A childhood belief about fairies

Without any prompting from stories or movies, I believed faeries, elves, and many other such creatures were real from a very young age... faeries were generally small and had wings, but elves were beautiful people, roughly human-sized with long pointy ears, usually had no wings, liked to sing to the stars at night, and sometimes gatheried into great shining elven armies and made war on bad creatures or people who really pissed them off. Maybe I was accidentally channelling JRR Tolkien or something. :D That was all before I read my big bro's Dungeons & Dragons set, too. Imagine my surprise some years later when I read Lord of the Rings...