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Was his intention to use Faerie for his own ends - make it safe & Christian, remove the 'dangerous' pagan elements & make Faerie a means to 'evangelise' his own people - that seems to have been his intention according to what we read in Garth's biography.
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It's hard to conjecture, so far after the fact. If the authors underlying intention was to create (among other ideas) a study of death and immortality, then altering the traditional view of faerie would be understood as appropriate. Undoubtedly the change from traditional fairie to a being who was a higher form of man, or man in his unfallen state was the authors choice in fitting elves into that underlying theme. But, was that an original thought, or an old idea brought to light in a later age?
But then that leads me to ask what the traditional view was, and
when was the archtypical view accepted as standard. If the premise being that myth derived from myth etc down through the ages, ultimately leading to that ever rare nugget of truth, then I would say it's entirely plausible that all the "folklorish" or traditional views of fairie was nothing more than a glimpse or a guess into something else further back into the past, remembered only via word of mouth.