David MacRitchie
[6] However, historian Edward J. Cowan has noted that the folklorist John Francis Campbell first founded this school of thought about 30 years before MacRitchie.
[7][8][9] Carole G. Silver, Professor of English at Yeshiva University has also traced the euhemerist theory of fairies further back to Walter Scott in his Letters on Demonology (1830).
Different ideas surfaced in the late 19th century and early 20th century concerning the "racial" origin of the supposed dwarf aborigines of Britain, and these hypotheses ranged from proposing that they were (using the ethno-racial labels of the era, which are now obsolete) real African "Pygmies" (a blanket term encompassing the Bambenga, Mbuti, and Twa), "Eskimos" (another vague, and today often offensive, exonym grouping the Inuit, Yupik and sometimes Aleut peoples), or a short-statured "Mediterranean race".
[24][25] In Fians, Fairies and Picts (1893), The Northern Trolls (1898) and The Aborigines of Shetland and Orkney (1924) MacRitchie attempted to further identify the fairies of British folklore with the Finfolk of Orkney mythology, the Trows of Shetland myth, the Fianna of Old Irish Literature, and the Trolls as well as the Svartálfar and Svartálfaheimr (elves or dwarves) of Norse mythology.
[27][28] A notable proponent of the theory who had read MacRitchie's earlier works published in the Celtic Review was Grant Allen, who became convinced that fairies were modelled on an indigenous population of Britain, specifically the Neolithic long barrow makers.
[29][30] The archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins found MacRitchie's views also appealing, since in his Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period (1880) he considered Upper Paleolithic culture across Europe (including Britain) to have been founded by a proto-Eskimo or Lapp race, a view at the time which was popularised after the discovery of "Chancelade Man", in southwestern France by Leo Testut in 1889.
T. Rice Holmes, for example, mocked MacRitchie's claims, considering them eccentric and baseless since no archaeological evidence had ever proven of a "race of pre-neolithic or even prehistoric pygmies existed in this country".
[42] Critics attempted to pick holes in MacRitchie's claims on mythology; for example, Evans-Wentz noted that the Fianna of Irish myth are sometimes described as "giants".
MacRitchie acknowledged these criticisms in his own writings but attempted to work around them and provide solutions:[43] In regarding the Fians as a race of dwarfs, I do not overlook the fact that they are also spoken of as "giants."
[46] In his Ancient and Modern Britons, MacRitchie claimed that the Gypsies were not of foreign origin, but were in fact the more conservative element of the native British population who had retained their nomadic way of life while the majority adopted a settled lifestyle.
