The Testimony of Tradition

There is yet another characteristic of the modern Aino which suggests the dwarf of the British Isles. "Mention must also be made of an anatomical peculiarity of the Aino skeleto...

It is manifest that the traditions relating to "the little people" contain many statements which at the first sight seem to be irreconcilable with one another. In one aspect, th...

So numerous are the mounds that, owing to the traditions attaching to them, invite their own destruction at the hands of the archæologist, that only a limited number of them can...

There is one variety of the underground dwellings which, in the northern counties of Scotland if not elsewhere, is more specially indicated by the term "Earth House," or "Eirde...

Such barrows as these of the Boyne district belong to the largest class of these structures at present revealed to us. What may be taken as the average "fairy knowe" is very muc...

Anyone familiar with the shape of the long, narrow, skin-covered skiff of the Eskimo (which, as has just been pointed out, is completely "decked," with the exception of the roun...

The Gaelic accounts do not, of course, refer to the "Fairies" under that name. It is therefore unnecessary to add anything here to the many attempted solutions of the etymology...

It is in the Shetland Tales that we hear a great deal of creatures partly more than human, partly less so, which appear in the interchangeable shape of men and seals. They are s...

While the Picts, or Pechts, are remembered to a great extent as the builders of the subterranean and half-subterranean dwellings with which they are associated, these are far fr...

In a reference to the popular traditions of Northumberland, the Picts are spoken of as "a race of people who are represented, in such legends, as endowed with supernatural power...

But, if the legendary "Feens" are identical with, or closely akin to, the Picts of history, then the historical Picts must also belong to this stunted Eskimo-like race. Let us l...

The references made in the two preceding chapters bear specially upon those Finns who "came ow'r fa Norraway" to the islands of Shetland and Orkney. But if the assumption be cor...

It is clear that those popular traditions and records, as well as the indisputable statements of Brand and Wallace, indicate two very different kinds of people, who, sometimes f...

"The Feens, then, belonged to the pre-Milesian races, and were connected, not only with Ireland, but likewise with Northern and Central Scotland, England and Wales, and the terr...

But, admitting the existence, at so recent a date, of a visibly "Eskimo" caste in some parts of the Hebrides, what evidence is there that any of these people found their way to...

In the immediately preceding pages we have been considering the people known as "Pechts." But it is contended that the "Feens" of Gaelic story ought to be identified with the "P...

When the twelfth-century Norseman, Sigurd Slembe, with his twenty followers, spent a whole winter with the Lapps or Finns, as stated in the "Heimskringla" (Saga XIV), it is evid...

The Brugh of the Boyne--The Brugh as Described in 1724--Gaels _versus_ Dananns--Dananns, Fir Sidhe, or Fairies--Cruithne=Feinne--Inmates of the Brugh--Plunder of the Boyne Hillo...