Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/124

116 its construction, it was merely a cenotaph. A grave there was, sunk more than twelve feet deep in the chalk rock; but no corporeal tenant had ever occupied it. Picts and Finns were alike foreign to it; yet here is a legend just like some of those Mr. MacRitchie relies on, of a fairy festival within its earthen walls, which has persisted to our certain knowledge for seven hundred years. I have dealt elsewhere with Mr. MacRitchie's book, and have no intention of discussing it again. It is an argument to prove a thesis quite untenable, namely, that the fairies of tradition were the prehistoric, dwarfish, races of Northern Europe driven out by the ancestors of the present peoples. In Scotland and Ireland, the author tells us, these races were called Picts and Finns, and they inhabited barrows, such as are still known in Scotland as Picts' Houses. Many of these barrows seem, in fact, to have been used as residences: to some of them fairy traditions yet cling, and they are quoted by Mr. MacRitchie in proof of his position. The legend of Willey How is an instance of a tradition of this kind, attaching with great persistency to a barrow that never was a place of human abode; and it is not an unfair test of the value of the evidence Mr. MacRitchie brings forward to support this branch of his argument.

Of Miss Garnett's book on The Christian Women of Turkey, it will be enough to say here that the folk-tales it contains were all, or nearly all, previously in print, though scarcely any of them were known to English readers. They are all interesting, and their importance is enhanced by the full and vivid account of native life and superstitions in which they are embedded. Dr. Krauss has included a number of sagas illustrative of South Slavonic superstitions in his work on that subject. The narratives have been gathered at first hand, and the particulars relative to them are carefully recorded.

The Doyle Fairy Book and (except for the last chapter) Shadowland in Ellan Vannin hardly fall within the limits