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All this might account for many details that we are told concerning the dwarfs, the Picts, the Finns, or by whatever other names the elvish race may have been known to Scots and Irishmen. But further than this I cannot go with Mr. MacRitchie. I hold his error, like that of Liebrecht already discussed, to be founded on too narrow an induction.
This volume will have been written in vain, as it appears that for Mr. MacRitchie the vastly more important works of Dr. Tylor and Mr. Andrew Lang have been written in vain, unless I have made it clear that the myths of nations all over the world follow one general law and display common characteristics.
Ethnol. Of stone structures built by fairies or little people for the use of others, may be mentioned the churches built by dwarfs in Scotland and Brittany, and described by Mr. MacRitchie, as also the two following instances, taken from widely distant parts of the globe.
MacRitchie does not reckon with is, that no theory will explain the nature and origin of the fairy superstitions which does not also explain the nature and origin of every other supernatural being worshipped or dreaded by uncivilized mankind throughout the world.
MacRitchie has, first in "The Archæological Review," and since then more elaborately in a separate book, entitled "The Testimony of Tradition," worked it out and fortified it with an array of arguments philological, historical, topographical, and traditional.
The workmen were soon convinced of this, and our digging had the effect of proving to them that the fairies had nothing to do with at least two of these hillocks." The same may surely be said of that favourite and important fairy haunt Tomnahurich, near Inverness, though Mr. MacRitchie seems to think that an investigation, were such possible, of its interior, might lead to a different explanation.
But all these things, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, must be very perplexing to Mr. MacRitchie, if he be not prepared to prove that Annamites and Arabs, Hebrews and Shoshone, New Zealanders and classical Greeks alike, were acquainted with the Picts and the Finns, and alike celebrated them in their traditions. The truth Mr.
And this was followed in 1901 by his edition of ‘Lavengro,’ which, notwithstanding certain unnecessary carpings at Borrow—such, for instance, as the assertion that the word “dook” is never used in Anglo-Romany for “ghost”—is beyond any doubt the best edition of the book ever published. G. R. Sims and Mr. David MacRitchie.
MacRitchie considers to have formed the subjects of the fairy legend have themselves tales of little people. This is true especially of the Eskimo, as will have been already noticed, a fact to which my attention was called by Mr. Hartland. For the reasons just enumerated, I am unable to accept Mr.
Lastly, a few words must be expended on a totally different theory lately put forward by Mr. MacRitchie. This theory is not altogether a new one; it has been before the world for many years. But Mr.
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