Kipling, Rudyard
Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936),English author, used Puck to introduce the characters from the past in Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). Two children, Dan and Una, are acting scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream in a fairy ring on Midsummer's Eve, when they find they have conjured up ‘a small, brown, broad‐shouldered, pointy‐eared person’. He is the last of the Old Things who once were pagan gods and then became the People of the Hills; he is contemptuous of the word ‘fairy’—‘little buzz‐flies with butterfly wings and gauze petticoats’. In the succeeding stories he produces for the children people who have lived in their part of Sussex, and in ‘Dymchurch Flit’ tells them how the Reformation frightened the last fairies (‘Pharisees’) out of England.
Gillian Avery
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