A testimony to otherworldly origin of tunes in our heritage
Some would argue that belief in, say, the sí folk is a reformulation in memory, a distorted recollection of one of the earlier populations on our island, a re-telling as fairy story of what in a later age would have been written into the histories.
This kind of thinking is based on a particular idea of what constitutes evidence, but evidence, especially when it comes to the borderlands of our agreed world, is an elusive concept. “I’ve never seen a banshee”, for instance, is taken to mean the same thing as: “The banshee does not exist.” We think this assertion is somehow strengthened by adding: “… and I don’t know anyone who has.” This, of course, does not answer the two basic questions that come to mind: Why, given what we think we now know, do we persist in retaining these stories as living tradition? and: Why is it that all cultures, at all times, have and tell stories of another people whose world is contiguous to ours, a people we may meet from time to time?
