PLATE I.
SELECTIONAL VIEW AND GROUND PLAN OF UNDERGROUND GALLERY, CALLED UAMHSGALABHAD, NEAR MOL A DEAS, HUISHNISH, ISLAND OF SOUTH UIST.
Frontispiece.
FIANS, FAIRIES
AND
PICTS
BY
DAVID MacRITCHIE
AUTHOR OF
"THE TESTIMONY OF TRADITION"
"Sometimes ... it seems that the stones are reallyspeaking—speaking of the old things, of the time when the strangefishes and animals lived that are turned into stone now, and thelakes were here; and then of the time when the little Bushmen livedhere, so small and so ugly, and used to sleep in the wild dogholes, and in the 'sloots,' and eat snakes, and shoot the buckswith their poisoned arrows ... Now the Boers have shot them all, sothat we never see a little yellow face peeping out among the stones... And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we arehere."—Waldo, in The Story of an African Farm.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1893
INTRODUCTION.
The following treatise is to some extent a re-statement and partly anamplification of a theory I have elsewhere advanced.[1] But as thattheory, although it has been advocated by several writers, especiallyduring the past half-century, is not familiar to everybody, some remarksof an explanatory nature are necessary. And if this explanation assumesa narrative form, not without a tinge of autobiography, it is becausethis seems the most convenient way of stating the case.
It is now a dozen years or thereabouts since I first read the "PopularTales of the West Highlands," by Mr. J.F. Campbell, otherwise known byhis courtesy-title of "Campbell of Islay." Mr. Campbell was, as manypeople know, a Highland gentleman of good family, who devoted much ofhis time to collecting and studying the oral traditions of his owndistrict and of many lands. His equipment as a student of West Highlandfolklore was unique. He had the necessary[Pg vi] knowledge of Gaelic, thehereditary connection with the district which made him at home with thepoorest peasant, and the sympathetic nature which proved a master-key inopening the storehouse of inherited belief. It is not likely thatanother Campbell of Islay will arise, and, indeed, in these days ofdecaying tradition, he would be born too late.
In reading his book, then, for the first time, what impressed me morethan anything else in his pages were statements such as the following:—
"The ancient Gauls wore helmets which represented beasts. Theenchanted king's sons, when they come home to their dwellings, putoff cochal [a Gaelic word signifying], the husk, and become men;and when they go out they resume the cochal, and become animalsof various kinds. May this not mean that they put on their armour?They marry a plurality of wives in many stories. In short, theenchanted warriors are, as I verily believe, nothing but real men,and their manners real manners, seen through a haze ofcenturies.... I do not mean that the tal