888 REPORT— 1900. 



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 aa an under- 

 sized race, there must have been a people of that description in their country, 

 I'erhaps archfeologists may succeed in classifying the ancient habitations in the 

 North accordingly : that is, to tell us what class of them were built by the Picts 

 ttfld what by the Little People whom they may be supposed to have found in posses- 

 sion of that part of oui island. 



In Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland the fairies derive their more usual 

 appellations from a word sid or sitk (genitive side), which may perhaps be akin to 

 the Latin sedes and have meant a seat, settlement, or station ; but whatever its 

 exact meaning may have originally been, it came to be applied to the hillocks or 

 mounds within which the Little People made their abodes. Thus Aes Side as a 

 name for the fairies may be rendered by mound people or hill folk ; fer side, ' a 

 fairy man/ by a mound man ; and be7i side by a mound woman or banshee. They 

 were also called simply side, which would seem to be an adjective closely allied 

 with the simpler word sid. 



But to leave this question of their names, let me direct your attention for a 

 moment to one of the most famous kings of the fairies of ancient Erin : he was 

 called Mider of Bri Li^ith, said to be a hill to the west of Ardagh, in the present 

 county of Longford. There he had his mound, to which he once carried the queen 

 of Eochaid Airem, monarch of Ireland. It was some time before Eochaid could 

 discover what had become of her, and he ordered Dalan, his druid, to find it out. 

 So the druid, when he had been unsuccessful for a whole year, prepared four twigs 

 of yew and wrote on them in Ogam. Then it was revealed to him through his 

 keys of seership and through the Ogam writing, that the queen was in the sid of 

 Bri L(5ith, having been taken thither by Mider. By this we are probably to 

 understand that the druid sent forth the Ogam twigs as letters of enquiry to other 

 druids in different parts of the country ; but in any case he was at last successful, 

 and his king hurried at the head of an army to Bri Ldith, where they began in 

 earnest to demolish Mider's mound. At this Mider was so frightened that he sent 

 the queen forth to her husband, who then departed, leaving the fairies to digest 

 their wrath ; for it is characteristic of them that they did not fight, but bided their 

 time for revenge, which in this case did not come till long after Eochaid's day. 

 Now, with regard to the fairy king, one is not told, so far as I can call to mind, 

 that he was a dwarf, but the dwarfs were not far off; for we read of an Irish 

 satirist who is represented as notorious for his stinginess, and who, to emphasise the 

 description of his inhospitable habits, is said to have taken from Mider three of his 

 dwarfs and stationed them around his own house, in order that their truculent looks 

 and rude words might repel any of the men of Erin who might come seeking hospita- 

 lity or bringing any other inconvenient request. The word used for dwarf in this 

 story is co?t, which is usually the Irish for a crane or heron, but here, and in spme 

 other instances, which I cannot now discuss, it seems to have been identical with the 

 Brythonic cor, ' a dwarf.' It is remarkable, moreover, that the role assigned to 

 the three Irish co7'rs is much the same as that of the dwarf of Edern son of 

 Nudd, in the Welsh story of Geraint and Enid and Chretien de Troies' Erec, 

 which characterises him Bls/cI et de pufeire, 'treacherous and of an evil kind.' 



By way of summarising these notes on the Mound Folk I may say that I 

 should regard them as isolated and wretched remnants of a widely spread race 

 possessing no political significance whatsoever. But, with the inconsistency 

 characteristic of everything connected with the fairies, one has on the other hand 

 to admit, that this strange people seems to have exercised on the Celts — probably 

 on other races as well — a sort of permanent spell of mysteriousness and awe 

 stretching to the verge of adoration. In fact, Irish literature states that the pagan 

 tribes of Erin before the advent of St. Patrick used to worship the side or the 

 fairies. Lastly the Celt's faculty of exaggeration, combined with his incapacity 

 to comprehend the weird and uncanny population of the mounds and caves of his 

 country, has enabled him, in one way or another, to bequeath to the great litera- 

 tures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs and little people, a whole world 

 of wizardry, and a vast wealth of utopianism. If you subtracted from English. 



