Grimm suggests that the real men, to whom gigantic forms and magic powers were afterwards attributed, were the aborigines of Scandinavia, namely the Finns, a people who, to the present day, cling to the practice of sorcery. There is considerable evidence, particularly in the publications of the Ossianic Society, for believing that it was a semi-Finnish, semi-Danish race which formed those bodies of mercenary soldiers known in the British islands as Fiana or Finians. Everyone conversant with the publications of that Society, and with Macpherson's "Ossian," is aware of the titanic and supernatural powers attributed to Finn M'Cual (the archetype of "Fingal ") and his comrades. In the instance of this piece of mythology, rendered famous by one of the grandest literary impostures, the present writer may perhaps be pardoned for referring to the pages of the Ulster Journal of Archæology' for a Paper in which he has traced this myth, as in the present case of fairies and banshees, back to fact and truth as far as possible. If the Ossianic legends are compared with those of giants in Scandinavia, some of the circumstances will be seen to be similar; and the Scandinavian origin of cognate superstitions in North Britain is implied in Laing's observation, in his "Kings of Norway," page 91, that it is but within these fifty years that trolls, or sea-trows (German giants), and Finnen, and dwarfs, disappeared from the northern parts of Scotland. The idea handed down in Ireland is of a few brave, herculean warriors, of nomad race, living on the hills, hunting wild deer and swine, wandering hither and thither, and fighting until one breed of them was exterminated. On the other hand, the Scandinavians spoke of monstrous man-eating ogres, who fled from the race of men as from intruders, abhorred, like ghosts, the light of day, and looked upon agriculture as an innovation destructive to hunting, and destined to drive them from off the face of the earth. Certainly this dread, which the savage, or sylvan man, has of the cultivator, has been felt over all the globe, from old Zealand in Denmark, to New Zealand of the Maoris. Let us now weave the earliest traces or records we have of the banshee or woman of the fairies together, in order to prove her identity in profession with existing herbalists called "fairy women." A tradition is recorded in the first page of the chief annalists of Ireland, "the Four Masters," that a ban-liagh, or female physician, was among the earliest settlers in that country; and other professionalists of the same class are mentioned in old manuscripts. In an ancient elegy,' a ban-rioghan na bruighne, or fairy queen, is represented as lamenting the fact that her caste, the ban-shees, have been deprived of all their residences excepting Slievenaman, Knockfeerin, Knockgreany, and Knockany. This last place is named from Aine, who is traditionally remembered as a banshee; and it is on legendary record that her father, who lived in the second century, was of Dé Danann caste, and was slain by Oilioll Olum, a chief 1 Ulster Journal of Archæology, vi. 294. 2 Kilkenny Journal of Archæology, vol. i. tain infamous in history for having persecuted the druids. Our readers will have remarked that the word "Knock" (cnoc), a mount or hill, usually enters, very characteristically, into the names of localities which are said to have been the abodes of fairies. Many a hill might be mentioned as claiming the same distinction, as the place first named above, Slievenaman, or correctly, Sliabh-na-mban-fionn, i.e. the mountain of the fair women, a very Parnassus, being the place where, according to tradition, bards and learned ladies dwelt. The full name of Ballingarry, a well-known locality near this mountain, is Baile-an-gharrdha-chnuic-sitheUna, or the hill-house, and garden, the seat of Una, who is now considered as having been a wonderful "fairy-woman," and who doubt. less had a medicinal herb garden here. There were similar gardens, it seems, in other places; but for the most part "the wise" or "cunning women (as they were styled), unsupplied by commerce with mineral drugs, sought and found in the wide and varied field spread by nature before them, the simple remedies which they applied to the sick and wounded. Their Materia Medica was restricted to roots and leaves, and, by the hereditary experience of ages, they possessed considerable knowledge of their native properties. Their pharmacopoeia was full enough, ranging from balm and balsam to ptisans and elixirs; with, for complaints of the passions, philters, charms, poisons, and amulets. The people, conscious of certain qualities in these medicaments for body and mind, were apt to retain a credulous faith as to the supernatural source of those powers, and this credulity was encouraged and continued by the craft of the "fairy-women." Doubtless, the manufacture and sale of the above-mentioned articles was very profitable. In a learned Paper on the census of Ireland, for 1841, Dr. Sir