Box of Fairies

Box of Fairies was officially released at OVFF (Ohio Valley Filk Festival) 2003 .

So far, response has been pretty good.

Where can you buy Box of Fairies?

You can now buy the CD from

Read Harold Feld's Review of B ox of Fairies, posted to rec.music.filk not long after OVFF.

Read Judith Gennett's Review of Box of Fairies, which appeared in Green Man Review in December, 2002. The CD is 55 minutes long and change, and here is the final track list, in order:

Mixing was completed in early September, and mastering was finished a week or so after the final mix was approved. The cover art was finalized in early September, as well.

CDs were delivered directly to the hotel at OVFF, and filk vendors had them in their hot little hands just bare moments later. Trained sea lions could not have done a better job.

Many people have asked where the name comes from, so here's the story, reprinted without permission from its author. Unfortunately, Gwen was unable to get in touch with him to get his permission, so the story is paraphrased in the liner notes. A few years ago, Gwen visited Phoenix, Arizona, on a business trip, and I hooked up with some local harpers. One of them wrote this message:

I feel obliged to come out from under my bridge ... to explain where this "The Harp Troll" thing came from. First, however, I would like to say, "Right back at Ya!" to Gwen Knighton for all of the things she said about the Phoenix harp folks in her earlier post, because "wonderful, fun, interesting" and the like apply equally well to Gwen!

Ok. The explanation. I have only been playing the harp for a few months, and this was my first harp circle. People were doing storytelling with harp accompaniment, original compositions, complex Celtic pieces, and I was the person who played after Gwen.

Gwen wasn't actually playing the harp, by the way. She smuggled a box of faeries under her chair - very small ones, so they would be easy to transport and not get cross at being stuck in a box under a chair until the wee hours of the morning. When it was her turn to play, she would, under the pretense of getting comfortable, shift in her chair and nudge the box with her foot. This was the signal she and the faeries had arranged, so the faeries would dance in the box, creating a delicate, enchanting music, while Gwen pretended to play her little Witcher wire-strung.

I caught on to Gwen's scheme quite early because Gwen is not very good at pretending to play the harp. She would casually wave her fingers over her harp, looking quite calm while the faeries were weaving their ancient, intricate patterns. Anyone watching Gwen would just know there had to be a box of faeries under her chair.

Anyway, after Gwen's faeries would finish dancing, it would be my turn to play something, and the difference between Gwen's faeries and what I could play put me in mind of some fantasy talent show: First, Gwen's faeries (no longer confined to their box) would come on the stage and whirl and twirl and make marvelous music. When finished, as I put it to the others, "The faeries flit off of the stage, and here come the trolls with their clubs." The trolls would plod on to the stage, shift heavily, scratch themselves, and then lumber into some vaguely musical, cumbersome thing that I'm sure their mothers would have loved if they hadn't been eaten by the aforementioned trolls earlier that week.

Now admittedly, I'm not actually _that_ bad (for a beginner), but it was a funny comparison (we certainly thought so - it was getting late) and hey, wouldn't any beginner feel a little like one of those trolls if they were following after a box of faeries?

The Harp Troll. (Who plans to get his very own box of faeries - he just needs several years to collect them!)

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