An earlier investigator of fairy beliefs, though still of this century, was Evans Wentz, from who book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, I have already quoted.

In 1908 Evans Wentz, an American of Celtic descent, who had worked for some years under John Rhys, the Oxford Professor of Celtic Studies, set out on an exploration of the Celtic area - Ireland, the Highlands of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany. He began by consulting the leading folklore experts of each region, Douglas Hyde in Ireland, Alexander Carmichael in the Scottish Highlands, John Rhys of Wales, Henry Jenner of Cornwall, Sophia Morrison of the Isle of Man and Professor Anatole le Bras of Brittany; then he travelled through all the regions, for the most part on foot like J. F. Campbell and Alexander Carmichael, visiting and living in peasant cottages and collecting material from people of all classes of society. It was no doubt a help to him in his researches that he was himself a believer in fairies, so that though he researched as a folklorist he encountered believers without any trace of scepticism or condescension, and was therefore given access to experiences and beliefs that would have been withheld from a more sophisticated investigator. Most of these point, as do many of Lady Wilde's4 stories, to a strong connection between fairies and the dead. Christiansen still found traces of this, but believed that the fairies were the captors and guardians of the dead rather than the dead themselves. The recently dead are certainly often described as being among the fairies, but the dead of the ancient tribes of Ireland are also thought of as The Gentry. John Boglin, for instance, of Kilmaeean, near Tara, who was about sixty years when he gave his evidence, reported this of the fairy tribes:

"There is said to be a whole tribe of little red men living in Glen Odder, between Ringleston and Tara; and in long evenings in June they have been heard. There are other breeds or castes of fairies; and it seems to me, when I recall our ancient traditions, that some of these fairies are of the Fir Bolgs, some of the Tuatha de Danaan, and some of the Milesians. All of them have been seen round the western slope of Tara, dressed in ancient Irish costumes. Unlike the little red men, these fairy races are warlike and given to making invasions."5

Later on in giving his evidence, John Boglin said:

The Fairies are the Dead - 'According to the local belief, fairies are the spirits of the departed. Tradition says that Hugh O'Neil in the sixteenth century, after his march to the south, encamped his army on the Rath or Fort  of Ringlestown, to be assisted by the spirits of the mighty dead who dwelt within this rath. And it is believed that Gerald Fitzgerald has been seen coming out of the Hill Mollyellen, down in County Louth, leading his horse and dressed in the old Irish costume, with heartplate, spear and was outfit.'6

In Scotland, which was next visited by Evans Wentz, the evil fairies, The Host or Sluagh, were thought of as the dead, and the fairies or Shee are spirits who were decoyed out of their natural allegiance by The Proud Angel. In a footnote to one piece of evidence, taken from Carmina Gadelica, (p. 108), Alexander Carmichael explains the difference:

Sluagh. 'hosts', the spirit-world. The 'hosts' are the spirits of mortals who have died...According to one informant, the spirits fly about in great clouds, up and down the face of the earth like starlings, and come back to the scenes of their earthly transgressions. No soul of them is without the clouds of earth, dimming the brightness of the works of God, nor can any win heaven, till satisfaction is made for the sins of the earth.7

In Man again, the same belief of 'The Proud Angel' is held, though there are traces of the fairies as the descendants of the ancient gods, particularly Mannanon, son of Lir, a belief we also find in Ireland. In Wales the origin is more vaguely given in such sayings as 'The old folk thought them a kind of spirit from a spirit world'. In Cornwall the connection between the pixies and the dead seems to be closer, at least among the country people. On P. 172, for instance, we have:

Nature of Piskies - 'I always understood the piskies to be little people. A great deal was said about ghosts in this place. Whether or not piskies are the same as ghosts, I cannot tell, but I fancy the old folk thought they were.'8

The same opinion of the Fees, Corrigans and Lutins as fallen angels as we find about the fairy people in Ireland and Scotland, seems to be held in Brittany, though in parts of Southern Brittany they appear to be held in beneficent, and some tradition of god-like attributes hangs about them.9

There will be occasion to return to the evidence collected by Evans Wentz later in this book, but I have here given a short summary of his account of the beliefs about fairy origins held by his informants.

