ON THE ORIGINS OF FAIRIES

[KittyLane]

The following article is offered as fodder for discussion and for your
individual discernment. The views and opinions expressed by the authors
are their own, and are not necessarily the views and opinions of Home
Circle or its members. All copyrights are held by the respective authors.
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ON THE ORIGINS OF FAIRIES
Excerpted from "Strange and Secret Peoples" by Carole G. Silver; Oxford
University Press (C) 1999

In 1846, William John Thomas, who contributed the term folklore to the
English language, commented in The Athenaeum that "belief in fairies is
by no means extinct in England" (Merton, p. 1846, 55). Thorns was not
alone in his opinion; he was merely echoing and endorsing the words of
others such as Thomas Keightley, the author of The Fairy Mythology. For
believers were not limited to gypsies, fisherfolk, rural cottagers,
country parsons, and Irish mystics. Antiquarians of the romantic era had
begun the quest for fairies, and throughout Victoria's reign advocates
of fairy existence and investigators of elfin origins included numerous
scientists, social scientists, historians, theologians, artists, and
writers. By the 1880s such leading folklorists as Sabine Baring-Gould,
Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and Sir John Rhys were examining oral
testimony on the nature and the customs of the "little folk" and the
historical and archaeological remains left by them. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, eminent authors, among them Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and Arthur Machen, swelled the ranks of those who held the fairy
faith and publicized their findings. In a remarkable "trickle up" of
folk belief, a surprisingly large number of educated Victorians and
Edwardians speculated at length on whether fairies did exist or had at
least once existed.

For the Irish, especially those involved in the Celtic revival, belief
in fairies was almost a political and cultural necessity. Thus, William
Butler Yeats reported endlessly on his interactions with the sidhe
(Irish fairies) and wrote repeatedly of their nature and behavior. His
colleagues AE (George Russell) and William Sharp/Fiona Macleod proudly
enumerated their fairy hunts and sightings, and the great Irish
Victorian folklorists--Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, and Lady
Gregory--overtly or covertly acknowledged their beliefs. Even those not
totally or personally convinced, like Douglas Hyde, remarked that the
fairy faith was alive and well in Ireland.

Only a relatively small group of questers was satisfied with purely
experiential evidence, with saying "I believe in fairies because I have
seen them." Lafcadio Hearn, the Japanologist, was more Celtic than Saxon
when he commented that he had faith in "ghosts and goblins, because ...
[he] saw them, both by day and night" (Temple, p. 30). Richard Dadd, the
fairy painter, seems to have encountered them at least once, but his
contemporaries could dismiss his testimony as that of a madman; the same
was true of Charles Doyle, brother of the more famous fairy painter
Richard and father of Arthur Conan Doyle. Sane and rational W. Graham
Robertson--artist, playwright, and theatrical designer--would give no
grounds for his belief. Maurice Hewlett, best known for his historical
romances and travel books, was another who ostensibly glimpsed members
of the elfin races; his The Lore of Proserpine (1913) is a full-length
memorate (or ostensibly "believed" report of personal experience) of his
and others' interactions with supernatural creatures. However, he
repeatedly refused to comment on the reasons for his own belief. Robert
Louis Stevenson, equally rational, was also mysterious about the extent
and nature of his fairy faith. Like all children, he remarked, he had
believed in youth in the actuality of the elfin world: "No child but
must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the
infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies"
(Essays, pp. 452-53). In adulthood, he suggested, the "Little People"
came only in dreams; then, however, they suggested ideas for his tales
and novels. In "A Chapter on Dreams," he noted that many details of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had been dictated to him, while asleep, by the
brownies (pp. 247-48).

