886 REPORT— 1900. 



different views of iier surroundings : with the untouched eye she sees that she iH 

 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 attending reposing on a bed, while with the 

 anointed eye she perceives how she is lying on a bundle of ruslies 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 pictured invariably 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 depreciatory 

 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 real people, consisted of a short, 

 stumpy, swarthy race, which made its habitations underground or otherwise 

 cunningly concealed. 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 spinning, though they do not appear to have thought much of clothing. They 

 had no tools or implements made of metal. They had probably 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 exact money without uttering a syllable to anybody by way of bargaining for 

 their purchases. They counted by fi.ves 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 their thieving was 

 not systematically resented, as their visits were held to bring luck and prosperity. 

 More powerful races generally feared them as formidable 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 were 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 Frazer 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 conception, 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 immaculate 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. Frazer'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 argu- 

 ment 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 ; 