Varying theories have been set forth from time to time by students of folklore. One of the most clear-cut is the suggestion made by David MacRitchie that the fairy beliefs sprang from the memory of an earlier race of rather dwarfish people, pre-Neolithic dwellers in caves or earthworks, who used flint arrows, had much knowledge of the hidden paths in their country and were credited with power over weather and other magical skills. The chief works of David MacRitchie which uphold this thesis are The Testimony of Tradition (1890) and Fians, Fairies and Picts (1893). In these he equates the Picts with the Fians and Fairies. Passages in J. F. Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands first suggested the theory to him, and some of Campbell's tales could be plausibly ascribed to the existence of a conquered race, lurking in woods and mounds and hanging around farms, doing casual service for gifts of food, but distrustful of their conquerors' clothing as a badge of servitude. Indeed the whole pattern of the Brownie stories could be explained along these lines. Another tale which is particularly apt as a proof of MacRitchie's theory is 'The Isle of Sanntraigh', in volume II of The Popular Tales.10 It is not very widely know and is worth giving in its entirety.

There was a herd's wife in the Island of Sanntraigh, and she had a kettle. A woman of peace (fairy) would come every day to seek the kettle. She would not say a word when she came, but she would catch hold of the kettle. When she would catch the kettle, the woman of the house would say:

A smith is able to make
Cold iron hot with coal.
The due of a kettle is bones,
And to bring it back again.

The woman of peace would come back every day with the kettle and flesh and bones in it. On a day that was there, the housewife was for going over the ferry to Baile a Chaisteil, and she said to her man, 'If thou wilt say to the woman of peace as I say, I will go to Baile Castle.' 'Oo! I will say it. Surely it's I that will say it.' He was spinning a heather rope to be set on the house. He saw a woman coming and a shadow from her feet, and he took fear of her. He shut the door. He stopped his work. When she came to the door she did not find the door open, and he did not open it for her. She went above a hole that was in the house. The kettle have two jumps, and at the third leap it went out at the ridge of the house. The night came, and the kettle came not. The wife cam back over the ferry, and she did not see a bit of the kettle within, and she asked, 'Where was the kettle?' 'Well then I don't care where it is,' said the man; 'I never took such a fright as I took at it. I shut the door, and she did not come any more with it.' 'Good-for-nothing wretch, what didst thou do? There are two that will ill off - thyself and I.' 'She will come tomorrow with it.' 'She will not come.'

She hasted herself and she went away. She reached the knoll, and there was no man within. It was after dinner, and they were out in the mouth of the night. She went in. She saw the kettle, and she lifted it with her. It was heavy for her with the remnants that they lift in it. When the old carle that was within saw her going out, he said,

Silent wife, silent wife,
That come on us from land of chase,
Thou man on the surface of the 'Bruth',
Loose the black, and slip the Fierce.

The two dogs were let loose; and she was not long away when she heard the clatter of the dogs coming. She kept the remnant that was in the kettle, so that if she could get it with her, well, and if the dogs should come that she might throw it at them. She perceived the dogs coming. She put her hand in the kettle. She took the board out of it, and she threw at them a quarter of what was in it. They noticed it there for a while. She perceived them again, and she threw another piece at them when they closed upon her. She went away walking as well as she might; when she came near the farm, she threw the mouth of the pot downwards, and there she left them all that was in it. The dogs of the town struck (up) a barking when they saw the dogs of peace stopping. The woman of peace never came more to seek the kettle.

One can see how well this could apply to the members of a lurking conquered tribe and to the newly settled conquerors. Each one, as we can see, was formidable and uncanny to the other. It is noticeable that cold iron is mentioned in the Sanntraigh woman's incantation to the visiting fairy. MacRitchie's contention would be that to the Neolithic people wrought iron would be uncanny. The 'people of peace' would have no kettle, but they had conquered their fear enough to be desirous of the use of a kettle which they could not manufacture. The fairy wife was uncanny to the man of Sanntraigh, but his wife, rising silently into the bruth, was uncanny to its inhabitants also. The only supernatural event was the leaping of the kettle, and it could be suggested that the fairy wife could have hooked it up, and that the incident had been slightly magnified by the husband.

