PIGMIES AND FAIRIES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3335, 13 February 1918, Page 53

PIGMIES AND FAIRIES.

By Jessie Mackay. Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together ;- Green jacket, red .cap, and white owl's feather. * If the Scottish fairies were but termed "good" folk and "peaceful" folk as a matter of nervous placation, as the oldGreeks called their dishevelled and ruthJess Fates the Ewmenides or Merciful Ones, there was no doubt that these tricksy habitants of the Caledonian glens were truly regarded as "w.ee" folk. The modern Euhemerist, in Scotland as in other lands, has busied himself not only with divesting these "wee folk" of actual existence to-day, but of typical existence in any age —that is to fay, in reducing their elfinhood to a primitive error that grew, to regard the traditions ofs an actual race of aboriginal pigmies as fairy tales proper. This, of course, would rationally account for fairy wives and husbands, for the stealing of mortal children, for cavedwellers who shunned the day, and possibly for certain legends of hidden treasure. This would not trench upon that "Pet and Pict" controversy which also identifies both the name and stature of the ancient North Highlanders wjth these indigenous "Pets" or dwarfs supposed to precede the tali Gaels. Now, the fairies, as fairies pure and simple, have never quite gone out of fashion. One of the most positive authorities on this head, we understand, is 0. W. Leadbeater, the ex-leader of an Indian branch of Theosophy, jwho had seen fairies in every, land he visited, and could even give the special colours worn by each liation of little folk. Both Scotland and New Zealand were on the list, though I have, unfortunately, forgotten their respective colour-uniform » The dwarf theory is, however, trenchantly attacked ir: a recent issue of the Celtic' Monthly by a pundit Avorth listenins? to. the well-known European mythologist, Mr Donald A. Mackenzie. Mr Mackenzie exxoressbg repudiates his own predilection for fairy lore as- an abstract affair of books and science. In his Highland childhood he had drawn in with every breath these stories of elf and kelpie, seal-folk, mermaids, and waterhorses He now repels with hot disdain the theory that fairies were ever anything but their lovely, tricksy selves, particularly that they had ever been a hunted race of little earth-dwellers, such as that unlovelv folk forecasted in the "Time Machine" bv Mr H. G. Wells. That early work, it may be remembered, looked on to a time when the proletariat of today had sunk into a permanently dwarfed and dehumanised, but cunning, race of fugitives who visited their own and their ancestral wrongs on the dwellers in the upper dav whenever occasion offered. Mr Mackenzie disbelieves in the pigmy theory for at least two good reasons. In the first place, not all the supernatural beings of Scottish romance were of diminutive size. . Scotland, in fact, abounds in giant stories, and fearsome legends of colossal beasts rising from the earth or the waters to terrify or destroy the hapless traveller. But' as well as urisk and gruagach, and the giants who sat on the headlands catching whales with oak trees for fishing-rods, there was the lingering grace of the tiny folk of tho mounds, where children listened for_ tho clinking of fairy hammers on delicate

anvils and the music of the fairy bagpipe, while the grey cliff door in one haunted dell was still thought to open and let out the elfin cavalcade, riding steeds as small and light in proportion as themselves. Might not a latent race-memory have created these dainty deruzcns of the corrie and the wood? "No," says Mr Mackenzzio again. This time the reason is an alibi. There never was a pigmy race in Scotland, nor in England, Wales, or Ireland. The Mound-builders of the Mississippi, we must infer, as well as the ancestors of the still-living Andamanese, Negrittos of the South Asian Archipelago, and dwarfs of the equatorial forest in Africa, had no definite kindred in Europe.- The nearest approach to such people is the Neanderthal man, who was apparently from sft to sft 3in. But the Neanderthal type was a long way behind any men who could possibly have been contemporary with the myth-makers of our own race. It never saw the Fourth Glacial epoch,- and was far more like a gorilla than a even the pigmy men of the Central African forest. Neolithic man was of an Iberian type, and he is perpetuated in the Southern Italians, the Southern Spaniards, and tho small dark people about the fringes of the British Isles and Britanny. If this small, but not abnormal-sized, people were the core British fairy legend the Wee Folk would be described as swarthy instead of blue-eyed -and fairhaired. Here, we may pause to reflect, we come in touch with our own .Maori myth of the fair-haired, sunny little people who were the counterpart in most things but the "green jacket, red cap, and white owl's feather" of their fairy kinsfolk in Europe. How did the Maori evolve "the same type of* fay as that of the Greek and the Highlander, unless he drew it from- that far-off, common Aryan ancestry which most students now accept as proved? Palaeolithic man. in Europe, however, , covered another type beside the stunted and ape-like Neanderthal. Later and more highly developed was the Cro-Magnon race that came to Britain after the Fourth Glacial period, and remained in Scotland during the Fifth and Sixth periods. This early settler was a hunter who crossed the land-bridge that then .joined France to Kent, and his objective was the reindeer that slowly retreated northward as the climate grew warmer. The Cro-Magnon men, so called from French remains, were large and heavy, and it is believed that this strain left Scotland her fame as a mother of tall .sons. Considerable Cro-Magnon remains have recently been unearthed at Glasgow. From France and Spain, we gather more definite impressions of the Cro-Magnon period, its life and arts. Wo say arts advisedly, for among these cavedwellers, already organised into communities, there" were artists who etched and painted with astonishing skill, taking for their subject the wiid animals they hunted for their daily food. The guild of Ung had its v European beginning in Cro-Magnon times. m But not only did these wild craftsmen draw animals. Sometimes they portrayed small figures, which undoubtedly represented nothing that ever lived on earth or under it. As far back as the Third Glacial epoch, which is variously hazarded as from 20,'000 to 70,000 8.C., the French Cro-Magnon believed in fairios of a sort, and drew them. But these tiny winged or light-footed beings were not copied from his own heavy figure. Moreover, it was not everyone who could see fairies: the power to do this was bound up for the most part with second sight, which Tevealed the scenes th§t were yet to be. The mischief they did—and it was much — was not so much the stealing of actual things likely to tempt a- small aboriginal people : it was less the substance of things than the indwelling soul of them. It was the fairy soul that peaked and pined in the changeling's body. It was the essence of things desired that the fairies stole away, more than the actual forms of them. It is plain that Mr Donald Mackenzie regards the Euhemerists and their "rationalising" of current myth much as sensible theologians regard the apolheosisof Higher Criticism from Germany, that has so long subjected the Bible, not to historical and philological but to positive chemical analysis.. The* present question probably admits of some interesting arguments from the pigmy side, but they will require quite a pinch of salt for the majority of readers. It is good to hear, in conclusion, that Rob Down, the tuneful, caustic bard of the Reay Country, has a descendant of such note" in another branch of literature.