David MacRitchie

“ In regarding the Fians as a race of dwarfs, I do not overlook the fact that they are also spoken of as "giants." But to assume them to have been of gigantic stature is both totally at variance with the bulk of the evidence regarding them, and at variance with the fact that the word "giant" has very frequently been used to denote a savage, or a cave-dweller. [41] No more appropriate illustration [Pg 36] of this can be found than the local tradition that a certain artificially hollowed rock in the island of Hoy, Orkney, was the abode of "a giant and his wife." ”

“ But a man so stupid as to assume that a showman's marionettes were anything else than lifeless dolls, might continue for the rest of his life to recount his marvellous meeting with "the fairies." Similarly, to a tipsy man returning homeward from market, many common and every-day objects take on a weird and superhuman aspect, due to no other spirits than those he has consumed. ”

“ Highland giants were not so big but that their conquerors wore their clothes; they were not so strong that men could not beat them, even by wrestling. They were not quite savages; for though some lived in caves, others had houses and cattle and hoards of spoil" (I. xcix.) . "And though I do not myself believe that fairies are ... I believe there once was a small race of people in these islands, who are remembered as fairies, for the fairy belief is not confined to the Highlanders of Scotland" (I. c.) ”

“ If the modern Highland proprietor or large farmer should ever be induced to lead a pastoral life, and adopt a Pictish architecture in his residence, we might again see a tumulus of twenty feet in height, with its long low passage leading into a large hall with beehive cells on both sides. ”

“ The term "Picts' house" is unknown in the Hebrides, says [Pg 40] one writer. "In the Hebrides tradition is entirely silent concerning the Picts ... there the Fenian heroes are the builders of the duns." [49] Yet the self-same class of building is elsewhere assigned to the Picts. To these structures I shall presently refer more particularly; but it is enough to note in passing that, just as Oisin, King of the Fians, is translated into Ossian, King of the Picts, so the dwellings ascribed to the Fians in one locality, are in another said to have been made and inhabited by the Picts. ”

“ But the conception of such "little people" as tiny beings of aërial and ethereal nature, able to fly on a bat's back, or to sip honey from the flowers "where the bee sucks," [Pg 24] is regarded by the realists as simply the outcome of the imagination, working upon a basis of fact. An illustration of this position may be seen in the Far East. There is a tradition among the Aïnos of Northern Japan that they were preceded by a race of "little people," only a few inches in height, whose pit-dwellings they still point out. ”

“ The fairies lived in hollow hillocks and under the ground: what kind of dwellings are the Picts supposed to have occupied? The answer to this question still further strengthened Mr. Campbell's conjecture. There yet exist numerous underground structures and artificial mounds whose interior shows them to have been dwelling-places; and these are in some places known as "fairy halls" and in others as "Picts' houses." ”

“ Any one, therefore, who duly considers the matter, in relation to the statements of both of these writers, will see that the mound at New Grange is the Brugh-na-Boinne of Irish history and tradition. And this name, says Father O'Laverty, "signified 'the town, or dwelling-place, on the Boyne.'" What, then, are the earliest associations with this "town or dwelling-place?"
It is said [78] to have been built by a celebrated "king and oracle" of the people known as the Tuatha Dé, Dea, or De Danann, and to have been the residence of himself and others of his race. ”

“ Incidentally, therefore, in considering the Brugh of the Boyne and the people most associated with it, we find very distinct confirmation of the main part of the contention in the foregoing treatise. From these extracts it is evident that those early writers regarded siabhra, fear-sídh, bean-sídh, and daoine-sídh (words which may also be interpreted "mound-dweller") as ordinary folk-names for the Picts; just in the same way as any historian of the frontier wars in North America would understand by "Red-skin" and "Greaser" the more classic "Indian" and "Mexican." ”

“ This word "sídh," which was applied—probably in the first place—to hollow mounds such as this, but which was also applied to the dwellers in them, gave the Tuatha De Danann their most popular name. Because it was on account of their residence in "the green mounds, known by the name of Sídh," that they were called "the Fir Sídhe [i.e., men of the sídhs] , or Fairies, of Ireland." [82] The one word, indeed (sídh) , became indifferently applied to the dwellings and the dwellers. Whichever was the earliest meaning of that word, there is little dubiety as to the etymology of Siabhra. ”

