Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/443

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writes of the fairies as " the people of peace." Yet this is cer- tainly a bit of folk-etymology, though apparently of some antiquity in Gaeldom. Note, however, that although widely spread it has practically not influenced at all the popular presentation of the fairy race. It is only the first two chapters which make any pretence at treating their subject at all exhaustively, and these may profitably be compared with the account of the fairy belief in Western Scot- land written at the end of the seventeenth century by the Rev. Robert Kirk. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the Church has often been guilty of unintelligent disregard or reprobation of folklore, but it has also produced many devoted and sympathetic students of popular creed and fancy. Campbell of Tiree takes his place by the side of Kirk, and of Walter Gregor of Pitsligo, among those recorders of folklore to whom the student can always turn with increased confidence and admiration.

Alfred Nutt.

Bedd Gelert, its Facts, Fairies, and Folklore. By D. E. Jenkins. With an Introduction by Professor Rhys. Port- madoc : Llewelyn Jenkins. 1899.

Professor Rhys has kindly contributed an introduction on place- names to this spirited production of a local press, in which every feature of the parish of Bedd Gelert, from prehistoric antiquities to the smallest modern cottage, is minutely described, and the tradi- tional history of each spot for nearly a hundred years is set forth at length. But there is no general history of the place or of the estates contained in it, nor is anything told from documentary sources except some few facts about the ancient priory. Legendary history there is in abundance, together with modern genealogy, personal details, and trivial gossip of the country side ; and among all the medley, a considerable amount of folklore. In the first place we have a chapter chiefly devoted to the demolition of Mr. Joseph Jacobs, for having ventured to suggest that the famous Greyhound legend was first attached to Bedd Gelert by a certain local poet, whereas the village tradition runs that it is due to a local innkeeper, an intruder from South Wales, who had taken the