Note 39 — Chapter XII · Race in Folklore and Myth

Now at last I come to the question, what pre-Celtic race or races make themselves evident in the mass of things touched on in this and the foregoing chapters? The answer must, I think, recognize at least two. First comes the race of the mound folk, consisting of the short swarthy people variously caricatured in our fairy tales. They formed isolated fractions of a widely spread race possessed of no political significance whatsoever; but, with the inconsistency ever clinging to everything connected with the fairies, the weird and uncanny folk emerging from its underground lairs seems to have exercised on other races a sort of permanent spell of mysteriousness amounting to adoration. In fact, Irish literature tells us that the síde were worshipped (p. 678). Owing to his faculty of exaggeration, combined with his inability to comprehend the little people, the Celt was enabled to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs and brownies, a whole world of wizardry and magic. The real race of the little people forms the lowest stratum which we can reach, to wit, at a level no higher, seemingly, than that of the present-day natives of Central Australia. Thus some of the birth stories of Cúchulainn and Étáin seem to have passed through their hands, and they bear a striking resemblance to certain notions of the Lapps (pp. 657–8). In fact, the nature of the habitations of our little people, together with other points which might be mentioned, would seem at first sight to betoken affinity with the Lapps; but I am warned by experts39 that there are serious craniological difficulties in the way of any racial comparison with the Lapps, and that one must look rather to the dwarf populations once widely spread over our hemisphere, and still to be found here and there in Europe, as, for example, in Sicily. To come nearer our British Isles, the presence of such dwarfs has been established with regard to Switzerland in neolithic times40.