If some people later ascribed the etiology of such visions to sunstroke
or hallucinations caused by heat, or to nurses' tales and unconscious
memories of the illustrations in their childrens' books (Book of
Folk-Lore, p. 200), others, who retained their faith as adults, often
sought to buttress their arguments with tangible proof. Some were
content to argue by "authority," contending that additional and reliable
witnesses had reported the same or similar experiences. Others pointed
to the evidence provided by physical phenomena and artifacts or tokens.
Rural folk still collected elf-shots or fairy bolts (prehistoric flint
shards or arrows), as well as fairy pipes (small pipes often found near
prehistoric monuments), but so, too, did folklorists. Fairy rings were
located and examined, though most scientists believed that they had been
produced by fungi rather than by fairy feet. The pages of Notes and
Queries and of Folk-Lore were dotted with accounts of elfin sightings
and activities around standing stones. The Rollright Stones, near
Oxford, for example, were thought to be raised by the Druids and later
occupied by supernatural creatures. They were visited by many who hoped
to see the fairies--"little folk like girls to look at"--dance around
them (Evans, p. 22).

A larger and more significant group of Victorian questers incorporated
personal experience and physical evidence into a framework of belief.
They based their fairy faith on theological or philosophical premises.
These "religious views," as I have chosen to call them, might be
grounded on Christian, occultist, or pagan assumptions and adopt widely
varied colorations, but all were based on the premise that fairies were
actual spiritual beings or, at the very least, that they had originated
in realms beyond the material. The most basic form of the "religious
view," one long held by many of the folk, was that the elfin peoples
were the fallen angels. All over England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales,
folklorists found local people who believed that the fairies were the
uncommitted angels or those trapped on earth during Lucifer's fall.
Equally widespread was the view that the fairies were the souls of the
dead who were not good enough for salvation or evil enough for
damnation; the semireligious notion that the fairies were the spirits of
unbaptized children was also widespread and popular. Only slightly less
prevalent was the idea that they were spirits of "special" categories of
the dead, those awaiting reincarnation, or those killed before their
time, or those from long-dead, pagan, or extinct races.

The more orthodox segment among those who held "religious views" drew
strength from the biblical text: "And other sheep have I that are not of
this fold" (John 10:16). Both clergy and laypeople read in this passage
the implication that there had been a separate creation of the
inhabitants of fairyland. Martin Luther could be called to witness; he
had believed in the existence of supernatural creatures and insisted on
the reality of changelings (see chapter 2). Thomas Lake Harris, the
mystic, poet, and religious leader, had incorporated fairies into his
system of belief. John Henry, Cardinal Newman, did not exclude them from
his. At least one Scottish Protestant minister thought, as he told W. Y.
Evans-Wentz, that fairies were still extant, though only visible to
those in a state of mystical ecstasy (p. 91). Evans-Wentz himself
believed fairies to be analogous to Christ in their ability to become
invisible--as He had done at His Ascension and Transfiguration (p. 93).

Victorian Spiritualists, Rosicrucians, and Theosophists grounded their
faith on their sectarian theologies, although they generally insisted
that their evidence was scientific. Early Spiritualists, who often
perceived their movement as simply adding another dimension to already
firm Christian beliefs--as offering evidences of immortality through
contact with the departed--were not initially much concerned with
fairies. They regarded them mainly as nuisances who interfered with
seances and were responsible for the poltergeist phenomenon--that is,
the moving or throwing of objects at seances or in "haunted" houses.
They agreed, however, with the Theosophists that the elfin peoples were
really the "elementals"; "subhuman Nature-Spirits of pygmy stature"
(Evans-Wentz, p. 241) first described by medieval alchemists and mystics.

The association of the elements with guardian or governing spirits was
probably first made by the third-century Neoplatonists, but the first
full acount of them was in the work of Paracelsus, the fifteenth-century
alchemist and mystic. He detailed the nature and power of the
inhabitants of the four elements: the sylphs of air, the salamanders of
fire, the undines or nymphs of water, and the gnomes of earth. His
elementals occupied a position between humans and pure spirits, though
they lived exclusively in one of the four elements. In their earliest
manifestations in the period, they appear as the figures in the various
plays and ballets derived from Undine and as the undiscovered but
"scientifically possible" forces in the fiction and, perhaps, the belief
of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton; they play important roles in his Zanoni
(1845) and A Strange Story (1862). In their later manifestations, they
are staples of Victorian occultist thought, and they are systematized,
classified, and rendered scientific.

