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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Picts, the pre-Gaelic people of eastern Scotland, have frequently been represented in literature and popular culture.
Thematic Pictish history and imagery has been appropriated by multiple contemporary fine artists, most notably American ex-pat Marianna Lines,[1][2][3] British artists Lisa Wright[4][5] and Jon Hodgson,[6] as well as American artist F. Lennox Campello.[7][8][9]
David MacRitchie was an outspoken proponent of the euhemeristic origin of fairies being the folk memory of Picts.[10][11] He argued they were rooted in a real diminutive or pygmy-statured indigenous population that lived during the late Stone Age across the British Isles, especially Scotland:
"Postulations based on the premise that fairies constitute a folk memory of former races, conquered peoples who were pushed out beyond the periphery of settled areas, have fuelled the imagination of many scholars on this subject. Of particular significance was a theory advanced by David MacRitchie that fairies were an actual race of small or 'little' people, the original Pict[ish] peoples of Scotland."[12]
MacRitchie developed what became known as the "Pygmy-Pict theory" in his The Testimony of Tradition (1890) and Fians, Fairies and Picts (1893) regarding fairies to have been folk memories of the aboriginal Picts who in his view were of very small size, pointing to findings of short doors (3 – 4 ft in height) of chambers, underground dwellings, long barrows, as well as quoting old literature such as Adam of Bremen's Historia Norwegiæ which describe the Picts of Orkney as "only a little exceeding pygmies in stature". The folklorist John Francis Campbell, who MacRitchie cited, had also written in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–62):
"I believe there once was a small race of people in these islands, who are remembered as fairies [...] the fairy was probably a Pict."[13]
Robert Louis Stevenson described so the Picts in his Heather Ale poem:
Rudely plucked from their hiding,
Never a word they spoke:
A son and his aged father—
Last of the dwarfish folk.
Modern archaeological studies demonstrate that the Picts were not significantly different in height from the present-day occupants of Scotland.[citation needed]
On the road coming, five days' travel, a Pict woman
(big mouth and small bones) gave me shelter, and
laughed (part scorn, part pity) at my journey.
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