There are, however, several good objections to this view of the origin of the fairy idea. First and foremost, the smaller prehistoric aboriginal peoples of Europe themselves possessed tales of little people, of spirits of field and forest, flood and fell. It is unlikely that man was ever without these.
Yea, I sang, as now I sing, when the Prehistoric Spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove,
And the troll, and gnome, and dwerg, and the gods of cliff and berg
Were about me and beneath me and above.[35]
The idea of animism, the belief that everything had a personality of its own, certainly belonged to the later prehistoric period, for among the articles which fill the graves of aboriginal peoples, for use on the last journey, we find weapons to enable the deceased to drive off the evil spirits which would surround his own after death. Spirits, to early man, are always relatively smaller than himself. He beholds the “picture 87 of a little man” in his comrade’s eyes, and concludes it to be his ‘soul.’ Some primitive peoples, indeed, believe that several parts of the body have each their own resident soul. Again, the spirit of the corn or the spirit of the flower, the savage would argue, must in the nature of things be small. We can thus see how the belief in ‘the little folk’ may have arisen, and how they remained little until a later day.
A much more scientific theory of the origin of the belief in fairies is that which sees in them the deities of a discredited religion, the gods of an aboriginal people, rather than the people themselves. Such were the Irish Daoine Sidhe, and the Welsh y Mamau (‘the Mothers’)—undoubtedly gods of the Celts. Again, although in many countries, especially in England, the fairies are regarded as small of stature, in Celtic countries the fay proper, as distinct from the brownie and such goblins, is of average mortal height, and this would seem to be the case in Brittany. Whether the gorics and courils of Brittany, who seem sufficiently small, are fairies or otherwise is a moot point. They seem to be more of the field spirit type, and are perhaps classed more correctly with the gnome race; we thus deal with them in our chapter on sprites and demons. It would seem, too, as if there might be ground for the belief that the normal-sized fairy race of Celtic countries had become confounded with the Teutonic idea of elves (Teut. Elfen) in Germany and England, from which, perhaps, they borrowed their diminutive size.
But these are only considerations, not conclusions. Strange as it may seem, folk-lore has by no means solved the fairy problem, and much remains to be accomplished ere we can write ‘Finis’ to the study of fairy origins.