Others added to the classification and definition of various orders of
elementals. "Occultist" or "mystical" folklorists like Yeats and
Evans-Wentz (both of whom were believers) sought to philosophically
reconcile the elementals and the supernatural creatures of folklore.
They inquired, through informants, about traits common to both popular
fairies and elemental spirits, and they sought to locate the ways in
which the various orders of beings had merged.

Platonic, too, was the occultist notion that fairies were the spirits of
the recent dead, awaiting incarnation in new bodies or transportation to
new astral planes. Debate even raged about the normal residence of the
elemental spirits. Was it the "astral plane"? Was it the "Summerland" of
the Spiritualists--the place to which those who had recently "passed
over" were relegated? Or was it something else, perhaps even a sort of
Purgatory or, more optimistically, a chamber of rebirth? All in all, for
the group of religious faithful (and both Spiritualists and Theosophists
were among them), fairies provided an imaginative alternative or at
least a supplement to Christianity, offering a promise of immortal life
in a creed not yet outworn. In effect, all who asserted that fairies
were actual rather than imaginary did so with a sense that their reality
was a protest against sterile rationality, evidence that the material
and utilitarian were not sole rulers of the world.

However, with the possible exception of Campbell and the occult
folklorists, most Victorian scholars who held one of the "religious
views" did not participate in the fairy faith; instead, they studied
religious belief. They saw the elfin peoples not as actual beings but as
folk memories of ancient faiths, "survivals" of decayed pagan gods or
local English deities. Croker and Keightley had found in the characters
and actions of the "little folk" the remnants of an ancient religious
system (see Keightley, p. 512) similar if not identical to that
mentioned by the Brothers Grimm in their essay "On the Nature of the
Elves." Wirt Sikes, the American consul to Wales, whose British Goblins
was a popular book of the 1880s, favored the theory that the belief in
fairies was one of the "relics of the ancient mythology" (p. 1) as did
Patrick Kennedy (p. 81), the Irish folklorists revered by Yeats.

The places with which fairies were most identified, their mainly
interior and subterranean habitations, were the strongest and most
widely cited evidences of their similarity to or identity with the souls
of the dead. The ancient mounds, burrows, and tumuli, in which they
often lived (as well as their nocturnal habits) suggested the realms of
death. The fairies were, as Kipling's Puck calls them, the "People of
the Hill"--and they lived not on the hill but in it. One branch of the
Irish fairies, the sidhe--who were thought to take their names from the
mounds or sidhe in which they dwelt--lived in these mounds, or raths, or
forts. (The forts were the remains of prehistoric fortifications.) For
some, fairyland became the place where these souls waited, in Christian
terms, for the Last Judgment and, in pagan terms, for rebirth or an end
to things.

All of these "religious views" were merely second to a cluster of
opinions that may be termed "scientific views." Whether their approaches
were mythological-linguistic, comparative-anthropological, or
euhemerist, all who accepted versions of the scientific view shared the
conviction that fairies or their prototypes had, in some sense,
originated on this earth. From the mid-1850s till the outbreak of the
First World War, the various scientific theories jockeyed for position,
rising and falling in popularity as new evidence flowed in.

For the mythological-linguistic "school" associated with Max Muller, the
answer to the question of the actuality of the fairies lay in language.
Since myth, they believed, came from a "disease of language," a
condition in which a later group of people misunderstood the language or
metaphoric usage of an earlier group, the barbarous features of fairy
lore were now explained as poetic, metaphoric phrases from early human
mythopoeic thinking.

But a rival to the mythological-linguists in the form of a far more
significant set of scientific theories claimed the foreground after 1859
and the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Darwin's theory of biological evolution was quickly appropriated by
anthropologists and resulted in a parallel theory of cultural evolution.
For these folklore scholars, the savage elements in folk tales and
customs were again (as with the celestial mythologists) the attempt of
primitive peoples to interpret the basic, universal situations of life,
but they were not always mistakes or distortions. In Primitive Culture
(1871), Tylor proposed two ideas important to the study of fairy lore:
the doctrine of survivals and the theory of animism. What degree of
historical truth, if any, does folk and fairy lore contain? Tylor
inquired. What is its basis? Were similarities in lore the results of
diffusion or the separate inventions of groups, tribes, or races?

