Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

saw that they had made a grin, he himself made two."What was the meaning of your grinning at us?" said the amhusg."What was the meaning of your grinning at me?" said Conall. Said they, "Our grinning atthee meant that thy fresh royal blood will be ours to quench our thirst, and thy fresh royalflesh to polish our teeth." And, said Conall, "The meaning of my grinning is, that I will lookout for the one with the biggest knob and slenderest shanks, and knock out the brains of therest with that one, and his brains with the knobs of the rest."Evidently, the little men of that particular time and place had not yet invented their paralyzing ray!The tale of Conall Gulban, recorded by Campbell of Islay in West Highland Tales, continues withmany wonderful fights in other lands. In France, for example, Conall wins in the same absurd wayover "the house of the Tamhaisg, the best warriors that the King of France had." MacRitchieconcluded:It is of course to be understood that the passage as it stands is as impossible as it isludicrous. But this does not interfere with the assumption that the basis of the story may bean actual encounter between men of tall stature and a race of dwarfs; the excessive numberof the latter, and the ease with which the hero swings them about, being merely theembroidering of tale-tellers in later times.As for the seeming impossibility that a tale could be transmitted for fifteen centuries and yet behistorical, MacRitchie adds:It ought to be remembered that the oral transmission of history and genealogy, with the mostcareful attention to language and details, was a perfect science among the Gaelic-speakingpeoples.But, then, what became of the dwarfish race? According to MacRitchie in Scots Lore (1895), thedwarfs were destroyed or went into hiding toward the sixth century, when Columba and hisfollowers carried on a religious war against the Picts. At the same time, he says, the Irishmen werealso using force against the same people in the north of Ireland. And since the new owners of theland felt for their ancient enemies a mixture of guilt and fear, numerous rumors were bornconcerning the ghosts of the Picts, still roaming through the land. And this in turn led to the elvesand fairies. This theory – generally referred to as the "pygmie theory" – is no longer tenable in theface of the evidence historians have gathered about the Picts.The name "Picti," according to Wainwright in The Problem of the Picts (1955), appears first in 297A.D., and from that time on, it is applied to all the peoples who lived north of the Antonine Walland were not Scots. We are really concerned with the predecessors of the Picts, who formed variousgroups called "Proto-Picts." Could MacRitchie's pygmies have figured among the Proto-Picts?Should we believe that, among the Proto-Picts, there were dwarfs who were mistaken for a nativepeople? And, then, where did they come from? MacRitchie's theory offers only confusion, and it isamusing to observe his embarrassment when he must report that the Fenlanders were not onlydwarfish, but black, too. Could it be that there were ikals in Northern Europe at the dawn ofrecorded history?In his conclusion to his discussion of the pygmie theory, which he rejects as Hartland does, Evans-Wentz remarks that it leaves all the problems of the historical origins of the fairy-faith unsolved,since it is clearly global, not limited to the Celtic lands. Thus A. Lang, in his introduction to the1922 edition of Kirk's book, states that "to my mind at least, the subterranean inhabitants of Mr.Kirks's book are not so much a traditional recollection of a real dwarfish race living underground (ahypothesis of Sir Walter Scott's) as a lingering memory of the chthonian beings, the Ancestors."