This legend, then, shows the Fir Sidhe (or Sidhfir) as a people not always friendly to each other, although of kindred race. Moreover, it suggests that those of Ireland were divided into at least two sections—the Sidhfir of Munster and those of "the North." When we remember that in the ninth century "Feens and Fairies" were equally regarded as owners of the "underground" dwellings which were then plundered (and which still remain), it is noteworthy that in this very detail we have another parallel between the two castes—if they were two. For the Feens of Ireland were also divided into sections, and it may be remembered that two of these—"the Feens of Leinster and the east of Ulster," and those of "Connaught and the west of Ireland," were referred to on a previous page as engaged in building a famous hill-fort for their great leader, Fin. If the "Sidhfir of the North" were not the same as the Feens of Leinster and the east of Ulster, they occupied much of the same ground, and had so many points in common, that it is difficult to say wherein they differed.
Nor is this deduction at variance with the belief that the people just named were one with the Pechts of history. For the Cruithné of Ulster formed a distinct division of the Pechts; and, indeed, to be still more specific, were latterly associated with the eastern part of that province. And, as for internecine warfare, that forms no obstacle to the identification of the historical Pechts, in their later stages, with the Sidhfir of popular legend.[149]
Like the rivers of the same name in Leinster and Munster, there is a Blackwater in Perthshire which has fairy traditions, and, in consequence, the valley through which it flows is known as Glenshee (Gleann-sith). It is also remembered as a favourite hunting-ground of the Feens. Here they used to come, says an ancient poem,[150] to chase the deer and elk. The stories of Fin and his Feens are full of references to their hunting exploits. And an old poem[151] recites how, even while Ireland was chiefly peopled and ruled by another race, the ancient rights of the Feens, in this as in other respects, were still duly acknowledged. Fin, we are told,
"possessed the old rights
Which previously were his.
From Hallowmass on to Beltin,
His Feens had all the rights.
The hunting without molestation,
Was theirs in all the forests."
The "rights" possessed by these people between All Hallow-tide and Beltin, or from the first of November to the first of May, were, according to Keating,[152] that they were quartered upon the country-people, who had to support them during all that period. But from the first of May on to the first of November, the Feens were obliged to support themselves, which they did by hunting and fishing. It was during this latter period, therefore, that "the hunting without molestation was theirs in all the forests." Perhaps the expression "all the forests" is too comprehensive. Mr. J. F. Campbell, in referring to the Feens,[153] speaks of their "maintaining themselves by hunting deer, extensive tracts of land being allotted to them for that purpose." Perhaps, also, the word "forest" ought to be understood much in the way that "deer forest" now is.
"It was said at that time," says a West Highland tale,[154] "that Ireland was a better hunting-ground than the Scotch Highlands; that there were many great beamed deer in it, rather than in the Highlands. It was this which used to cause the Feens to be so often in Ireland." Nevertheless, the poem by Allan MacRuaridh, already referred to, states that the Perthshire Glenshee (or rather, the more important of the two Perthshire glens so named) was famous as a hunting-ground of the Feens, for the reason that it abounded in "deer and elk." Whether the "elk" of the one writer, and the "great antlered deer" of the other represent the same animal, or two separate species now extinct in these islands, is uncertain. In the account contributed to the (Old) Statistical Account of Scotland, the minister of the parish of Clunie, Perthshire, which is not very far from Glenshee, remarks (ix. 256-7, note): "The head of the urus has been dug up in this neighbourhood, as also the palmated horns of the elk, together with the horns and skeletons of large deer, supposed to be the moose-deer."[155] One of the tales of the Feens, which is common from County Mayo to Sutherlandshire, says Mr. J. F. Campbell, has reference to the hunting of an animal called the lon-dubh, which word Mr. Campbell, on the suggestion of his collector (Mr. MacLean), believes ought to be translated "black elk." This "black elk," then, which the Feens used to hunt, was an animal of much greater size than the deer, on the testimony of these tales, told in the degenerate days when the "black elk" and its hunters had become only a memory. "These [tales] may date from the days when men hunted elks in Erin, as they now do in Scandinavia," says Mr. Campbell.[156] It is to be remembered, however, that at the battle of Gawra, and, indeed, long after that date, the Feens of Scandinavia were in association with those of Ireland and of Scotland; and traditions relating to animals long extinct in Britain might really refer to incidents in Scandinavia, within comparatively modern times. But, on the other hand, there is the visible testimony of the "palmated horns of the elk, together with the horns and skeletons of large deer, supposed to be the moose-deer," dug up in the very neighbourhood which is famous as a favourite hunting-ground of the Feens, where they came "to chase the deer and elk." The inference is, then, that either the tales which relate to that time are very old, or else that the animals referred to did not become extinct in these localities at a very remote date.