Tylor's theories attracted such luminaries of anthropology and folklore
study as James Anson Farrer and Andrew Lang. Farrer and Lang did further
anthropological spadework, comparing the beliefs and practices of
non-European primitive peoples with similar accounts imbedded in
European folklore. Their theories were most fully and coherently
elaborated by Canon J. A. MacCulloch in The Childhood of Fiction (1905).
To MacCulloch the originals of the fairies were the ancient and modern
"savages," and folk tales were direct reflections of savage ideas,
beliefs, and customs. The lives of fairy-tale kings, he argued, were
exaggerated replications of the simple lives of primitive tribal
chieftains: the magic slumbers of sleeping beauties were evidences of an
early tribal knowledge of hypnosis. The princess who was ravished by a
giant or a fairy was none other than a savage maiden kidnapped in the
widespread ritual known as marriage by capture. Cannibalism as a
prominent motif in folklore came from its widespread practice by the
savage races; a "superior" tribe that had renounced the custom told
tales of those who still practiced it--describing them as goblins,
ogres, or witches.

The concept implicit in MacCulloch's book--that fairies and their lore
resulted from the clash of cultures or races--had been earlier and more
explicitly stated by others, including Alfred C. Haddon, George Laurence
Gomme, and John Stuart Stuart-Glennie (Dorson, British Folklorists, p.
310). Professor Haddon argued that "fairy-tales point to a clash of
races" and could be regarded "as stories told by men of the Iron Age of
events which happened to men of the Bronze Age in their conflicts with
men of the Neolithic Age" (qtd. in Evans-Wentz, p. 137n). In his
brilliant Ethnology in Folklore (1892), Gomme, then president of the
Folk-Lore Society, argued that folklore often represented the clash of
peoples, and that English lore, specifically, spoke of the battles
between those of prehistoric non-Aryan stock and the Indo-Europeans who
invaded them (p. 19). Much of the inconsistency in folklore could be
explained by a difference in point of view, he suggested; the influences
on the lore of the conquered race and of the conquering race differed,
each group ascribing certain supernatural powers to the other. The
nature of given concepts was dictated by whether they were believed and
enunciated by the conquerers or the conquered. For example, beliefs
about fairies and about witches were very similar, said Gomme. The
belief in fairies, however, came from the conquerors; it was a belief
about the aborigines from Aryan sources. The belief in witches, on the
other hand, came from the conquered aborigines themselves; they believed
they had magical powers and tried to spread this belief (in part, to
guarantee their survival) among their conquerors. Significantly, Gomme
ascribes the cruder and bloodier superstitions to non-Aryans. To
Stuart-Glennie, however, the clashes between early peoples were not mere
power struggles, but conflicts filled with racial and imperial
implications; the importance of the fairies was that they were white.
All civilization arose from the "Conflict of Higher and Lower Races";
such tales as "The Swan Maiden" recorded actual events: the rape or
forced marriage of white women by black or brown men. Only the "Higher
Races" could create civilizations; the "Lower" at best were the sources
of folklore (Dorson, Peasant Customs 2:520; 2:323-30).

Few fellow folklorists took up the white man's fantasy quite so overtly
and Stuart-Glennie had almost no disciples. However, the racial
composition of the fairies, their inferior or superior status, and their
place in British history became major issues, especially to those who
took the historical-realist or euhemerist position. The euhemerists
believed that fairies were derived from an early group of invaders of
the British Isles or from the British aborigines themselves. Various
forms of euhemerism had been popular at the end of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth, when the Reverend Peter
Roberts, Dr. Guthrie, and the Dr. Cririe cited by Robert Southey had
theorized that the elfin races, with their organized societies and
systematized customs, were, in actuality, the Druids hiding underground
from Roman and Christian persecutions. Other pre-Victorian antiquarians
had speculated that the English fairies were really early Irish
invaders; still others, that they were early but unspecified mortals
whose actions had been exaggerated in fabulous tales (Sikes, p. 130).

