The recorded or manuscript Fairy-Faith of the Gaels corresponds in all
essentials with the living Gaelic Fairy-Faith: the Tuatha De Danann or
_Sidhe_, the 'Gentry', the 'Good People', and the 'People of Peace' are
described as a race of invisible divine beings eternally young and
unfading. They inhabit fairy palaces, enjoy rare feasts and love-making,
and have their own music and minstrelsy. They are essentially majestic
in their nature; they wage war in their own invisible realm against
other of its inhabitants like the ancient Fomorians; they frequently
direct human warfare or nerve the arm of a great hero like Cuchulainn;
and demons of the air, spirit hosts, and awful unseen creatures obey
them. Mythologically they are gods of light and good, able to control
natural phenomena so as to make harvests come forth abundantly or not at
all. But they are not such mythological beings as we read about in
scholarly dissertations on mythology, dissertations so learned in their
curious and unreasonable and often unintelligible hypotheses about the
workings of the mind among primitive men. The way in which social
psychology has deeply affected all such animistic beliefs was pointed
out above in chapter iii. In chapter xi, entitled _Science and Fairies_,
our position with respect to the essential nature of the fairy races
will be made clear.
SECTION II
THE RECORDED FAIRY-FAITH
CHAPTER V
BRYTHONIC DIVINITIES AND THE BRYTHONIC FAIRY-FAITH[265]
'On the one hand we have the man Arthur, whose position we have
tried to define, and on the other a greater Arthur, a more colossal
figure, of which we have, so to speak, but a _torso_ rescued from
the wreck of the Celtic pantheon.'--The Right Hon. Sir JOHN
RHŶS.
The god Arthur and the hero Arthur--Sevenfold evidence to show
Arthur as an incarnate fairy king--Lancelot the foster-son of a
fairy woman--Galahad the offspring of Lancelot and the fairy woman
Elayne--Arthur as a fairy king in _Kulhwch and Olwen_--Gwynn ab
Nudd--Arthur like Dagda, and like Osiris--Brythonic fairy-romances:
their evolution and antiquity--Arthur in Nennius, Geoffrey, Wace,
and in Layamon--Cambrensis' Otherworld tale--Norman-French writers
of twelfth and thirteenth centuries--_Romans d'Aventure_ and
_Romans Bretons_--Origins of the 'Matter of Britain'--Fairy-romance
episodes in Welsh literature--Brythonic origins.
ARTHUR AND ARTHURIAN MYTHOLOGY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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