The Testimony of Tradition

An argument that the fairies, dwarfs and "little people" of British legend were a real earlier population — small, dark, dwelling in mounds — remembered by their conquerors as magic. MacRitchie published this in 1890 and it was influential for a generation before archaeology went another way. Right or wrong, it is the clearest statement of the euhemerist case about folklore. Sixty plates, among them Turner's Whalers and The Harbor of Dieppe, carry the same argument in paint: the old world of mound-dwellers and sea-rovers, recorded before it faded from memory.