William Wilde comments on, and explains, several of the numerous superstitious notions which are in vogue, under the appellation of "cures" for disorders still supposed to arise from the malignity of fairies; and Sir William concludes by observing that an inquiry into the sources of Irish "cures" and "charms" would throw much light upon many topics of antiquity, and elicit such legendary information as would assist both the historian and topographer. This learned member of the medical profession has also, in his "Catalogue of the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy," mentioned the popular superstitions connected with "poisoned fairy darts." Among the herbs which "banshees" made use of to effect their cures, a few may be mentioned which are still employed by living herb doctoresses, who retain the (translated) name of fairy-women. [Mr. Hore names several of these, and after various remarks upon them and upon other cognate matters, he goes on as follows:-] "Annals of the Four Masters," A.D. 1599. In a poem composed six hundred years ago by an Ulster bard,1 the author, lamenting the loss of his chieftain in battle, imagines that he may possibly have escaped from the slaughter, be living, and concealed in a sith, or fairy mount, for, as the bard observes : "Often hath a youthful maiden put Her spells upon a man in days of yore; So that oft hath a woman borne to her fairy fort A man, when found alone. On the day of Clontarf's hot battle, A bean-sidhe bore away alive By the blue eye of her fascination." Further, the bard alludes to other instances of fairy abduction, all of which may be explained by the inferences that nothing could be more natural than for daughters of the healing art to carry wounded warriors from the battlefield home to be healed, and that, in case of failing to effect a cure, the man was buried without ceremony; and then, as neither his body was found on the field, nor himself heard of ever after, he was truly said to have been carried off by a banshee.2 John Good, the Limerick schoolmaster, writing on "The Ancient Manners of the Irish," exactly three centuries ago, gives a detailed account of the medical practice of the wise women or witches of the time. These crafty practitioners openly called on their pretended, but invisible, assistants, the fairies, for aid; particularly whenever the patient was suffering from the distemper called esane, which they declared was inflicted by elves. This malady may have been what is now commonly called a "fairy dart," an attack of boils and blains, which break out suddenly without any apparent cause. The Irish people, says the schoolmaster, fancy that these women possess spells or charms which are effectual against all diseases; and, if we may credit him, the skill of these old crones was so great that they often cured cases which had been given up by their betters. It must also be remarked that the "wise woman" was the midwife, who is still, in France, styled sage femme. In some of the Ossianic tales, there are allusions to wise women, who are usually designated "nurses," and calliagha, or hags, to whom supernatural power is ascribed. It was precisely the nurse that was the banshee, at least in our opinion. This functionary did not resemble the nurse of Shakespeare's plays, or the modern attendant on children, but was the caretaker of sick and wounded in a chieftain's house. Dr. Hanmer, the chronicler, has preserved a curious account of the ways in which the carcasses of a 2 See note 4, p. 128. "Celtic Soc. Miscellany," p. 411. sheep and a cow were disposed of whenever these animals were killed in an Irish castle in the sixteenth century. Each piece was allotted to a superior member of the family, or to a certain servitor. The "nurse" had one of the best cuts of beef, and the "astronomer" had another. This latter person, for whom astrologer is the correct term, was certainly no other than a leech, who cast nativities, and consulted the stars on any emergency. As to the female domestic, she probably combined the functions of what in England at that time was called "still- (distillery) room maid," nurse, and "keener" (caoina), i.e. professional mourner at funerals.1 . . . . The best-authenticated account of a banshee is by Lady Fanshawe, in her memoirs, who mentions an apparition of this sort occurring at Inchiquin Castle before the death of one of the O'Brien family. The whole fable we have now considered, of the appearance and lamentations of "the banshee " before the death of a member of the family she is attached to, is capable of the following conjectural explanation. Every great Irish house retained a nurse, who had knowledge of herbs, who prepared decoctions and administered them, and who attended to and watched the sick and dying. Accustomed to be up at night, she perhaps went out occasionally to gather herbs in the moonlight; and accustomed to mourn and cry, a "keener," she would, when the patient under her care was past hope, naturally