514 



NATURE 



[September 20, 1900 



any one could foresee that when she is engaged in applying the 

 ointment to the young fairy's eyes one of her own eyes is certain 

 to itch and have the benefit of the forbidden salve. When 

 this happens the midwife has two very different views of her 

 surroundings : with the untouched eye she sees that she is in 

 the finest and grandest place that she has ever beheld in her 

 life, and there she can see the lady on whom she is attend- 

 ing reposing on a bed, while with the anointed eye she per- 

 ceives how she is lying on a bundle of rushes and withered 

 ferns in a large cave, with big stones all round her and a 

 little fire in one corner, and she also discovers that the woman 

 is a girl who has once been her servant. Like the midwife 

 we have also to exercise a sort of double vision, if we are to 

 understand the fairies and see through the stories about them. 

 An instance will explain what I mean : Fairy women are 

 pretty generally represented as fascinating to the last degree 

 and gorgeously dressed : that is how they appear through the 

 glamour in which they move and have their being. On the 

 other hand, not only are some tribes of some fairies described 

 as ugly, but fairy children when left as changelings are invariably 

 pictured as repulsive urchins of a sallow complexion and mostly 

 deformed about the feet and legs : there we have the real fairy 

 with the glamour taken off and a certain amount of depre- 

 ciatory exaggeration put on. 



Now when one approaches the fairy question in this kind of 

 way, one is forced, it strikes me, to conclude that the fairies, as 

 a veal people, consisted of a short, stumpy, swarthy race, which 

 made its habitations underground or otherwise cunningly con- 

 cealed. They were hunters, probably, and fishermen ; at any 

 rate, they were not tillers of the ground or eaters of bread. Most 

 likely they had some of the domestic animals and lived mainly 

 on milk and the produce of the chase, together with what they 

 got by stealing. They seem to have practised the art of spin- 

 ning, though they do not appear to have thought much of cloth- 

 ing. They had no tools or implements made of metals. They 

 appear to have had a language of their own, which would imply 

 a time when they understood no other, and explain why, when 

 they came to a town to do their marketing, they laid down the ex- 

 act money without uttering a syllable to anybody by way of bar- 

 gaining for their purchases. They counted by fives and only dealt 

 in the simplest of numbers. They were inordinately fond of music 

 and dancing. They had a marvellously quick sense of hearing, 

 and they were consummate thieves ; but theirthievery was not sys- 

 tematically resented, as their visits were held to bring luck and 

 prosperity. More powerful races generally feared them as for- 

 midable magicians who knew the future and could cause or cure 

 disease as they pleased. The fairies took pains to conceal their 

 names no less than their abodes, and when the name, happened 

 to be discovered by strangers the bearer of it usually lost heart 

 and considered himself beaten. Their family relations were of 

 the lowest order : they not only reckoned no fathers, but it may 

 be that, like certain Australian savages recently described by 

 Spencer and Gillen, they had no notion of paternity at all. The 

 stage of civilisation in which fatherhood is of little or no account 

 has left evidence of itself in Celtic literature, as I shall show 

 presently ; but the other and lower stage anterior to the idea of 

 fatherhood at all comes into sight only in certain bits of folklore, 

 both Welsh and Irish, to the effect that the fairies vvere all 

 women and girls. Where could such an idea have originated ? 

 Only, it seems to me, among a race once on a level with the 

 native Australians to whom I have alluded, and of whom Fraser 

 of "The Golden Bough" wrote as follows in last year's Fort- 

 nightly Review : " Thus, in the opinion of these savages, every 

 conception is what we are wont to call an immaculate concep- 

 tion, being brought about by the entrance into the mother of a 

 spirit, apart from any contact with the other sex. Students of 

 folklore have long been familiar with the notions of this sort 

 occurring in the stories of the birth of miraculous personages, 

 but this is the first case on record of a tribe who believe in im- 

 maculate conception as the sole cause of the birth of every 

 human being who comes into the world. A people so ignorant 

 of the most elementary of natural processes may well rank at 

 the very bottom of the savage scale." Those are Dr. Fraser's 

 words, and for a people in that stage of ignorance to have 

 imagined a race all women seems logical and natural enough — 

 but for no other. The direct conclusion, however, to be drawn 

 from this argument is that some race — possibly more than 

 one — which has contributed to the folklore about our fairies, 

 has passed through the stage of ignorance just indicated ; 

 but as an indirect conclusion one would probably be .right in 



supposing this race to have been no other than the very primi- 

 tive one which has been exaggerated into fairies. At the same 

 time it must be admitted that they could not have been singular 

 always in this respect among the nations of antiquity, as is amply 

 proved by the prevalence of legends about virgin mothers, to 

 whom Frazer alludes, not to mention certain wild stories 

 recorded by the naturalist Pliny concerning certain kinds of 

 animals. 



