Little people

[wolfinthewood]

Much of the last few weeks has gone by in a feverish blur - first a nasty little virus, and then the head cold that invaded while I was convalescing.

One of the things that cheered me in passing was the news of what sounds like quite persuasive evidence that the famous Indonesian ‘Hobbit’ was indeed a member of a separate human species. There was a piece in the Guardian.

(Mind you, I love the way the archaeologists find the remains of a female, and the news media illustrate the story with a picture of a male, with a club, ‘returning from a hunt’. It makes my brain hurt to unpack all the sexist assumptions in there, so I am not going to bother.)

Right from the start, the discovery of ‘Homo floresiensis’ has reminded me of the theories, controversial in his own time and now discounted, of the Victorian folklorist David Macritchie. In his book The Testimony of Tradition (1890) and later works he argued that fairy beliefs arose from folk-memories of prehistoric tribes of rarely-seen dwarfish humans. In point of fact, I am certain that he was totally wrong about the origin of fairy beliefs. But his hypothesis is fun to play with:

The attributes with which the “little people” of North Europe are accredited cannot be given in detail here. It is enough to note that they were believed to live in houses wholly or partly underground, the latter kind being described as “hollow” mounds, or hills; that when people of taller race entered such subterranean dwellings (as occasionally they did) they found the domestic utensils of the dwarfs were of the kind labelled “pre-historic” in our antiquarian museums; that the copper vessels which dwarf women sometimes left behind them when discovered surreptitiously milking the cows of their neighbours, were likewise of an antique form; further, that they helped themselves to the beef and mutton of their neighbours, after having shot the animals with flint-headed arrows; that melodies peculiar to them are still sung by the peasants of certain localities; that words used by them are still employed by children in their games; and that many families in many districts are believed to have inherited some of their blood. Of this intercourse between the taller races and the dwarfs, there are many records in old traditions. In the days of King Arthur, when, as Chaucer tells us, the land was “ful-filled of faërie,” the knights errant had usually a dwarf as attendant. One of King Arthur's own knights was a Fairy. According to Highland tradition, every high-caste family of pure Gaelic descent had an attendant dwarf. These examples show the “little people” in a not unfriendly light. But many other stories speak of them as “malignant” foes, and as dreaded oppressors. Of which the rational explanation is that these various tales relate to various localities and epochs.

David Macritchie (1851–1925)

from Fians, Fairies and Picts (1893)


Incidentally, Macritchie's ideas influenced the imagination of the historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff in books like Sword at Sunset (1963).


tag: fairy beliefs

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Comments

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry about the virus! Glad you're feeling better.

I didn't know about the origins of that theory! I think Kage Baker draws on it too. Hmmm.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think John Buchan used that theory as the basis for a creepy short story (think it's in The Moon Endureth, but at the moment 1000s of miles preclude my checking).

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

I think you are thinking of 'No-Man's-Land' - an eerie tale, set, I think in the hills of south-west Scotland, though most of the place names are made up. It's in my copy of The Watcher by the Threshold (1902). I see the John Buchan Society have a very good online bibliography; according to that, it first appeared in Blackwood's in 1899.

Looking at it, I am sure you are right that Buchan is drawing very heavily on Macritchie's ideas.