Note 15 — Chapter XII · Race in Folklore and Myth

The attribution of these and similar characteristics to the fairies can scarcely be all mere feats of fancy and imagination: rather do they seem to be the result of our ancestors projecting on an imaginary world a primitive civilization through which tradition represented their own race as having passed, or, more probably, a civilization in which they saw, or thought they saw, another race actually living. Let us recur for examples also to the two lake legends which have just been mentioned (p. 650): in both of them a distinction is drawn between the lake fairy’s notion of bread and that of the men and women of the country. To the fairy the latter’s bread appeared crimped or overbaked: possibly the backward civilization, to which she was supposed to belong, was content to support itself on some kind of unleavened bread, if not rather on a fare which included nothing deserving to be called bread at all. Witness Giraldus Cambrensis’ story of Eliodorus, in which bread is conspicuous by its absence, the nearest approach to it being something of the consistency of porridge: see p. 270 above. Then take another order of ideas: the young man in both lake legends lives with his mother (pp. 3, 27): there is no father to advise or protect him: he is in this respect on a level with Undine, who is the protegee of her tiresome uncle, Kühleborn. Seemingly, he belongs to a primitive society where matriarchal ideas rule, and where paternity is not reckoned15. This we are at liberty at all events to suppose to have been the original, before the narrator had painted the mother a widow, and given the picture other touches of his later brush.