Campbell, interested as he was in the folktales, often had a naturalistic explanation at hand and was sceptical about transformation and enchantments, as for instance in the introduction to volume I (CXV), where he says:

'The ancient Gauls wore helmets which represented beasts. The king's sons, when they came home to their dwellings, put off Cochal, the husk, and became men; and when they go out they resume the Cochal, and become animals of various kinds. May this not mean that they put on their armour?'11

He is even more explicit later:

'This class of stories is so widely spread, so matter-of-fact, hangs so well together, and is so implicitly believed all over the United Kingdom, that I am persuaded of the former existence of a race of men in these islands who were smaller in stature than the Celts; who used stone arrows, lived in conical mounds like the Lapps, knew some mechanical arts, pilfered goods and stole children; and were perhaps contemporary with some species of wild cattle, horses and great auks, which frequented marshy ground, and are now remembered as water-bulls and water-horses, and boories, and such like impossible creatures.'12

It would be hard to quarrel with MacRitchie's conclusions if he had been content to apply them to some of the fairy traditions, but he stretches his theory to cover the whole body of the fairy belief everywhere and this is asking too much of it. Archaeological evidence is also lacking for the small size of the Picts; the bodies found in the tombs which were traditionally supposed to be the homes of the fairies were of average human size.

John Rhys in his Celtic Folklore sometimes seems to take the same view as MacRitchie, particularly in one chapter on, 'Race in Folklore and Myth', where he traces the fairies from the Picts or from earlier races, relying on such primitive practices as their habit of reckoning in fives instead of tens and on the impression sometimes created that they were a race of women ignorant of paternity. This is a view founded on casual study of the traditions, and Rhys actually believed in the multiple origin of the fairy faith. He says, for instance:

'I should hesitate to do anything so rash as to pronounce the fairies to be all of one and the same origin; they may well be of several. For instance, there may be the representatives of the ghosts of departed men and women, regarded as one's ancestors; but there can hardly be any doubt that others, and those possibly not the least interesting have originated in the demons and divinities - not all of ancestral origin - with which the weird fancy of our remote forefathers peopled lakes and streams, bays and creeks and estuaries.'13

The distinction between the feared and venerated spirits of ancestors, nature spirits and the remnants of ancient mythology is very hard to draw, but there seems little doubt that the god of Ireland, for example, were the originals of the Irish fairies, though some folklorists and archaeologists believe that the gods were descended from the spirits of dead ancestors. The matter is discussed by O'Curry and dealt with at some length by Wood-martin in Elder Faiths of Ireland: Pre-Christian Traditions.14 There seems no doubt that the children of the Goddess Don were the Dann O'Sidh and there, conquered by the invading Milesians, took to the hollow hills and became the Daoine Sidh or 'Deeny Shee'. The Fianna Finn and their contemporaries fought, loved and mated with these Daoine Sidh. Originally of human or more than human size, they dwindled through successive generations from the small size of humans to the size of three-years children, and sometimes to midgets.

Some of them retained a godlike status in legends. And example is Mannanon, Son of Lir, a sea-god to whom the Isle of Man specially belonged, but who presided over Tir Nan Og, the Land of the Ever-Young, to which Niamh of the Golden Locks took her lover, Oisin. Mermaids and the river and tree spirits, which remain in tradition often as souls of the dead, may once have been minor gods.

