☕️ Alice’s Mad Tea Party Presents:

From the Quill of the Mad Tea Mistress

The Seelie Courts and The Unseelie Courts

Ah, mortals, let’s spill some very real tea. You know all those labels - Seelie Court and Unseelie Court - that people throw around in Scottish fairy stories? The ones that make fairies sound like they belong to some neat royal hierarchy of good versus evil? Yes… that is mostly modern invention.

Long before J. C. Wells or Katharine Briggs put pen to paper, Scottish fairies were chaotic, unpredictable, and morally ambiguous. Some helped humans for fun or generosity, others tricked or punished, sometimes in the same hour. No one had bothered to neatly label them Seelie or Unseelie. That tidy division is a later convenience for collectors and writers.

Enter the Victorian and early twentieth-century folklorists. J. C. Wells was one of the first to attempt categorizing fairy behavior, distinguishing “fortunate” (Seelie) from “unfortunate” (Unseelie) fairies. Later, Katharine Briggs and others popularized these terms, mixing lore from different regions and adding interpretations that appealed to readers and scholars alike.

Here is the key truth: these divisions are not faithful to traditional Scottish oral tales. Original stories show fairies as utterly unpredictable. They might help, harm, or mischief humans for no reason at all. They do not care about court titles or human morality. They are, and always have been, chaos in beautiful, dangerous form.

So the next time someone whispers about the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court, remember: those labels are mostly twentieth-century inventions. The real Scottish fairies laugh at your labels, flit through the mist, and probably steal your boots just to see how you react.

Alice, Queen of Ink & Lore

Pip’s Editorial Note
Alice’s story aligns with Scottish oral tradition. Historical records indicate fairies were unpredictable, capricious, and morally ambiguous. The Seelie/Unseelie distinction was largely popularized by later folklorists, especially J. C. Wells and Katharine Briggs. This story preserves the chaos and mischief of original tales without simplifying them into tidy categories.