“ At any rate, the size fully justifies the tradition prevalent here, as well as in the south of Scotland, that the Picts were a diminutive race." Of the Broch of Mousa he says: "The uppermost gallery is so narrow and low that it was with great difficulty I crept through it,"—a feat which baffled the present writer. [94] In all those cases, of course, it is understood one has to crawl. As with the Lapps and the Eskimos, creeping was much more a matter of course with the builders of those places than it is with us. ”

“ In the broader dialect it is "yird-house" or "eirde-house," which at once recalls the form "jord-hus" in the saga which tells of Leif's adventure underground in Ireland. The term weem is also applied to these places in Scotland. This is merely a quickened pronunciation of the Gaelic uam (or uamh) , a cave; and it reminds one that, both in Gaelic and in English, the word "cave" is by no means restricted to a natural cavity. Indeed, one of the two artificial structures under consideration is known as Uamh Sgalabhad, "the cave of Sgalabhad." ”

“ In the same collection of tales we are told [29] that one time when the Fians were hunting in the Isle of Skye, they left their wives in a dwelling which bore a title "applied to dwellings of the Elfin race." It is further stated that one popular belief in the Scottish Highlands is that the Fians are still lying in the hill of Tomnahurich, near Inverness, and that "others say they are lying in Glenorchy, Argyleshire." [30] Now, both the Inverness-shire mound and the mounds in Glenorchy are also popularly regarded as the abodes of Fairies. ”

“ The enchanted king's sons, when they come home to their dwellings, put off cochal [a Gaelic word signifying] , the husk, and become men; and when they go out they resume the cochal, and become animals of various kinds. May this not mean that they put on their armour? They marry a plurality of wives in many stories. In short, the enchanted warriors are, as I verily believe, nothing but real men, and their manners real manners, seen through a haze of centuries.... ”

“ One of King Arthur's own knights was a Fairy. [20] According to Highland tradition, every high-caste family of pure Gaelic descent had an attendant dwarf. These examples show the "little people" in a not unfriendly light. But many other stories speak of them as "malignant" foes, and as dreaded oppressors. Of which the rational explanation is that these various tales relate to various localities and epochs. [Pg 28]
The connection visible between Fians and Fairies, between Fians and Picts, and between Picts and Fairies, may now briefly be stated. ”

“ It is quite certain that such men could not "nest like sand-martins" in the holes in the wall described by Captain Thomas. And, in proportion as such Galloway men are to the modern Hebridean mound-dwellers, so are these to the much more archaic race with whom the oldest structures are associated. For a study of the dimensions of these will show that they could not have been conceived, and would not have been built or inhabited by any but a race of actual dwarfs; as tradition says they were. ”

“ This last, however (Plates XI. and XII.) , represents another variety of earth-house, the chambered mound or beehive, with an underground gallery leading to it. Of this kind two examples are here shown. And in Plates I. and XIII. will be seen specimens of wholly subterranean structures. It is difficult, and indeed hardly necessary, to distinguish between one variety and another of what is practically the same kind of building; but to this last class the term "earth-house" is most frequently accorded in Scotland. ”

“ The earliest known association of the first two classes occurs in an Irish manuscript of the eleventh or twelfth century, [21] wherein it is stated that when the ninth-century Danes overran and plundered Ireland, there was nothing "in concealment under ground in Erinn, or in the various secret places belonging to Fians or to Fairies" that they did not discover and appropriate. This statement receives strong confirmation from a Scandinavian record, the Landnáma-bok, which says [22] that, in or about the year 870, a well-known Norse chief named Leif
"went on warfare in the west. ”

“ He has no intention of denying, as some have vainly imagined, that there is an intervening mist. Nor, it seems necessary to explain, does he assume that wherever there is a mist there must be some tangible object behind it. For example, he does not believe that Boreas, or Zephyrus, or Jack Frost were ever anything but personifications of certain natural forces. ”

“ Now, this same "giant" is also remembered as a "dwarf," and the largest cell in his dwelling is only 5 feet 8 inches long. Similarly, [Pg 37] there is in Iceland a certain Tröllakyrkia (literally "the dwarfs' church") which is translated "the giants' church." [42] For these reasons, then, I do not regard any reference to the Fians as "giants" as indicating that they were of tall stature; although I see no objection to the assumption that they were savages and cave-dwellers.
Fians, then, are closely connected with the "little people" called "Fairies." ”

