Note 148 — Chapter V · WORSHIP OF THE MALEVOLENT DEAD.

In connection with these treasure guardians, we reach another cycle of folk-lore legends, that of gifts or robberies from fairy-land. Professor Rhys, writing of the Celts, well explains the principle on which these are based.148 “The Celts, in common with all other peoples of Aryan race, regarded all their domestic comforts as derived by them from their ancestors in the forgotten past, that is to say from the departed. They seem, therefore, to have argued that there must be a land of untold wealth and bliss somewhere in the nether world inhabited by their dead ancestors; and the further inference would be that the things they most valued in life had been procured from the leaders of that nether world through fraud or force by some great benefactor of the human race; for it seldom seems to have entered their minds that the powers below would give up anything for nothing.” Hence the many tales which thus account for the bringing of fire and other blessings to man.