Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries characters

Appears from the start

A Cambridge dryadologist, which is to say a scholar of faeries, and the author of the first comprehensive encyclopaedia of the Folk, which she has spent years compiling. She is rigorous, formidably well read and almost entirely uninterested in the social conventions that would make fieldwork easier, which is why she arrives in a remote northern village in October 1909 with excellent research plans and almost no practical arrangements. The novel is written as her own field journal, so the account of events is hers throughout, complete with footnotes. She treats faerie lore as a body of evidence to be tested rather than as superstition, and she is far more comfortable with the Folk's rules than with her own neighbours'.

Appears from the start

Emily's dog, an enormous black hound who travels with her to Ljosland. Elderly in his habits and devoted to Emily, he spends most of his time apparently asleep in front of whatever fire is available, and is a good deal more capable than that suggests.

First appears in chapter 2

The farmer at Hrafnsvik responsible for the cottage Emily has been lent for the winter. Blunt, unwelcoming and disinclined to explain himself, he regards a visiting scholar as an imposition on the village and has prepared her accommodation accordingly.

First appears in chapter 3

A leading figure in Hrafnsvik, who takes on the management of the village's relationship with its visiting scholar. Practical, even-handed and patient, she smooths over the offence Emily gives without meaning to, and she is the person Emily can go to for an honest account of local tradition and of the accommodations the village has long made with the Folk.

First appears in chapter 4

A young man of Hrafnsvik, among the first of the villagers to be openly friendly to Emily rather than merely polite, and willing to answer her questions about what people there believe and what they do about it.

First appears in chapter 5

A young woman of Hrafnsvik, married to Margret. She is one of the villagers Emily comes to know while collecting accounts of the Folk, and her household, like every household in the village, lives under the long and uneasy arrangement Hrafnsvik has with them.

First appears in chapter 5

A young woman of Hrafnsvik, married to Lilja, and more reserved with the visiting scholar than her wife is. Like everyone in the village, she has grown up with the rules that govern living close to the Folk and takes them entirely seriously.

First appears in chapter 8

A small faerie of the common sort living near Emily's cottage. Emily, who knows the etiquette from her own research, leaves him offerings and is repaid in information and small practical assistances, and he becomes her most reliable local source on the Folk of Ljosland. He is one of the very few relationships in the village that she manages without difficulty, largely because the rules governing it are written down.

First appears in chapter 10

Emily's colleague and rival at Cambridge: elegant, indolent, extravagantly charming and the author of work she considers thin but enviably popular. He follows her to Ljosland uninvited, arrives comfortable and beautifully dressed in a place that is neither, and within days has won over the entire village that Emily has spent weeks failing with. Emily has long believed, on the strength of accumulated evidence rather than instinct, that he is not human at all but one of the Folk living in exile among mortals, and she keeps careful notes on the question.

First appears in chapter 24

The ruler of Ljosland's courtly Folk, the power behind the winter and behind everything Hrafnsvik has learned to fear and appease. The village's rules, its offerings and its careful avoidance of certain places all exist to limit how often his people take what they want from it.