with the Caledonian fairies. Lucas Jacobson Debes, who
dates his description of Feroe from his Pathmos, in Thorshaven, March
12, 1670, dedicates a long chapter to the spectres who disturbed his
congregation, and sometimes carried off his hearers. The actors in these
disturbances he states to be the _Skow_, or _Biergen-Trold_--_i.e._, the
spirits of the woods and mountains, sometimes called subterranean
people, and adds, they appeared in deep caverns and among horrid rocks;
as also, that they haunted the places where murders or other deeds of
mortal sin had been acted. They appear to have been the genuine northern
dwarfs, or Trows, another pronunciation of Trollds, and are considered
by the reverend author as something very little better than actual
fiends.

But it is not only, or even chiefly, to the Gothic race that we must
trace the opinions concerning the elves of the middle ages; these, as
already hinted, were deeply blended with the attributes which the Celtic
tribes had, from the remotest ages, ascribed to their deities of rocks,
valleys, and forests. We have already observed, what indeed makes a
great feature of their national character, that the power of the
imagination is peculiarly active among the Celts, and leads to an
enthusiasm concerning national music and dancing, national poetry and
song, the departments in which fancy most readily indulges herself. The
Irish, the Welsh, the Gael, or Scottish Highlander, all tribes of Celtic
descent, assigned to the Men of Peace, Good Neighbours, or by whatever
other names they called these sylvan pigmies, more social habits, and a
course of existence far more gay, than the sullen and heavy toils of the
more saturnine Duergar. Their elves did not avoid the society of men,
though they behaved to those who associated with them with caprice,
which rendered it dangerous to displease them; and although their gifts
were sometimes valuable, they were usually wantonly given and
unexpectedly resumed.

The employment, the benefits, the amusements of the Fairy court,
resembled the aerial people themselves. Their government was always
represented as monarchical. A King, more frequently a Queen of Fairies,
was acknowledged; and sometimes both held their court together. Their
pageants and court entertainments comprehended all that the imagination
could conceive of what was, by that age, accounted gallant and splendid.
At their processions they paraded more beautiful steeds than tho