"I put that down to soppy middle-class new-age & so-called 'alternative' agendas myself."
I put it down to the rather disturbing Victorian re-invention of fairy/folk tales and lore - a strange mix of 'dumbing-down' censorship and erotic fantasising.
Some modern scholars have made a fair stab at unravelling the mess left behind; Maureen Duffy's 'The Erotic World of Faery' springs to mind (in which she describes, fairly accurately IMO, much of Victorian artistic representation of fairies as "an excuse for refined pornography".
We are still left with the situation where collections of folktales are invariably filed in the 'childrens' section in libraries and bookshops.
Some of the best examples of storytelling have been those left in the vernacular in which they have been collected.
'To Shorten the Road' (George Gmelch and Ben Kroup; and 'Puck of the Droms' (Artelia Court) are two fine examples of Irish Traveller storytelling - the latter includes an excellent commentary on the social setting in which the tales functioned.
For a comprehensive over-view anthology of Irish storytelling by somebody familiar with both the genre and the culture that gave rise to it, 'Irish Folktales' (part of the Penguin Folklore Library series) edited by Henry Glassie is well worth a dip into.
The magazine of The School of Scottish Studies, 'Tocher', is a goldmine of straight-from-the-horses-mouth Scottish tales (now appearing sporadically, but still available as a full set of 59 last time we looked .
By far, the classic analysis of the subject remains 'The Folktale' by Stith Thomson, originally published in 1946, but still available when we got our copy, republished by University of California Press in 1977.
Jim Carroll