And the latter inference is, in point of fact, the right one; if we do not restrict lon-dubh to the precise meaning of "black elk." Mr. J. F. Campbell not only tells us that certain "great antlered deer" were formerly hunted by the Feens, but he also points out Sutherlandshire traditions which tell how witches and fairies used to milk the female deer. And this statement forms one of the reasons which lead him to believe that Fairies, Picts, and Lapps were practically one people; for his deduction therefrom is this:—"Fairies, then, milked deer, as Lapps do." Now, the point of this is that the deer milked by the Lapps is the reindeer, and not any variety of deer now existing in the British Islands. Mr. Campbell's further reference to "a story published by Grant Stewart, in which a ghost uses a herd of deer to carry her furniture," quite bears out his belief that the reindeer was domesticated, as well as hunted, by the little people. And it is an actual historical fact that the reindeer was hunted in Caithness so recently as the twelfth century. In a very full and exhaustive "Notice of Remains of the Rein-Deer, Cervus tarandus, found in Ross-shire, Sutherland, and Caithness,"[157] the late Dr. John A. Smith, Sec. S. A., Scot., has pointed out that the seventeenth-century historian, Torfæus, mentions that it was the custom of two earls of Orkney, during the twelfth century, to cross over to Caithness from the Orkneys, for the purpose of hunting the roe-deer and the reindeer. Dr. Smith adds that the correctness of Torfæus' statement having been at one time called in question, the matter was placed beyond all doubt by a reference to the work of a learned annotator and editor of Torfæus (of the year 1780), who shows that the original manuscript whence Torfæus derived his information uses the words "rauddýri edr hreína" to denote those roes and reindeer of Caithness. Indeed, Dr. Smith's paper affords plenty of confirmation of this historical statement, since it is chiefly devoted to a consideration of the reindeer's horns found in various parts of the north of Scotland; some of them in those very "brochs" which are so associated with "the little people." And as, even at the present day, the higher mountains of Scotland abound in reindeer-lichen, there is nothing in the natural condition of the place to contradict the assertion of the historian. Therefore, Mr. Campbell's hypothesis that the fairy "herds of Glen Odhar" were herds of reindeer, receives every confirmation from history, tradition, and fact. And, thus, the figure of the reindeer incised on the monumental stone near Grantown, in the same quarter of Scotland (of which a representation is given on page 122 of Dr. Anderson's "Scotland in Early Christian Times"), may have been "drawn from life" at that very place, and need not be any older than the twelfth century.[158]
"Hunting appears all along to have been a favourite amusement of the Seelie Court," says a writer on the fairies of Clydesdale,[159] "and innumerable are the stories which are told concerning the magnificence and splendour of the royal retinue." There is also a Highland tale[160] which describes how the dwarfs used to be seen "hunting on the sides of Ben Muich Dhui, dressed in green, and with silver-mounted bridles to their horses which jingled as they rode." And a writer of the seventeenth century[161] tells "how there was a King and Queen of Pharie, of such a Court, and train, as they had, and how they had the teind [tithe] and dutie, as it were, of all corn, flesh, and meale, how they rode and went alongs the sides of hills, all in Green apparel." That green was the special colour of the fairies, everybody knows. And that it was also the colour of the Feens is what certain sections of the people of modern Ireland do not allow one to forget.
Thus, in regarding these people as hunters, any distinction between "Feens and Fairies" seems to vanish altogether. Although it does not appear to be stated in so many words that the Feens "had the tithe and dutie, as it were, of all corns, flesh, and meale," yet the same fact is practically stated when we are told that, during the six months of autumn and winter, the Feens were kept in idleness by the people of the country ("billeted upon the country," as Keating has it), and this as a matter of right. The very dates upon which this period began and ended—Hallow-E'en and Walpurgis-night—are pregnant with "fairy" associations. And when the green-clad Feens, typified by their dwarf chief, had the exclusive right of hunting, during the spring and summer months, up till the end of October, over "extensive tracts of land allotted to them for that purpose," they could not have greatly differed from those little people who are even yet remembered as "hunting on the sides of Ben Muich Dhui, dressed in green." And it was distinctly understood that this right was theirs "without molestation." There is a real matter-of-fact meaning in the ballad, placed in the mouths of people of a taller race, and relating to that period and those privileged hunters—
"Up the airy mountain,
Down the rocky glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men."