Willie the Duck
Hero
Yeah, tone is definitely a huge factor in all this. I briefly touched on that with the Dryad -- they can effectively 'kill off' your character, but it is barely treated as a real threat. Also something that medieval people (who believed in this) would be terrified of charmed and taken away forever, but in the game it is treated as a neutral creature's boycrush action.I think it was D&D making a big number of them good and emphasizing a prankster aspect for things like sprites as their big interaction niche. Take a leprechaun or nymph and turn them evil and predatory and it could be more fearsome than a hag. Leprechaun at will polymorph any object is huge in 1e, nymph blindness is very strong mechanically.
That's kind of what I was alluding to with mind-effecting abilities (and others associated with fey) somewhat poorly handled. I was recently re-listening to Overly Sarcastic Production's review of the god Pan, and was reminded that Mycenaean Greek Pan was terrifying -- he drove people mad (so much that his faithful might tear others to bits in their madness), or away in terror. That was scary to people. In D&D, not so much. At least not from things that look like cuddly woodland friends and are (as you point out) treated in-genre as vaguely-dangerous tricksters at worst. Also at least not when the same class of powers are held by things like madness-inducing gorilla-beetle hybrids listed as Chaotic Evil and noted for eating humans.
I had forgotten about Anglesey. Yes, that's pretty straightforward. Overall prevalence and what part of the tale was Roman propaganda vs. what we know was what I was thinking of, and this is a definitive instance.There is some interesting archaeological evidence for mass sacrificial burnings on Anglesey that backs up the Roman account of the battle.
My take on what the Roman historians wrote is the legions were terrified of druidic magic. The original "kill 'em before they can get their spells off".
To bring things back to the original topic, the Roman attitude to druids seems to resemble Conan's attitude to the spellcasters he comes across.
As to the Roman attitudes, absolutely. They clearly had a strong negative reaction to the Druids and related culture (perhaps because of the bloody resistance to empyreal conquest), and (some amongst them) appeared to really believe both the exoticization and barbarization interpretations.
I would love more tales where it is unclear if the special event was real, or just believed by the characters in-narrative.I really like Bernard Cornwell's take on druidic magic in his Warlord trilogy (his take on the Arthurian myths). Mostly psychological with enough ambiguity of circumstance to let the reader understand how the characters (or at least some of them) could believe.