From: jnephew@tirith.carleton.edu (John A. Nephew)
Subject: Re: Faerie Folk
Organization: J. Random Misconfigured Site
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 10:01:58 GMT
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In article <1jkcelINNgdn@titan.ucs.umass.edu>, dunkelza@titan.ucs.umass.edu
(KE`
>You must remember that the Gauls were Celts in the purest sense, and that the
>Franks were from the Celtic homeland.  Also there is much to suggest that
>no linguistic change occurred because the languages were very similar.

Well, I seem to recall that Tacitus classified the Franks among the Germanic
tribes, and did not link them to the Gauls.  As for linguistic similarity:
Well, both Gaulish and Frankish were surely Indo-European languages, but hardly
*similar* to the extent of being closely related dialects -- I doubt they were
as close as Irish, Scottish and Breton, for example.  Testimony to this are the
differences among the French language (so very based on Latin), Breton (the
descendant of old Gaulish), and German.

>If you look at history, the Britons and the Saxons were able to communicate.

So you're claiming that ancient British (the ancestor of Welsh) is the same as
Old English or Anglo-Saxon?!  If they had everything in common, what would be
the point about talking about a "foreign" invasion in Chronicles and such?

>The same is true of the Teutonic peoples who invaded the northern british
>isles, and that decided to establish trade.  Kind of bizarre for a bunch that
>was reknowned for pillaging, isn't it?

You mean, like the Vikings?  The vikings make a good example, actually.  They
ruled much of England and Ireland at some points in time, yet they did not
impose their language on the populace.  They did influence the language,
however -- especially in place names in what used to be the Danelaw.

>No more untenable than the currently accepted theories are incomplete.

Well, I'm a big fan of Ockham's Razor -- best to accept as true the theory with
the minimum necessary assumptions.  To say that all fairies are descended from
the Irish Daoine sidhe (and that those in turn are derived from pre-Celtic
inhabitants of Eire) requires many more difficult assumptions than to suppose
that some other theory is true -- even if we don't know what that theory is.

Given the choice between:

(1) Fairies were in Ireland; Ireland is Celtic; therefore, anywhere that had
fairies had them as a result of Irish Celtic influence (even if that influence
cannot be corroborated by other means);

or,

(2) Fairies are a folkloric element common among many different cultures across
Europe, including ones that don't have any obvious link to Celtic culture
(without redefining "Celtic" to the point of meaninglessness); therefore,
fairies are not exclusively Celtic, and most likely reflect a broader cultural
current (perhaps Indo-European, perhaps -- as Steffan suggests -- even larger
in scale);

how can someone really choose the former?  It flies in the face of reason.

(This is even to restrict the term "fairy" to a genealogical, rather than
ideal, definition -- i.e., an idea that has been passed down as a tradition,
rather than imposed by cultural comparison.  (Genealogically, for example,
Confucious was not a philosopher; rather, the "essence" of the western
tradition of Philosophy, which began specifically with Socrates, is applied by
comparison to Confucious, who was uninfluenced by philosophy as such.  This is
probably complete unclear.   *sigh*)  To take a non-genealogical view, the
daoine sidhe couldn't be fairies, because the term is English/Latinate, and was
imposed on them comparatively sometime after the arrival of Anglo-Norman
culture.  I'm going to stop this digression now...)

Look, I love Ireland, having Irish ancestry and having lived there, but at this
rate we'll be saying that fairies are really American because so many Americans
lived in Europe before coming here (and besides, we have REAL newscasters,
movies, books, and the like, not just bards).  This theory I suppose is proven
by the fact that Europeans and Americans are able to communicate.

-John Nephew
President, Atlas Games