Blair Collection > Beside the fire

XX PREFACE.
Stories in the MSS. are not so much old Aryan folk-tales
written down by scholars as the inventions of individual
brains, consciously inventing, as modern novelists do.
This theory, however, must be somewhat modified before
it can be applied, for, as I have said, there are incidents
in Scotch Gaelic folk-tales which resemble those of some
of the ]\IS. stories rather nearly. Let us glance at a
single instance — one only out of many — where High-
land tradition preserves a trait which, were it not for
such preservation, would assuredly be ascribed to the
imaginative brain of an inventive Irish writer.
The extraordinary creature ot which Campbell found
traces in the Highlands, the Fáchan, of which he has
drawn a whimsical engraving,'^' is met with in an Irish
MS. called lollAnn -<\]\iii--oeAH5. ^^^ MacPhie, Camp-
bell's informant, called him the "Desert creature of Glen
Eite, the son of Colin," and described him as having
" one hand out of his chest, one leg out of his haunch,
and one eye out of the front of his face ;" and again,
** ugly was the make of the Fáchan, there was one hand
out of the ridge of his chest, and one tuft out of the top
of his head, and it were easier to take a mountain from
the root than to bend that tuft." This one-legged, one-
handed, one-eyed creature, unknown, as Campbell re-
marks, to German or Norse mythology, is thus described
* Campbell's " Popular Tales of the West Highlands.'" Vol. iv. p. 327.