The book’s epilogue summarises the book’s argument that Britain’s godlings have a long history, arising from a mingling and interplay of learned and popular traditions. The epilogue looks ahead to the development of fairy belief into its recognisable, modern form in the early modern period and pays particular attention to the survival or revival of Classical (and classicising) elements in the portrayal of small gods. The epilogue concludes with a reflection on why people yearn to believe in godlings of nature, arguing that it arises from a human desire to connect with a real or imagined realm of the ‘almost human’.

The book’s final chapter argues that the various elements of fairy belief as we might recognise it, including belief in an underground otherworld inhabited by sometimes pygmy-sized otherworlders, the connection between fairies and fate, and the sexual aspects of fairy activity, were brought together as a direct result of the Norman Conquest. The key role played in the Conquest by Breton nobles who felt a cultural affinity with the Cornish and Welsh, combined with the Normans’ desire to escape the English past, resulted in the crafting of a new ‘British’ identity for the whole island of Great Britain by authors with a Brittonic cultural background such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map. These authors united elements of English and Brittonic folklore to fashion a new fairy world that was subsequently adopted as the setting for literary romances and became the background to late medieval popular belief.

The introduction articulates the problem of the origins of Britain’s folkloric beings and traces the various ways in which scholars have tackled (or sidestepped) the problem, from John Aubrey to the present day. The introduction seeks to explain why scholars became wary of engaging with folkloric origins as a historical question, critiques previous approaches to the history of folkloric beings, and presents the book’s new approach in the context of current methodologies in the study of the history of popular religion. The introduction then outlines the structure of the book

Chapter 4 turns to literary descriptions of explicitly British landscapes, but to examine ideas of the “foreign at home.” I discuss here how the ballad-romances Sir Colling the Knycht, Eger and Grime, and Thomas of Erceldoune, characterized Anglo-Scottish Border landscapes via rugged topography and extreme weather, and emphasized their proximity to the otherworlds of Fairy and Hell. In particular, I argue that these texts anthropomorphize non-human environmental forces as fairy adversaries, and in the process conflate contemporary ecological, economic, and political anxieties. I also examine how these topics get developed in the early modern ballads that are based on some of these romances, explaining how song-texts persist in communicating some of these same ideas regarding Scottish and northern English landscapes to later audiences. This chapter, then, allows me to consider how the issues I raise throughout the book form an important influence upon postmedieval understandings of human relationships with local and global landscapes.