what are some "faery features" mentioned in folklore?
to be fair, I just made that term up because I like alliteration, but in Germanic folklore there are quite a lot of different traits people can have that either indicate their inherent 'faery/trollish/otherworldly' nature, or are ones that in the process of getting them they adopted or gained faery/troll/otherworldliness. they're often not stated outright and rather implied, as well as being highly variable, contextual, etc. it's a spectrum, and an impossibly complex one a that. I should note that contrary to popular belief, 'faery' is not just a class of beings in the same way that 'troll' isn't. both of those words were originally more like adjectives than nouns, they refer to states of being and lived experiences rather than hard categories or specific individuals. generally speaking these words, and many many like them in Celtic and Germanic folklore - are extremely complex ways to indicate some kind of 'otherness'. 'Otherness' was a sort of socially agreed upon unnamed but highly powerful feature of the world that one found in such things as death, the unknown, the grotesque and malefic, the incomprehensible, the unnavigable, the misunderstood, the arcane, the creepy and uncanny, et cetera. so 'faery' or 'troll' is not an easily grasped class of beings so much as an umbrella term for a whole range of groups and kinds of beings/things/creatures/states that primarily exist outside of our sensory and instrumental perception.
this means that something can be a faery when it's any kind of creature that lives in the otherworld (including, at times, just the ancestors!), but somebody can also be faery to any extent, from somebody who is a full-blown changeling to somebody who just has features that puts them in connection with this concept of faery. things can be faery, places and situations can be faery, and all of this can be to completely varying degrees. just wanna get that out there before people start being like "OMG DOES THIS MEAN I'M HALF FAIRY" because no please settle down
folkloric 'faery features' can be anything like:
amputated limbs or physical deformities
notable and unusual dental differences
blue eyes, red hair, pale skin, tight curls, heterochromia
bodily fluid related notable differences
anything that makes you half of something: half deaf, half blind, limping heavily, being one-legged or one-armed, etc, all gives you "one [x] in the grave/otherworld/etc"
dying and coming back to life
being extremely beautiful, but like, in a Spooky Way
mental disabilities and noticeable or severe mental illnesses
speaking coherently early in life or being extremely far ahead of your peers as a child
just being freaking weird as hell
being very good at divination, very wise, or accurate in predicting the future
these are not all completely neutral or free of a history of oppression but I tried to choose ones that weren't traditionally associated strictly with kinds of 'otherness' that were regarded as inherently bad (like witches and witchcraft). nevertheless at the time 'otherness' was very much something that people feared, to varying degrees, with all the effects thereof
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
snowghoul
blakekathryn
titsay
annaxmalina
