WHO WERE THE FAIRIES ? 273 



to. Certainly nothing can be better proved than 

 that the flint arrow-heads to which allusion has 

 been made were not constructed by a pigmy race, 

 and as to the so-called " pigmy implements " 

 these owe their name to their size. There is no 

 sort of osteological evidence that their makers 

 were pigmies themselves. 



Further, there is the remarkable and highly 

 significant fact that many of the mounds associ-j 

 ated with fairy legends were never habitations of 

 the living, but they were the resting places of the 

 dead. Such was the well-known Bryn-yr-Ellyllon 

 or Fairy Hill, near Mold, and such the sepulchral 

 barrow of Willey How in Yorkshire. It is partly on 

 this fact that the late Mr. Andrew Lang founded 

 his belief that the real origin of the belief in fairies 

 was to be found in " a lingering memory of the 

 Chthonian beings, ' the Ancestors.' " He empha- 

 sizes, in fact, the importance of " the part played 

 by ancestral spirits, naturally earth-dwellers." 

 And, in this connexion, appears the significance 

 of one of the pieces of folk-lore embedded in the 

 tale of Childe Rowland, that of the abstinence 

 from food. For as he points out " in many ways, 

 as when persons carried off to Fairyland meet 

 relations or friends lately deceased, who warn 

 them, as Persephone and Steenie Steenson were 

 warned " and, we may add, as Childe Rowland ; 

 was warned " to eat no food in this place, Fairy- | 

 land is clearly a memory of the pre-Christian 1 

 Hades." And he continues : " There are other 

 elements in the complex mass of Fairy tradition, 

 but Chaucer knew e the Fairy Queen Proserpina ' 



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