So the sidhe may have been based on/a reference to a group of real people? Do you know any books/articles I could read? That sounds really cool. I've mostly just read Cunliffe and Pryor, and then my Celtic course mostly focused on medieval history (grr, argh).
No serious ones after the 1930s; it's rather a Victorian sort of thing. I don't currently have any references (it was in the 1960s that I first came across it) but the idea was that they were Bronze Age survivals, linking Bronze Age burial mounds and the antipathy to iron. But as I said, it was based on a model of invaders wiping out or (literally) driving underground the original inhabitants. This got rather political as it was partly based on preconceptions and archaeology has challenged it (see Pryor on the willingness of South East England to take up new fashions and behaviour).
it goes along with the belief that fairy tales oozed out of the primordial slime with humanity and therefore contained clues of great antiquity (that, for instance, certain fairy tales obviously stemmed from the switch from matrilineal to patrineal descent -- their confidence that there had been such a switch was another instance of it), that all myths, legends, and fairy tales were really solar myths, and that the folk customs and celebrations they found in England were obviously of ancient pagan origin, when, it turns you, you can prove them many of them were of modern, let alone medieval, origin.
Nonetheless -- I remember a book titled Impossible People I read as a child that repeated many of these origins. You might find it useful.
There's a strong distinction to be made between long barrows, which are basically Neolithic and built around chambers containing the remains of many people, and round barrows, which are basically Bronze Age and tend to be built for an individual. There are also large round structures such as Maes Howe which are Neolithic but aren't called barrows.
"Introduction" of farming would be a better term as it spread across Europe, reaching Britain quite late.
"Anglo-Saxon" is completely inaccurate, as we know fairly exactly when they got here - after Roman society began to break down. The Anglo-Saxons, basically, are the English and are not just still here but dominant.
I'd have to disagree with you, actually! It's hard to say that there's a "strong distinction". There is a bit of a tendency for mounds to be individual graves later, and communal graves earlier, but the picture is complicated by the continuing re-use of mounds (the Hill of Tara, for instance, shows use all the way until the 6th or 7th century AD). As well, we're beginning to realize that regional variation played a big role. And, as you say, not all the mounds were graves. Nearly all of the mounds are Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, and there's not a huge distinction in society between the two periods (they're often lumped together in books of British History), so if the OP is interested in researching what is known about the people who built the mounds, it's much more of a Neolithic-esque culture than a Bronze Age one (no urbanism, no complex political structures, and only rare use of metal).
Your other two comments, you seem to be agreeing with me?
The picture was very clear when I was studying archaeology, and I've still got the revision file cards with diagrams of layouts of long barrows on the one hand and structures of round barrows on the other. There was a fuzzy area at the transition from Late Neolithic to Early Bronze, as with portable items. The main pattern for Bronze Age mounds was one individual for whom the mound was built followed by later interments in the sides of the mound; here too this continued until very late and includes Anglo-Saxon interments in and near round barrows
( ... )
Are you working with the idea that the daoine sidhe represent a previous group of humans? That's a very out-dated idea--straight out of the Victorian era, pretty much. I suppose it might do as a premise for a fictional work, but it would be hard to pull off. There's a lot of very ugly colonial-ish baggage there, things linking to Howard and Machen and Lovecraft type stuff, and I'm not talking the positive aspects of those three writers' work, either.
And if you are going with something like that, they'd certainly not be Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxons invaded what's now England in the post-Roman period; they certainly weren't in Ireland before a Celtic language came to be spoken there.* As far as Iberians, the Leabhar Gabhála na hÉireann, the Book of Invasions--the mythic history of Ireland--has the Gaels coming from Iberia, and driving the Tuatha Dé Danann, who are kind of sort of probably the old pagan gods, into hiding under the earth
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I used to have a compilation of folklore about the Good People but for the life of me can't remember the editor. I think it was one of the major figures in the Gaelic revival in Ireland, around that time, but it would have been highly politicized anyway.