The Scandinavian elves were from very early days a part of the Norse mythology. In the times of the Aesir and Vanir they were part of the pattern of the whole world, as the nymphs, satyrs and fauns, the naiads and tritons were part of the classical cosmology. The elves of Scandinavian mythology were of two kinds, 'the light elves' and 'the dark elves'. Dr. H. R. Ellis Davidson in Scandinavian Mythology mentions the possibility that the light elves might once have been the same as the fair giants and the dark elves have been the hostile giants with whom the others were at war, and that the elves, as they passed into folklore became a homelier, smaller people. She also suggests some connection between the elves and dead. In the passage Elves and land-spirits she says:

There seems to be some link between the elves and the dead within the earth, who still benefit men and who may be born again into the world through their descendants. The early King Olaf, thought to be reborn in the person of the Christian King Olaf the Holy, was called 'Elf of Geirstad', and sacrifices were said to be made to him and also the elves dwelling in mounds. Another race of beings linked closely with the earth were the land-spirits, said to follow 'lucky' men and to give help with hunting and fishing. They were believed to dwell in hills, stones and rivers, and they sometimes appeared in animal form or as little men and women. It was said to be forbidden to bring ships into harbour with menacing figure-heads, because they might frighten the land-spirits.15

According to the later Scandinavian mythology the light elves, under the dominion of Freyr, one of the Vanir, and the god of vegetation, had already something of the same character as the elves in Elizabethan England, small, tricksy, flower-loving creatures, though in earlier times they had been more various and more beautiful. Their home as Alfheim, one of the nine realms of the world in Scandinavian cosmology. The Saxon elves seem to have been larger and more formidable. There are spells against elfshot in the Anglo-Saxon Charm-books. In Scotland down to the seventeenth century the elves were full-sized and Fairyland was called Elfame.

The French Fees had a mythological origin also, for they derived from the Fata. In Hesiod's Theogony there are three Fates only, the daughters of Night named Clotho, Lachesis, and Antropos. Clotho spun the thread of each individual life, Lachesis took it from her and twisted it into various shapes, Antropos, with her inexorable shears, snapped it short at the appointed time.16 Out of these three half-goddesses the Fata developed in post-classical times, who became the Hadas in Spain and Fees in France. In medieval times they visited the house where a child was born, with gifts of good and evil fortune, as they came to Oberon's birth in the Romance of Huon of Bordeaux, and in the sophisticated fairy tales of Perrault and his successors they became fairy godmothers and were not afraid to visit Christian baptisms. In the medieval Arthurian romances they came into England as fays, and 'fai-ery', a state of enchantment, came to be used for those who cast the spell. It will be seen that there was a respectable ancestry here for those who claimed that the fairies were sprung from minor godlings.

Lewis Spence, in British Fairy Origins,17 makes a fair and detailed examination of the various theories about the origin of fairy beliefs, as spirits of the dead, deified ancestors, elementals or nature spirits, the memory of aboriginal races, diminished gods or totemic forms. He mentions but dismisses the theory that they may be a blend of all these, and in the end concludes that the weight of evidence makes it likely that the fairies are sprung from the feared and venerated dead. Many aspects of the fairy beliefs may be plausibly accounted for by this hypothesis: for instance the small size of the fairies, for in primitive times the soul was commonly thought of as a miniature form of the man which came out of his mouth in sleep or trance and had to return to the body before he could become conscious. A very good case may be made out for this theory, not least from the opinions of many of the believers, as in the Cornish story of 'The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor; in Bottrell's Traditions and Hearthside Stories of Cornwall, where the whole position is neatly and logically laid down - the fairies are the spirits of the heathen dead, not good enough for Heaven nor bad enough for Hell, who recruit themselves from time to time by seizing such humans as are rash enough to eat their food, and they are gradually dwindling by exercising their power of shape-shifting. They can take the form of birds or beasts, but every time that they resume their proper shape they are a little smaller than they were before. As time goes on they gradually lose their power of enjoyment and suffering so that in the end they live on the memory of feelings they once had. It is a curiously convincing picture, and the whole situation is worked out with a thoroughness unusual in folk tradition. There are other aspects of the fairy belief, however, which are better fitted by other hypotheses: The MacRitchie theory is a convincing explanation of some tales and traditions; Psychic experiences and extrasensory perception cannot be entirely dismissed and a body of beliefs so diverse and uncoordinated as fairly lore seems to call for something less rigid than a single formula.

Briggs, K., The Vanishing People. Fairy Lore and Legends. New York: Pantheon, 1978, pp. 30-38, 182.

Notes and References