Building on the work of all who came before him, David MacRitchie
popularized what came to be known as the "pygmy theory" in his important
and controversial book, The Testimony of Tradition (1890). His argument
was reiterated and further elaborated in Fians, fairies and Picts
(1893). Buttressing his case with philological, topographical,
traditional, and historical proofs, MacRitchie correlated fairy lore
with the archeological remains of underground abodes as evidence for the
existence of an ancient, dwarflike non-Aryan race in England. The idea
was not new, but the development of archaeology as a science and the
increased exploration of prehistoric sites gave MacRitchie's new
euhemerism a force beyond the theoretical. A sort of Victorian Thor
Hyerdahl, he crawled through and diagrammed mounds and tunnels to prove
the validity of his assertions.
The heart of MacRitchie's argument was that the Finno-Ugrian or Mongol
peoples (including the Lapps) were also the Fians (the race preceding
the Scots) and the Picts of Irish and Scottish history, and that they
had coexisted with the other inhabitants of England until at least the
eleventh century. Skilled in medicine, magic, and masonry, they
inhabited concealed underground earth houses--later known as fairy hills
or fairy forts--and sophisticated chambered mounds like Maes-Howe in the
Orkneys or New Grange and the other mounds at Boyne. The fires that
shone at night through the tops of their underground dwellings were
responsible for the persistent legends, found all over England, of
"fairy lights." Their "clever" women gained the love of Irish
chieftains, married them, and became, in legend, the powerful Irish
fairies known as sidhe. MacRitchie even explained why fairies favored
the color green: it was the hunting color worn by the tiny Lapps.

[KittyLane]

While some of the comparative-anthropological authorities on fairy lore,
including Andrew Lang, Alfred Nutt, and Edwin Sidney Hartland, took
issue with MacRitchie, others, equally respected, flocked to his cause.
Elizabeth Andrews tried to do for Ireland, especially Ulster, what
MacRitchie had done for Scotland. In Ulster folklore, published in 1913
but based on earlier articles and lectures, she argued that dwarfs
living in Ireland had built the souterrains (caves with underground
structures built of rough stones without mortar and roofed with large,
flat slabs) found throughout the country. Evidences of a dwarf race were
not solely archaeological, however; the tales of gorgachs (brownie-like
creatures), of Pechts or Picts, of the sidhe, and of the so-called short
Danes who invaded Ireland were also derived from memories of this
"Turanian" race. All, she believed, "represent primitive races of
mankind and ... in the stories of women, children and men being carried
off, we have a record of warfare, when stealthy raids were made and
captives brought to the dark souterrain" (p. vi). Short, strong, and
with skills in music and other arts, these "fairy" peoples, once all
over Europe, were pushed back and ended up in Lapland where their
descendents may still be found (p. 45). Andrews, like MacRitchie,
thought that pygmies had survived into the historical period. A ballad
like "The Wee Wee Man," with its description of a short, sturdy little
creature, was evidence of their existence. Although not quite so
enthusiastic about the "pygmy theory," Sir John Rhys remarked that when
fairyland is shorn of its glamour, it reveals "a swarthy population of
short stumpy men occupying the most inaccessible districts of our
country" (Celtic Folklore 2:668-69). Joseph Jacobs--Andrew Lang's rival
as a collector and editor of fairy tales for children (his English Fairy
Tales and Celtic Fairy Tales are still to be found in many children's
libraries)--used MacRitchie's theories to explain what lay behind such
places as the "Dark Tower" (a fairy mound) in "Childe Rowland" (see
English Fairy Tales, pp. 260-64). The Reverend Gath Whitley considered
piskey dwarfs, that is pixies, the earliest Neolithic inhabitants of
Cornwall and described them as small hunters who, like bushmen, danced
and sang to the light of the moon (qtd. in Andrews, p. 101). Henry
Jenner, local secretary for the Society of Antiquarians in Cornwall, was
certain that "a strange and separate people of Mongol type" were still
extant and dwelling in the Cornish wilds. This "little `stuggy' dark
folk," once thought to be composed of witches and wizards, were really
the descendants of the Pictish tribes; (qtd. in Evans-Wentz, pp.
166-67); thus had the Picts become the pixies.

