[284] The Archæological Review, Jan. 1890, pp. 433, 434.
[285] See Vol. 13, pp. 424-6 (Nugæ Cambrica).
[286] It is to be noted that this writer renders "Gwylliaid" by "Banditti," and never refers to them as "goblins" or "fairies," though this is the usual meaning given to the word. There is no good reason for objecting to the less usual translation, except that, while it denotes one recognized characteristic of the dwarfs, after they had been cut up into small confederacies, it loses sight of other notable features of such "banditti."
[287] The difference between these people and the intangible "fairies" created by the imagination (but originating in reality) is nowhere brought out more strongly than in this passage. A hanged fairy would be quite a novelty in poetry.
[288] In her "Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy" (London, 1879, Vol. I., Letter xiv.), Mrs. Bray speaks of these "gubbins," referring to the account given by Camden as well as Fuller. Halliwell also cites "Milles' MS." As for the derivation of the word itself, it seems clearly to be connected with Welsh coblyn, English goblin and gub, and Italian gobbo—pigmy. Compare also gobban (ante, p. 134); and note the etymology quoted by Fuller (op. cit.) "that such who did 'inhabitare montes gibberosos' were called Gubbings."
[289] See Mrs. Bray's work just cited, Vol. I., Letter x.: also a reference to the goblin or "bucka" as hairy, in Mr. Whitley Stokes' "Gwreans an Bys," pp. 124, 125.
In Mr. Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England" (London, J. C. Hotten, 2nd edit., pp. 217, 218), there is a weird story of a wrestling-match by night, at a certain cairn near Penzance. The wrestlers were believed by the two onlookers to be supernatural beings:—"They were men of great size and strength, with savage faces, rendered more terrible by the masses of uncombed hair which hung about them, and the colours with which they had painted their cheeks." They had appeared to issue out of the rocks of the cairn. Although the term "great size," if it denotes stature, does not include these men among dwarfs, yet they are represented as Picti; and as "supernatural," hirsute cave-dwellers.
[290] "West Highland Tales," II., 64. (For a general reference to the nudity of those drudges see Ritson's "Fairies," London, 1831, p. 46.)
[291] Thorpe's "Northern Mythology," I., 244.
[292] Thorpe: op. cit. I., 252.