October 5, 1900.] 



8GIENGE. 



505 



conception, being brought about by the en- 

 trance into the mother of a spirit, apart 

 from any contact with the other sex. Stu- 

 dents of folklore have long been familiar 

 with the notions of this sort occurring in 

 the stories of the birth of miraculous per- 

 sonages, but this is the first case on record 

 of a tribe who believe in immaculate con- 

 ception 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 log- 

 ical and natural enough — but for no other. 

 The direct conclusion, however, to be drawn 

 from this argument is that some race — pos- 

 sibly more than one — which has contributed 

 to the folklore about our fairies, has passed 

 through the stage of ignorance just indi- 

 cated ; but as an indirect conclusion one 

 would probably be right in supposing this 

 race to have been no other than the very 

 primitive 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 histoi-y of 

 the Little People may be derived from the 

 names given them, of which the most com- 

 mon in Welsh is that of y Tylwyth Teg or 

 the Fair Family. But the word cor, ' a 

 dwarf,' feminine corres, is also applied to 

 them ; and in Breton we have the same 

 word with such derivatives as Jcorrik, '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 fourteenth-century manuscript 

 of the Eed Book of Hergest. There one 

 learns that the Coranians were such con- 

 summate 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 sug- 

 gested to Welsh writers a similar explana- 

 tion 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 ISTorfolk, assigning to 

 them the two towns of Lindum (Lincoln) 

 and Ratce, 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 neighborhood of the Humber, for the 

 good reason, probably, that it afforded very 

 few inviting landing-places. So here pre- 

 sumably the ancient inhabitants may have 

 survived in sufiBcient numbers to have been 

 called by their neighbors of a different race 

 ' the dwarfs,' or Coritani, as late as Ptolemy's 

 time in the second century. This har- 

 monizes with the fact that the Coritani are 

 not mentioned as doing anything, all polit- 

 ical 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 impos- 

 sible 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 few districts containing Croy- 

 land, where towards the end of the seventh 

 century St. Guthlac set up his cell on the 

 side of an ancient tumulus and was dis- 

 turbed by demons that talked Welsh. Cer- 

 tain portions of the Coritanian country 

 offered, as one may infer, special advantages 