Sabine Baring-Gould's quibbles with MacRitchie's theories were over how
far south in England the Finno-Ugrians had come and whether they had
been entire tribes or gypsylike itinerants. In an article on "Pixies and
Brownies," reprinted in A Book of Folk-Lore (1913), he concluded that
yet another group of pygmies, who had lived in caves or earthen huts but
had not built in stone (and hence, in folklore were shown as emerging
from mounds or caverns), were the sources of the knockers and pixies of
Devon and Cornwall. It was, he thought, Oriental Lapps who taught the
Norse mining and metal working, for iron fabrication, he believed, was
not native to northern and eastern Europe. His "fairies" were dwarfs or
pygmies, "not found in large numbers nor forming big colonies, but
vagrant and dispersed," practicing crafts and migrating like gypsies.
"Shy, living a different life than those for whom they worked" (p. 216),
they gave rise to tales. There might, he argued, have been different
groups of them with different skills; some were miners, some smiths,
some mere laborers on farms. From these "people of foreign race,
misunderstood, looked on with superstitious fears, whose very ways
encouraged mistrust" (p. 224), came the tales of dwarfs (if they were
smiths) or brownies (if farm laborers). Baring-Gould thought that an
archaeological excavation near Padstow in Cornwall had yielded their
prehistoric necropolis, located on a site the local people long
considered "fairy haunted." But the most conclusive skeletal remains of
these small dolichocephalic (long-headed), non-Aryan, "intrusive people"
had been destroyed (pp. 227-28) not by the superstitious country folk
but by the bourgeois tourists trampling on the site in their quest for
the English past.

When the remains of neolithic Swiss dwarfs were found at Schweizerbild
near Schaffhausen around 1893, the "pygmy school" thought it had found
conclusive physical evidence. MacRitchie had not found dwarf skeletons
in his chambered mounds, but here they were, clear physical evidence of
an early dwarf creation as well as an explanation of the origin of the
fairies. Additional dwarf skeletons found at Spy in Belgium seemed to
further validate the "pygmy theory." Professor Fraipoint, the expert
examining the skeletons at Spy, identified them as those of very early
peoples. To him they looked analogous to modern Laplanders; they were
very short, he concluded, with "voluminous heads, massive bodies, short
arms and bent legs. They led a sedentary life, frequented caves,
manufactured flint implements ... and were contemporary with the
Mammoth" (qtd. in Andrews, pp. 129-30).

The euhemerist case did not depend solely on the findings of
archaeologists. After the 1870s, the African Pygmies discovered by
George Schweinfurth became the living physical support for the "pygmy
theory" of fairy origins and the most likely and visible proof of the
prehistoric existence of fairies. When, in the course of colonial
expansion, British explorations located dwarflike and Pygmy peoples
where they had not been previously known to exist--in the Congo and the
Uganda borderlands, and ostensibly near Mount Atlas, in
Morocco--MacRitchie's theories seemed incontrovertible. The findings of
archaeology, prehistory, ethnology, and of recent explorations--when
added to the quasi-Darwinian theory of cultural evolution--seemed, by
the turn of this century, to make the origin of the fairies a simple
matter: they were Pygmy peoples who had once inhabited the entire world.
For Colonel R. G. Haliburton, "little dark-complexioned smiths and
magicians" (closely resembling the Akka dwarfs of Morocco he believed he
had discovered) were responsible for the Scottish belief in brownies and
the Welsh memory of Merlin's band of dwarf smiths (Dwarf Survivals and
Traditions, p. 76[1895]).

From the 1840s till the 1920s, the elfin peoples had a surprisingly
large impact on the society that witnessed, studied, painted,
dramatized, and wrote about them. The Victorian study of fairy lore acts
as an excellent reflector of both the dominant ideas and the concealed
anxieties of the era.