Artemis Fowl Study Guide

Eoin Colfer was born in Wexford, Ireland, where his father was an elementary school teacher and his mother was a drama teacher. After graduating from Dublin University, Colfer himself became a teacher. He published his first children’s book, Benny and Omar, in 1998, but his best-known book is Artemis Fowl (2001), which went on to sell over 25 million copies. Colfer has written a total of eight Artemis Fowl books, along with several companion books and graphic novels, in addition to a spin-off series, The Fowl Twins. In addition to the Artemis Fowl series, Colfer has written science fiction and fantasy for adults, including the final installment in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series after the death of original author Douglas Adams, and he has also written dramas, screenplays, and musicals. Colfer continues to write and lives near Dublin, Ireland, with his family.

Many of the events in Artemis Fowl are inspired by real myths and beliefs that people have held about fairies, which appear widely throughout European folklore, including Ireland. While today, the word “fairy” is most often associated with small, winged magical creatures (like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan), in different parts of the world, the word has also referred to more nefarious creatures like goblins and gnomes, as it does in Artemis Fowl. The concept of “fairy gold” appears in several myths about fairies, in which fairies give a gift that seems to be valuable gold at first, only for that fit to later transform into something worthless. The novel also includes fairy bases located at places where pods from the underground reach the surface—these fictional bases are based on a real geographic feature in Ireland called “fairy mounds,” which people once believed were the homes of fairies. Another common belief about fairies is that they’re difficult to see because they can change shape at will—the shields that the fairies in Artemis Fowl use seem to provide a technological explanation for a myth, with the shimmering image of the near-invisibility shields making the fairies appear to shape-shift.

Artemis Fowl came out at a time when young adult fantasy novels were extremely popular. The first novel in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was published in 1997, and the first installment of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman was released in 1995. The fantasy series Twilight (Stephanie Meyer) and dystopian series The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) came out a few years later and were enormously successful. Unlike those novels, however, the tone of Artemis Fowl is often more flippant and satirical, perhaps inspired by the sci-fi comedy writing of Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a series that Colfer himself contributed to after Adams’s death). The character Artemis gets his name from the Greek goddess of the hunt, who appeared throughout ancient Greek literature, including the work of Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey). Colfer frequently cites the movie Die Hard as an inspiration for Artemis Fowl and pulls several elements from it, including the idea of a hostage standoff in an enclosed area, a villain (Artemis/Hans Gruber) who acts like a terrorist but has other motivations, the Christmas Eve setting, and the name Holly.