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method in favour in the North of Scotland is to take the suspected elf to some known haunt
of its race, generally, we are told, some spot where peculiar coughing sounds are heard, or to
some barrow, or stone circle, and lay it down. An offering of bread, butter, milk, cheese,
eggs and flesh or fowl must accompany the child.
But sometimes more radical methods have been used, and we can only pity any poor children who
may have been ill-treated because their superstitious parents thought they looked like elves! As late
as May 17, 1884, it was reported in the London Daily Telegraph, two women were arrested at
Clonmel and charged with cruelty toward a child three years old. They thought he was a changeling
and, by ill-treating him, hoped to obtain the real child from the elves! And there is no question that
in medieval times the same superstition has led to the death of children who had congenital defects.
Sometimes the same treatment applies to adults who have been "changed," and Hartland gives a
funny example of such a case:
A tale from Badenoch represents the man as discovering the fraud from finding his wife, a
woman of unruffled temper, suddenly turned a shrew. So he piles up a great fire and
threatens to throw the occupant of the bed upon it unless she tells him what has become of
his wife. She then confesses that the latter has been carried off, and she has been appointed
successor. But by his determination he happily succeeds in recapturing his own at a certain
fairy knoll near Inverness.
Of course, the UFO myth has not yet reached such proportions, but we are perhaps not quite far
from it. American television series such as "The Twilight Zone" have capitalized on this aspect in
episodes that assume that the human race has been infiltrated by extraterrestrials who differ from
humans in small details only. This is not a new idea, as the belief in changelings shows. What was
the purpose of such abductions? The idea advanced by students of folk tales is again very close to a
current theory about UFOs: that the purpose of such contact is a genetic one. According to
Hartland:
The motive assigned to fairies in northern stories is that of preserving and improving their
race, on the one hand by carrying off human children to be brought up among the elves and
to become united with them, and on the other hand by obtaining the milk and fostering care
of human mothers for their own offspring.
Similarly, Budd Hopkins, the researcher and artist who has become one of the most visible
"experts" on the abduction reports, wrote in 1987:
Do the UFO occupants want to lessen the distance between our race and theirs in order to
land, eventually, and join us on our planet?.... Or do these aliens merely wish to enrich their
own stock and then depart as mysteriously as they arrived?
Such is not always the purpose of abduction, however, and people are often returned by the elves
after nothing more than a dance or a game. But a strange phenomenon often takes place: the people
who have spent a day in Elfland come back to this world one year, or more, older!
This is our fourth point, and quite a remarkable one. Time does not pass there as it does here. And
we have in such stories the first idea of the relativity of time. How did this idea come to the
storytellers ages ago? What inspired them? No one can answer such questions. But it is a fact that
the nonsymmetry of the time element between Magonia and our world is present in the tales from
all countries.
Discussing this supernatural lapse of time, Hartland relates the true story of Rhys and Llewellyn,
recorded about 1825 in the Vale of Neath, Wales. Rhys and Llewellyn were servants to a farmer. As
they went home one night, Rhys told his friend to stop and listen to the music. Llewellyn heard no
music. But Rhys had to dance to the tune he had heard a hundred times. He begged Llewellyn to go
ahead with the horses, saying that he would soon overtake him, but Llewellyn arrived home alone.
The next day, he was suspected of murdering Rhys and was jailed. But a farmer "who was skilled in
fairy matters" guessed the truth. Several men gathered among them the narrator of the story and
took Llewellyn to the spot where he said his companion had vanished. Suddenly, "Hush!" cried
Llewellyn. "I hear music, I hear sweet harps."
All listened but could hear nothing. Llewellyn's foot was on the outer edge of the fairy ring. He told
the narrator to place his foot on his, and then he too heard the sounds of many harps and saw a
number of Little People dancing in a circle twenty feet or so in diameter. After him, each of the
party did the same and observed the same thing. Among the dancing Little Folk was Rhys.
Llewellyn caught him by his frock as he passed close to them and pulled him out of the circle. At
once Rhys asked, "Where are the horses?" and asked them to let him finish the dance, which had
not lasted more than five minutes. And he could never be persuaded of the time that had elapsed.
He became melancholy, fell ill, and soon after died.
Such stories can be found in Keightley's The Fairy Mythology and other books. The story of Rhys
and Llewellyn is remarkable because it dates from the nineteenth century, thus providing continuity
between fairy and UFO lore. In tales of this type, several modes of recovery of the persons taken are [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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