“ He suggests, for example, that certain "fairy herds" in Sutherlandshire were probably reindeer, that the "fairies" who milked those reindeer were probably of the same race as Lapps, and that not unlikely they were the people historically known as Picts. The fact that Picts once occupied northern Scotland formed no obstacle to his theory. ”

“ Cririe suggests that the germ of the Fairy myth is the existence of dispossessed aboriginals dwelling in subterranean houses, in some places called Picts' houses, covered with artificial mounds. The lights seen near the mounds are lights actually carried by the mound-dwellers. ”

“ In the story of Hok Lee the dwarfs are represented as living in subterranean dwellings, and in the picture they are portrayed as half-naked, with (for the most part) shaggy beards and eyebrows, and bald heads. It is wonderfully near the truth. The baldness is one of the most striking characteristics of those actual dwarfs, and is caused by a certain skin-disease, induced by their dirty habits, from which a great number of them suffer, or did suffer. The shaggy beards and eyebrows are equally characteristic of the race ”

“ He had the necessary [Pg vi] knowledge of Gaelic, the hereditary connection with the district which made him at home with the poorest peasant, and the sympathetic nature which proved a master-key in opening the storehouse of inherited belief. It is not likely that another Campbell of Islay will arise, and, indeed, in these days of decaying tradition, he would be born too late.
In reading his book, then, for the first time, what impressed me more than anything else in his pages were statements such as the following:—
"The ancient Gauls wore helmets which represented beasts. ”

“ This mediæval scholar has copied a poem on the subject, "ascribed to Dorban, a poet of West Connaught," wherein it is said that it is not in the power of poets or of sages to reckon the number of heroes under the Cruachan mounds, and that there is not a hillock (cnoc) in that cemetery "which is not the grave of a king or royal prince, or of a woman, or warlike poet." ”

“ And whereas Strabo is, says M. Monceaux, the only writer of antiquity who questions the existence of the dwarfs, all the others are on the side of Aristotle, who says—"This is no fable; there really exists in that region (the sources of the Nile) , as people relate, a race of little men, who have small horses and who live in holes." And these little men were of course the ancestors of Schweinfurth's and Stanley's dwarfs. ”

“ Externally merely a swelling green mound, like so many others in Sylt, entrance is gained by a trap-door in the roof, and decending a steep ladder, one finds himself in a subterranean chamber, some seventeen by ten feet in size, the walls of which are twelve huge blocks of Swedish granite; [Pg 72] the height of the roof varies from five feet to six feet. ”

“ But the pottery and the skeletons associated with these habitations show that not only were their occupants of a stature to be measured by feet rather than by inches, but also that, by reason of a certain anatomical peculiarity common to both, the traditional dwarfs were very clearly the ancestors of the Aïnos—a race which, though now blended, was once most distinctly a race of dwarfs, if one is to believe the earliest Japanese pictures of them. ”

“ Those people appear to have been known to the Chinese for at least twelve centuries, and to the Japanese for a much longer period. Thus, it was quite unnecessary for any novelist in China or Japan to invent such people, since they already existed. ”

“ After getting through such passages it happens that, in several instances, the roof is higher than is required for the tallest living man. [Pg 76] An admirable example of such a place is the underground "Picts' House" at Pitcur, in Forfarshire, which would be quite a palace to people of a small race, and very likely figures as such in some popular tale; its dimensions and appearance considerably magnified with every century. [95] But even this "fairy palace" was entered by narrow, downward-sloping passages, similar to that seen in the Frontispiece, down and up which the dwellers had to crawl. ”

“ And about thirty years ago, when digging into the hillock to make the foundations of a new house, they discovered what seemed to be the fairies' residence, built of stones inside, and holes in the wall, or croops, as they call them, as in Airidh na Bhannaghaisgach." [74]
It will be noticed that the "beds" in Maes-How are on a higher level than the floor of the main chamber. "In the winter houses," observes Captain Thomas, [75] "the floor of the bed-place was raised 3 or 4 feet above the ground." ”