions (c.f. the Lebor Gabála Érenn) into the landscape of Iron Age Ireland. But nonetheless, a warrior-heroic tradition.

(I simplify, both because my understanding of Irish literature and folklore is shallow and of British folklore more so, and because I don't want to be writing this all night.)

There's no such thing as a Blessed or Unblessed Mound Person. There may be Seelie or Unseelie Fair Folk, I'll grant you that, but by all the saints and sinners, the warriors and women (and occasionally women warriors) from the síd?

I'm not complaining about people playing around with folklore and mythology. I am complaining about people playing around in folklore and mythology who paint with extremely broad "Celtic" strokes, and think that Ireland is like Northern Ireland is like Scotland is like Wales is like England, and that there's nothing problematic at all about not even seeing the fact the relationship between cultures out here on the northeast edge of Europe has a lot of fraught historical baggage.

I don't mind people screwing with my cultural heritage as long as they do so inventively and with a little respect.

My cultural heritage, please to fuck it more inventively up, kthnx?