HEATHER ALE. 



rank and scholarly breeding had put upon record as 

 a thing quite credible the statement that Orkney had 

 been formerly inhabited by Dwarfish Ticts' famous 

 as builders, and living in subterranean houses, of 

 which houses many specimens are yet extant. 



"Whether Tulloch was writing down an oral 

 tradition or copying from an early historian does not 

 appear. But at least he supplies us with 1443 as a 

 date at which the above belief was firmly held. Even 

 some seventy years before Tulloch wrote we have the 

 compilers of the Book of Ballymote saying in effect 

 that the Picts lived in artificial mounds. Here again 

 the latest date is taken, and it is assumed that the 

 companion reference 'in an ancient genealogy' belongs 

 to about the same period. Now even if Bishop 

 Tulloch knew anything of the Book of Ballymote or 

 the language in which it was written, his own state- 

 ment bears inherent evidence that it was made quite 

 independently of the Irish chronicle, and that the 

 Bishop was simply repeating what had been previously 

 said by local tradition or by a Scandinavian writer 

 with sole reference to the Orkney Islands. Add to 

 this the great mass of inherited belief with respect to 

 this subject held in common by the Gaelic-speaking 

 people, by the once Norse-speaking inhabitants of 

 Orkney and by the Scottish lowlanders generally, and 

 the deduction is that Mr. Stevenson himself was in 

 error in assuming that the historical Picts were not 

 identical with the dwarfish earth dwellers of his 

 ballad." Stevenson had characterized Boece's re- 

 marks as "the blundering guess of a dull chronicler." 



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