- If you had asked your great-great-grandmother if she
believed in fairies, she would have looked at you askance. Believe in fairies?
Of course she did!
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- Ninety-five per cent of Scots continued to believe in
fairies right up until the middle of the 19th century. These were not the
diminutive, be-winged fairies of 1800s children's books. No, these were
strange folk who bewitched you, killed your cattle and kidnapped your wives
and daughters.
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- Fairy lore flowed through the centuries, their presence
acknowledged in ballads, poems and stories. They came in all shapes and
sizes and different parts of Scotland had different myths. Even today they
are remembered in the fairy glens and fairy hills found in every part of
Scotland.
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- This belief in fairies extended beyond Scotland; there
was almost universal acknowledgement that they existed.
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- "Fairy folklore was world-wide," says Dr Lizanne
Henderson, a lecturer of history at the University of Glasgow's Crichton
Campus. "They filled a need to explain the unexplainable. It was easier
to look for a rational explanation for things that happened, and back then
fairies were the rational explanation."
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- Yet for all that was written on the subject, there was
no consensus about what the fairies were. Earlier writings speak of them
as being dead souls or fallen angels. When a more "rational explanation"
was needed, there was a move away from describing fairies as mystical and
an attempt to place them within the human world.
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- John Frances Campbell of Islay was one of the first to
go into print with his new theory. "I believe there once was a small
race of people in these islands," he wrote in 1860.
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- Campbell's theory remained speculative until a remarkable
archaeological discovery in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores. The
skeletal remains of a dwarf man, similar to modern humans, were discovered
in a cave. Carbon dating proved that this small humanoid co-existed with
modern man and may have survived until fairly recently. In light of this
discovery, Indonesian folk tales of "little people" are being
re-evaluated and questions are being asked if these abnormally small people
have been living with us all along.
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- "I think it's highly unlikely," says Michael
Bird, a geo-scientist and professor at St Andrews University who was involved
in carbon dating the skull in Indonesia. "Although it's good for funding
to let people speculate that they were around for a long time, I think
it is probable that modern human ate them just as soon as they landed on
the islands."
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- Bird is even less enamoured of any attempt to suggest
that a similar race of little people were responsible for the fairy lore
of Scotland, pointing out the devastating effect of the Scottish Ice Age.
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- "Scotland was virtually completely covered during
the Ice Age and would have been a particularly nasty place to be,"
says Bird. "I really don't think anyone would have survived it."
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- Whilst it seems unlikely that a race of little people
were hiding in the woods of Scotland, the commonality of fairy lore still
demands some universal explanation. One man not afraid to stand up and
state his belief is Sir Iain Noble, the owner of Hotel Eilean Iarmain on
the Isle of Skye.
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- "There's no question that they existed. They most
definitely did," Noble insists. "We have two fairy houses quite
close by and we have records of conversations between fairies and people
on the island."
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- Nobel is referring to the houses at Glenn an Uird, but
so-called fairy houses cover Skye like a rash. The island is particularly
rich with fairy stories and these underground homes have long been regarded
as the doorways the fairies, or na Sithein, used between their world and
our own.
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- "From 1000BC onwards, the Iron Age people were prevalent
in Skye," says Martin Wildgoose, an archaeologist who helped in the
excavation of the fairy houses and concedes there could be a fact-based
explanation for fairies. "They were probably much smaller than us,
and they lived in turfed underground houses.
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- "The Vikings could easily have started the stories
about the fairies," he continues. "After all they were tall,
blond-haired, and would have been quite startled by these small, dark strangers
emerging from grassy knolls."
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- That Iron Age people had their own language, religion
and lived underground is not in dispute, but to suggest that they are the
inspiration for fairy myth is a step too far for Henderson, the Glasgow
University history lecturer.
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- "I just don't buy this original Iron Age man thing
at all," she says. "The facts just don't fit what we know of
the oral tradition."
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- For all our progress and science, we are still as unsure
about the origins of fairies as our confused ancestors. Still, few people
seriously believe in them any longer.
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- "I had assumed that fairy belief was a dead tradition,"
says Henderson. "People are reluctant to admit to it - because fairies
have become the realm of children - but it is amazing how many people come
up to me and confess that they still believe."
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- ©2005 Scotsman.com
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- http://heritage.scotsman.com/myths.cfm?id=449042005
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