begin to lament in her fashion. The inhabitants of the house or castle in which the sufferer lay, would recognise in her cries a sure sign that the sufferer was dying; and thus it came to pass that the banshee's or fairy-woman's shriek was truly deemed a forerunner of death. The phenomenon Lady Fanshawe mentions occurred about two hundred years ago. There has been no other equally plausible case since, so we may hope not to see another. On the other hand, we ourselves know one, at least, of the few "fairy-women" still living and exercising their medical craft. To meet one of these country practitioners is, therefore, to see no spectral banshee, but a notable body, the modern representative of the antique druidess and medieval witch, exerting a useful function in practising her healing art on man and beast, and, as such, well entitled to evoke our curiosity. NOTES BY DAVID MAC RITCHIE, F.S.A. (SCOT.), FELLOW. 1. Whether the Gaelic suidhe, "a seat," comes from the same root as sid, or is totally different in origin, can best be decided by Gaelic scholars. In support of Mr. Hore's view, however, may be cited "Fingal's Seat," the name given to a hillock in Glenlyon, Perthshire, and "Arthur's Seat," the name of a hill near Edinburgh. 1 See note 5, p. 128. 2. Among the miscellaneous notes on which his essay is based, Mr. Hore has the following memorandum :-" No phantom: the auld Pechts that held the country lang syne.' ›› 3. With the Baron of Upper Ossory's "fairies" may be compared a clan of "red fairies" living in Wales (Merionethshire) at precisely the same period. They are described as living "in dens in the ground," as having "long, strong arms (a characteristic of the Picts, according to tradition), and as plundering the neighbouring houses during the night-time, effecting an entrance by the chimney. "They possessed great powers over the arrow and the stone, and never missed their mark. They had a chief of their own appointment, and kept together in the most tenacious manner, having but little intercourse with the surrounding neighbourhood, except in the way of plundering, when they were deemed very unwelcome visitors. They would not hesitate to drive away sheep and cattle, in great numbers, to their dens. They would not scruple to tax (trethu) their neighbours in the face of day, and treat all and everything as they saw fit." In order to put an end to these "fairy raids,” a commission for their extermination was granted, in 1554, to the Vice-Chamberlain of North Wales and another gentleman, who, raising a large body of men, succeeded in capturing a hundred of the "fairies," whom they "hanged on the spot, as their commission authorised, without any previous trial."-(See the Scots Magazine, 1823, pp. 424-426; Gomme's "Ethnology in Folklore"; Sikes' "British Goblins," &c.) 4. A more probable reason for such abductions is the sexual influence, which pervades numerous stories of this kind on the Continent, as well as in the British Isles. 5. Compare the following definition in M'Alpine's "Gaelic Dictionary" :—Caointeach, a female fairy or water-kelpie, whose particular province it was to forewarn her favourite clans of the approach of death in the family, by weeping and wailing opposite the kitchen door." One of the notes which Mr. Hore has neglected to work into his article is the following:-" In an ancient genealogy we read of a wife, who obtained a sidhaibh mie Scail Bhailbh, no ri Cruithentuaithi, that is, from the fairy hills of the son of Scal the Stammerer, [or] King of Pictland.”—(" Miscellany of Celtic Society," p. 25.) Let this be compared with the similar passages in "Silva Gadelica," cited by me in this Society's Journal (December, 1893, p. 378). These show that a woman who is described by one chronicler as Nar thuathchaech, ingen Lotain do Chruithentuaith, that is, "Nar thuathchaech [an appellation which Dr. Hayes O'Grady does not attempt to translate], daughter of Lotan of Pictland," is described by another chronicler as Nar thuathchaech, a sidaib no do Chruithentuaith, that is, "out of the sidhs, or of Pictland." And this Nar is, moreover, stated in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, to have been of the Tuatha Dea." 66 One writer simply regards her as the daughter of Lotan of Pictland; another states that she was a native of Pictland, or, in other words, that she came 66 out of the sidhs"; while a third says she was one of the Tuatha Dea, an alternative name given to "the people of the sidhs." Added to this is the above reference of Mr. Hore's, which states that a certain Irish chief (Tuathal techtmar) obtained a wife "from the sidhs" of a prince of Pictland. Now, all these statements support one another in the most consistent manner, and, at the same time, tend unmistakably to confirm the correctness of the main argument (to waive any possible errors of detail) advanced by Mr. Hore and by myself. It would be out of place, on this occasion, to go particularly into the several objections |