The Science of Fairy Tales / An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology

I shall leave it to Celtic scholars to deal with Mr. MacRitchie's remarkable etymologies and with his historical arguments, confining myself to one or two observations on the traditional aspect of the theory. Now I should be the last to undervalue any traces of history to be found in tradition. I have elsewhere drawn attention to the importance of the study of this element in folk-tales;[245] and I am quite ready to admit that nothing is more likely than the transfer to the mythical beings of Celtic superstition of some features derived from alien races. Savages and barbarians are in the habit of imputing to strangers and foes in greatly extended measure the might of witchcraft they claim for themselves. And the wider the differences between themselves and the foreigners, the more mysterious to them are the habits and appearance of the latter, and the more powerful do they believe them. 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. I am not astonished to find the Shetland tale of marriage with a seal-woman reproduced on the Gold Coast and among the Dyaks of Borneo. But Mr. MacRitchie ought to be very much astonished; for he can hardly show that the historical Finns were known in these out-of-the-way places. It seems to me natural to find that in Scotland and Ireland fairies dwelt in barrows, and in Annam and Arabia in hills and rocks; and that both in this country and in the far East they inveigled unhappy mortals into their dwellings and kept them for generations?nay, for centuries. That the Shoshone of California should dread their infants being changed by the Ninumbees, or dwarfs, in the same way as the Celts of the British Islands, and the Teutons too, dreaded their infants being changed, does not seem at all incredible to me. That to eat the food of the dead in New Zealand prevents a living man from returning to the land of the living, just as Persephone was retained in Hades by partaking of the pomegranate, and just as to eat the food of fairies hinders the Manx or the Hebrew adventurer from rejoining his friends on the surface of the earth, is in no way perplexing to me. 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.

Here then we must pause. Obvious are the differences between the nations of mankind: differences of physical conformation,?that is to say, of race; divergences of mental and moral development,?that is to say, of civilization. Hitherto the task attempted by folklore has been to show that underlying all these differences there is a broad foundation of common agreement; that distinctions of race do not extend to mental and moral constitution; that the highest nation on the ladder of culture has climbed from the same rung on which the lowest are yet standing; and that the absurd and incongruous customs and institutions and the equally absurd and impossible stories and beliefs found imbedded in the civilization of the more advanced nations are explicable, and explicable only, as relics of the phases wherethrough those nations have passed from the depths of savagery.