Mr. Kirk’s first chapter, “Of the Subterranean Inhabitants,”
naturally suggests the recent speculations of Mr. MacRitchie. The
gist of Mr. MacRitchie’s _Testimony of Tradition_ is that there once
was a race of earth-dwellers in this island; that their artificial
caves still exist; that this people survive in popular memory as “the
legendary Feens,” and as the Pechts of popular tales, in which they
are regarded as dwarfs. “The Pechs were unco wee bodies, but terrible
strang.” Here, then, it might be thought that we have the origin of
Fairy beliefs. There really was, on this showing, a dwarf race, who
actually did live in the “fairy-hills,” or howes, now commonly looked
on as sepulchral monuments.
There is much in Mr. MacRitchie’s theory which does not commend
itself to me. The modern legends of Pechts as builders of Glasgow
Cathedral, for example, do not appear to prove such a late survival
of a race known as Picts, but are on a level with the old Greek
belief that the Cyclopes built Mycenæ (_Testimony of Tradition_, p.
72). Granting, for the sake of discussion, that there were still
Picts or Pechs in Galloway when Glasgow Cathedral was built (in the
twelfth century), these wild Galloway men, scourges of the English
Border, were the very last people to be employed as masons. The
truth is that the recent Scotch have entirely forgotten the ages
of mediæval art. Accustomed to the ill-built barns of a robbed and
stinted Kirk, they looked on the Cathedral as no work of ordinary
human beings. It was a creation of the Pechts, as Mycenæ and Tiryns
of the mighty walls were creations of the Cyclopes. By another
coincidence, the well-known story of the last Pecht, who refuses
to divulge the secret of the heather ale, is told in the Volsunga
Saga, and in the _Nibelungenlied_, of the Last Niflung. Again, the
breaking of a bar of iron, which he takes for a human arm, by the
last Pecht is a tale current of the Drakos in modern Greece (see
Chambers’s _Popular Traditions of Scotland_ for the last Pecht). I
cannot believe that the historical Picts were a set of half-naked,
dwarfish savages, hairy men living underground. These are the topics
of Sir Arthur Wardour and Monkbarns. Mr. W. F. Skene may be said to
have put the historic Picts in their proper place as the ancestors
of the Highlanders. The Pecht of legend answers to the Drakos and the
Cyclopes: the beliefs about his habits may have been suggested by the
tumuli, still more by the _brochs_: it seems less probable that they
represent an historical memory. As to the Irish “Feens,” the topic
can only be discussed by Celtic scholars. But it does not follow,
because the leader of the Feens seemed a dwarf among giants, that
therefore his people were a dwarfish race.[2] The story proves no
more than Gulliver’s Travels.
Once more, we often read in the Sagas of a hero like Grettir, who
opens a howe, has a conflict with a “barrow-wight,” as Mr. Morris
calls the “howe-dweller,” and wins gold and weapons. But the dweller
in the howe is often merely the able-bodied ghost of the Norseman, a
known and named character, who is buried there; he is not a Pecht.
Thus, as it seems to me, the Scotch and Celts possessed a theory of a
legendary people, as did the Greeks. Whether any actual traditions of
an earlier, perhaps a Finnish race, was at the bottom of the legend,
is an obscure question. But, having such a belief, the Scotch easily
discovered homes for the fancied people in the sepulchral howes:
they “combined their information.” The Fairies, again, are composite
creatures. As they came to births and christenings, and as Norse
wise-wives (as in the Saga of Eric the Red) prophesied at festivals,
Mr. MacRitchie combines his own information. The Wise-wife is a
Finn woman, and Finn and Fairy amalgamate. But the Egyptians, as in
the _Tale of Two Brothers_ (Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_), had their
Hathors, who came and prophesied at births; the Greeks had their
Mœræ, as in the story of Meleager and the burning brand. The Hathors
and Mœræ play, in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece, the part of
Fairies at the christening, but surely they were not Finnish women!
In short, though a memory of some old race may have mingled in the
composite Fairy belief, this is at most but an element in the whole,
and the part played by ancestral spirits, naturally earth-dwellers,
is probably more important. Bishop Callaway has pointed out, in
the preface to his _Zulu Tales_, that what the Highlanders say of
the Fairies the Zulus say of “the Ancestors.” 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, to eat no food in this place, Fairyland is clearly a
memory of the pre-Christian Hades. There are other elements in the
complex mass of Fairy tradition, but Chaucer knew “the Fairy Queen
Proserpina,” as Campion calls her, and it is plain that in very fact
“the dread Persephone,” the “Queen over death and the dead,” had
dwindled into the lady who borrows Tamlane in the ballad. Indeed
Kirk mentions but does not approve of this explanation, “that those
subterranean people are departed souls.” Now, as was said, the dead
are dwellers under earth. The worshippers of Chthonian Demeter
(Achaia) beat the earth with wands; so does the Zulu sorcerer when he
appeals to the Ancestors. And a Macdonald in Moidart, being pressed
for his rent, beat the earth, and cried aloud to his dead chief,
“Simon, hear me; you were always good to me.”[3]