The book Arran; - Cook Clan

FOLK LORE 255
Highlands, under Christian influences, to the conception of
' fallen angels ' who were shut out from heaven and did not
enter hell. The English poet Chaucer fairly equates the
Fairy Queen with Proserpine, Queen of the Dead, mistress
of the otherworld. King Arthur, and others of note, did
not die ; they were carried away to the fairy kingdom.^
Birth and death were equally mysterious to the primitive
mind : hence a world-wide similarity in the strange tales
woven around the two most familiar phenomena of human
life, the puzzled human mind everywhere reasoning on
similar lines.
Other phenomena, physical in character or external to
the people's own lives, find explanation in the invention of
giants or monsters of various kinds and tempers. It is the
same sort of reasoning as we find in much later times describing
great works of unknown origin, such as cairns and
standing-stones, as the production of gigantic personages.
A few of these tales form the second class of those here given.
A. FAIRIES
AM FIGHEADAIR CROTACH
Bho chionn fada nan clan bha figheadair beag, crotach a' c6mhnuidh
an Loch-Raonasa. Latha 's e 'dol do'n bheinn a bhuain
rainich, thainig e gu h-obann air buidheann shithichean 'us iad mu
theinn a' damhsadh ann an lagan uaine, grianach, uaigneach. Lan
ne6nachais laigh e sios aig cM garaidh-balla a chum 's gu'm
1 Cf. ' There be many places called Fairie-hills, which the Mountain People think
impious and dangerous to peel and discover, by taking earth or wood from them ;
superstitiously believing the souls of their predicessors to dwell there ' (Kirk's-
Secret Commonwealth of Elves and Fairies (1691), ed. 1893, p. 28).
' Bot, sen my spreit mon fra my body go,
I recommend it to the Quene of Farye,
Eternallye in tyll hir court to carye.'
Sir D. Lyndsay's Testament of the Papyngo.
There are, of course, other explanations current as to the origin of the fairy faith.