What Is The Origin Of The Sithe In Modern Fantasy?

What fascinates me about the sithe is how they live in the overlap between place and personhood: the original 'sídhe' were literally mounds—geography that is also gateway—and that idea survives in nearly every modern portrayal. Over centuries the Irish and Scottish folklore about these mound-dwellers got retold and reshaped by antiquarians, poets, and novelists; by the time the term shows up in contemporary fantasy it often carries Victorian romantic gloss, Tolkien-influenced nobility, and the bite of older, dangerous fairy lore. That synthesis is why you see so many different sithe in books and games: sometimes they're tragic starborn nobles, sometimes they're capricious tricksters, sometimes both. I enjoy spotting which strand a creator chose to amplify, because it tells you whether they're leaning on ancient menace, courtly glamor, or modern playground politics—each version says something different about the world-building, and I almost always prefer the ones that remember the old rules about bargains and time.

I've always been fascinated by how old words mutate into whole new mythologies, and the story of the sithe is a perfect example. The word most modern writers draw from is the Irish and Scottish 'sídhe'—originally referring to the mounds or hills where the Otherworld was believed to dwell and, by extension, the beings who lived there, the Aos Sí. Early medieval texts and oral tradition treated these beings as dangerous, powerful neighbors rather than the sparkly forest sprites of later postcards. The medieval Welsh tales in 'The Mabinogion' and Irish cycles give us the bones: a people with their own laws, time that runs differently, and a tendency to take offense.

Fast-forward to the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Celtic Revival cleansed and romanticized a lot of those darker edges. Writers and folklorists like W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory reshaped sidhe imagery into something simultaneously noble and melancholy, which then fed into fantasy literature. By mid-20th century, the sidhe began to blend with continental notions of elves—Tolkien’s revision of the elf as ancient and elevated had a huge ripple effect, even when he wasn’t directly borrowing Celtic specifics. Tabletop gaming and role-playing picked the term up, conflating courts of the sidhe with elf-lore, glamour mechanics, and fey politics. That means what you read as 'sithe' in modern fantasy is often an amalgam: Gaelic mound-faerie roots + Victorian romanticization + Tolkienic nobility + gameable mechanics.

What I love about this lineage is how flexible it is. Some books and games lean into the eerie, time-warped menace; others polish sidhe into tragic aristocrats or ecological avatars. The modern sithe keeps one foot in folklore and another in whatever the current storyteller needs—mystery, menace, or melancholy—and that keeps them endlessly compelling to me.

While sketching fae into a game map the other day I kept circling back to the same origin story: the sithe come from the Irish 'sídhe'—hills or mounds that were doors to another world. In practical terms for designers and authors, that origin explains a lot of fey behavior: hidden gateways, strange laws of hospitality, and a sense that the fey are as much place as people. The Victorian and Celtic Revival takes—think Yeats and the retellings that filtered into popular culture—gave the sithe a more aristocratic, otherworldly sheen, which makes them easy to slot into courts and factions in game narratives.

Mechanically, modern fantasy often borrows from both folklore and later fantasy tropes: bargains, glamour, and time-dilation are staples because they come straight from old stories. Role-playing games and novels then mix in the Tolkien-elf aesthetic (graceful, ancient, tragic) or the modern urban-fantasy version (dangerous, seductive, and bureaucratic). If I'm building a campaign or an NPC, I usually decide whether I want the sidhe's older, capricious-edge or the polished, highborn image—each pulls different kinds of player reactions. Designing around that dual heritage is what makes them fun to write and to run, and I still find their contradictory nature endlessly inspiring.