Some help to make out the real history of the Little People 

 may be derived from the names given them, of which the most 

 common in Welsh is that of ^ Tylwyth Teg or the Fair Family. 

 But the word cor, "a dwarf," feminine cones, is also applied to 

 them ; and in Breton we have the same word with such deriva- 

 tives as korrik, "a fairy, a wee little wizard or sorcerer," with 

 a feminine korrigan or korrigez, analogously meaning a she-fairy 

 or a diminutive witch. From cor we have in Welsh the name 

 of a people called the Coranians figuring in a story in the four- 

 teenth-century manuscript of the Red Book of Hergest. There 

 one learns that the Coranians were such consummate magicians 

 that they could hear every word that reached the wind, as it is 

 put ; so they could not be harmed. The name Coranians of those 

 fairies has suggested to Welsh writers a similar explanation of 

 the name of a real people of ancient Britain. I refer to the 

 Coritani, whom Ptolemy located, roughly speaking, between the 

 river Trent and Norfolk, assigning to them the two towns of 

 Lindu7ii, Lincoln, and Ratae, supposed to have been approxi- 

 mately where Leicester now stands. It looks as if all invaders 

 from the Continent had avoided the coast from Norfolk up to 

 the neighbourhood of the Humber, for the good reason, pro- 

 bably, that it afforded very few inviting landing-places. So here 

 presumably the ancient inhabitants may have survived in suffi- 

 cient numbers to have been called by their neighbours of a 

 different race "the dwarfs" or Coritani, as late as Ptolemy's 

 time in the second century. This harmonises with the fact 

 that the Coritani are not mentioned as doing anythmg, 

 all political initiative having long before probably passed out of 

 their hands into those of a more powerful race. How far inland 

 the Coritanian territory extended it is impossible to say, but it 

 may have embraced the northern half of Northamptonshire, 

 where we have a place-name Pytchley, from an earlier Pihtes lea, 

 meaning " The Pict's Meadow," or else the meadow of a man 

 called Pict. At all events, their country took in the fen district 

 containing Croyland, where towards the end of the seventh 

 century St. Guthlac set up his cell on the side of an ancient 

 tumulus and was disturbed by demons that talked Welsh. Cer- 

 tain portions of the Coritanian country offered, as one may infer, 

 special advantages as a home lor retreating nationalities : witness 

 as late as the eleventh century the resistance offered by Hereward 

 in the Isle of Ely to the Norman Conqueror and his mail-clad 

 warriors. 



In reasoning backwards from the stories about the Little 

 People to a race in some respects on a level with Australian 

 savages, we come probably in contact with one of the very, 

 earliest populations of these islands. It is needless to say that 

 we have no data to ascertain how long that occupation may have 

 been uncontested, if at all, or what progress was made in the 

 course of it : perhaps archeology will be able some day to help 

 us to form a guess on that subject. But the question more 

 immediately pressing for answer is, with what race outside 

 Wales may one compare or identify the ancient stock caricatured 

 in Welsh fairy tales ? Now, in the lowlands of Scotland, to- 

 gether with the Orkneys and Shetlands, the place of our fairies 

 is to some extent taken by the Picts, or, as they are there col- 

 loquially called, " the Pechts." My information about the 

 Pechts comes mostly from recent writings on the subject by 

 Mr. David MacRitchie, of Edinburgh, from whom one 

 learns, among other things, that certain underground — or 

 partially underground — habitations in Scotland are ascribed 

 to the Pechts. Now pne kind of these Pechts' dwellings 

 appear from the outside like hillocks covered with grass, so 

 as presumably not to attract attention, an object which was 

 further helped by making the entrance very low and as in- 

 conspicuous as possible. But one of the most remarkable 

 things about them is the fact that the cells or apartments into 

 which they are divided are frequently so small that their inmates 

 must have been of very short stature, like our Welsh fairies. 

 Thus, though there appears to be no reason for regarding the 

 northern Picts themselves as an undersized race, there must 

 have been a people of that description in their country. 

 Perhaps archaeologists may succeed in classifying the ancient 



NO. 1612, VOL. 62] 



m 



