[315] This story is told of two places in the Highlands of Berning, of Ralligen, a little village on the lake of Thun, where there once stood a town called Roll; and again, of Schillingsdorf, a place in the valley of Grinderwald, formerly destroyed by a mountain slip.
The reader need scarcely be reminded of the stories of Lot and of Baucis and Philemon: see also Grimm's Kinder und Hausmärchen, iii. 153, for other parallels.
In old wives daies that in old time did live, To whose odde tales much credit men did give, Great store of goblins, fairies, bugs, nightmares, Urchins and elves to many a house repaires. OLD POEM.
We use the term Great Britain in a very limited sense, as merely inclusive of those parts of the island whose inhabitants are of Gotho-German origin--England and the Lowlands of Scotland.
We have already seen[316] that the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain had in their language the terms from which are derived Elf and Dwarf, and the inference is natural that their ideas respecting these beings corresponded with those of the Scandinavians and Germans. The same may be said of the Picts, who, akin to the Scandinavians, early seized on the Scottish Lowlands. We therefore close our survey of the Fairy Mythology of the Gotho-German race with Great Britain.
Merry elves, their morrice pacing, To aërial minstrelsy, Emerald rings on brown heath tracing, Trip it deft and merrily. SCOTT.
The Fairy Mythology of England divides itself into two branches, that of the people and that of the poets. Under the former head will be comprised the few scattered traditions which we have been able to collect respecting a system, the belief in which is usually thought to be nearly extinct; the latter will contain a selection of passages, treating of fairies and their exploits, from our principal poets.
The Fairies of England are evidently the Dwarfs of Germany and the North, though they do not appear to have been ever so denominated.[317] Their appellation was Elves, subsequently Fairies; but there would seem to have been formerly other terms expressive of them, of which hardly a vestige is now remaining in the English language.
They were, like their northern kindred, divided into two classes--the rural Elves, inhabiting the woods, fields, mountains, and caverns; and the domestic or house-spirits, usually called Hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows. But the Thames, the Avon, and the other English streams, never seem to have been the abode of a Neck or Kelpie.