The harvest fairies from New Pictures in Old Frames by Gertrude M. Bradley, 1894.  This should also be of interest: How to Believe in Your Elf.

Here's one way to diagram a sentence about a fairy-like creature emerging from a portal.  From Community English by Mildred Flagg, 1921.

"The fishermen and the djinn," from Peaks and Pines: Another Norway Book by James Arthur Lees, 1899.

"Waking up the ancient Britons," from The Children's Fairy History of England by Forbes Edward Winslow and illustrated by E. Marillier, 1889.

The upside-down world, from Red Apple and Silver Bells by Hamish Hendry and illustrated by Alice B. Woodward, 1899.

This fairy on a bunny appears in a book entitled Yachts and Yachting, by Frederic Schiller Cozzens (1887), which proves that one really needs no excuse to work in bunny-riding fairies.  This should also be of interest: How to Believe in Your Elf.

"There was more than one way into the Otherworld." —Lisa Tuttle, The Mysteries

Pictured above, Prof. Oddfellow knocks on a fairy door.  Pictured below, Prof. Oddfellow reveals that even a fairy window floating in space may betray subtle sounds.

Though few people believe in elves outside of Iceland (where the majority entertains the possibility that the "hidden people" exist), elfish mischief afflicts every high-tech society that has traded the Otherworld of folklore for the virual world of computers.  We call a sudden malfunction a "glitch," an acronym for "gremlins loose in the computer housing" (Nigel P. Cook, Practical Digital Electronics, 2003.  Similarly, Safire's Political Dictionary defines a glitch as "the mischief of a computerized gremlin").  Gremlins are, of course, troublemaking sprites, namesakes of those pesky unexplained characters that appear in text documents.  One might be tempted to posit that the folk of fairyland believe in themselves, even if non-Icelanders daren't allow for the possibility (all evidence to the contrary).  Meanwhile, let us recall this nuggest of wisdom from How to Believe in Your Elf: "Know the enemy and know your elf."

Can one judge a book by its first page?  (Spoiler: we do.)  We bought Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant after reading John Pistelli's piece about it, and we'll probably try to get through it, but page one sure did leave us cold.  (That's not counting Ishiguro's blatantly misused semicolon in the second line.)  We're initially astonished over the banquet of praise the book has received.  In fairness, one can't help but to draw comparisons to John Cowper Powys' astonishing Porius, which similarly explores ancient Wales and its mythology (only Powys, under the spell of Merlin, writes sublime sentences from the get-go).  Almost more so, we're still staggering from the utter brilliance of The Attic Pretenders, which presents itself as an actual artifact of the Otherworld (and may be the only one of its kind: the phrase "artifact of the Otherworld" delivers zero Google results).  (And thanks to Writers No One Reads for putting us onto The Attic Pretenders.)  Compared to the visceral Otherworld that Attic Pretenders captures, the first page of The Buried Giant feels like a child's chalk drawing.  While we'd love for page two of The Buried Giant not to disappoint, we have entire color-coded bookshelves of vastly better-written prose.

On the edge of understanding
Below, above our reason's sway
Is a ghostly world extending
Into cool infinity.
Hosts invisible protect
The path beyond the intellect.
—Theodor Däubler, "The Sleep-Walker," quoted in Ernst Kreuder's The Attic Pretenders