I'll look for Meeting the Other Crowd. I enjoy complex, amoral, and alien figures in folklore, or having a set of figures (fairy, foxes, etc) be both benign and malevolent, and not just one or the other, so I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy that line of inquiry.
That ties in very well with what the Classical writers said: that the inhabitants of the islands resembled most closely those of areas across the sea from them - the people of Caledonia looked like the people of Scandinavia, the people of the South East were like the people in Gaul and the people of Ireland were like the people in Spain. They thought Spain was closer to Ireland than it actually is, but it looks as though they were right about that.
As stated, it was a 19th century notion that had been soundly buried by the 1930s. Western civilization has gone through multiple waves of efforts to rationalize anything it finds irrational: 'the Sidhe were Picts' is a 19th century example, 'the ancient gods were alien astronauts' is a 20th century example.
This type of thinking usually includes an underlying assumption that the people who had the original beliefs, being from an earlier era, were somehow stupid or gullible or unimaginative, and couldn't possibly have actually possessed a rich culture or a fully legitimate religious system.
You can mine this kind of thinking for fictional ore: "The theory was debunked, but guess what! It was TRUE!" But you'll have to do your research very thoroughly, and use the source materials with a full awareness of their limitations -- otherwise you'll give the impression that you swallowed the same Kool-aid.
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it goes along with the belief that fairy tales oozed out of the primordial slime with humanity and therefore contained clues of great antiquity (that, for instance, certain fairy tales obviously stemmed from the switch from matrilineal to patrineal descent -- their confidence that there had been such a switch was another instance of it), that all myths, legends, and fairy tales were really solar myths, and that the folk customs and celebrations they found in England were obviously of ancient pagan origin, when, it turns you, you can prove them many of them were of modern, let alone medieval, origin.
Nonetheless -- I remember a book titled Impossible People I read as a child that repeated many of these origins. You might find it useful.
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"Introduction" of farming would be a better term as it spread across Europe, reaching Britain quite late.
"Anglo-Saxon" is completely inaccurate, as we know fairly exactly when they got here - after Roman society began to break down. The Anglo-Saxons, basically, are the English and are not just still here but dominant.
Reply
Your other two comments, you seem to be agreeing with me?
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Are you working with the idea that the daoine sidhe represent a previous group of humans? That's a very out-dated idea--straight out of the Victorian era, pretty much. I suppose it might do as a premise for a fictional work, but it would be hard to pull off. There's a lot of very ugly colonial-ish baggage there, things linking to Howard and Machen and Lovecraft type stuff, and I'm not talking the positive aspects of those three writers' work, either.
And if you are going with something like that, they'd certainly not be Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxons invaded what's now England in the post-Roman period; they certainly weren't in Ireland before a Celtic language came to be spoken there.* As far as Iberians, the Leabhar Gabhála na hÉireann, the Book of Invasions--the mythic history of Ireland--has the Gaels coming from Iberia, and driving the Tuatha Dé Danann, who are kind of sort of probably the old pagan gods, into hiding under the earth ( ... )
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I'll look for Meeting the Other Crowd. I enjoy complex, amoral, and alien figures in folklore, or having a set of figures (fairy, foxes, etc) be both benign and malevolent, and not just one or the other, so I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy that line of inquiry.
Thank you!
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http://killarney-ireland.info/genealogy/dark-irish-celt-genealogy.html
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This type of thinking usually includes an underlying assumption that the people who had the original beliefs, being from an earlier era, were somehow stupid or gullible or unimaginative, and couldn't possibly have actually possessed a rich culture or a fully legitimate religious system.
You can mine this kind of thinking for fictional ore: "The theory was debunked, but guess what! It was TRUE!" But you'll have to do your research very thoroughly, and use the source materials with a full awareness of their limitations -- otherwise you'll give the impression that you swallowed the same Kool-aid.
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