Talk:David MacRitchie

Gypsy Origin of British
This section requires expanding, however since MacRitchie's work (Ancient and Modern Britons) is now a rare antiquarian item i don't think a description can be given of this work unless someone has read it. I own several antiquarian works but have sadly never come across MacRitchie's book, so i won't be able to write anything in detail. If i aquire a copy i will certianly write a brief overview. Bascially this needs to be done because there is a lot of Afrocentric misinterpretation or lies about MacRitchie's views across the internet. For example Afrocentric's are claiming MacRitchie believed the indigenous inhabitants of Britain were somehow Negroid, utter nonsense - nowhere is this stated in MacRitchie's literature. According to MacRitchie there was a native dwarf Lappish or Ainu race in Britain. Neither the Lapps or Ainu are Negroids. BookWorm44 (talk) 17:33, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Pronunciation of surname
How do you pronounce MacRitchie or McRitchie? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 175.156.91.156 (talk) 15:52, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
 * "Mac" followed by "Ritchie". Sorry to sound sarcastic, but this is a bit like asking how to pronounce "Johnson". Wikipedia doesn't add pronunciation keys for names that have pronunciations obvious to English speakers. In this case, the "American dictionaries"-style respelling key for this name would be:   or . In IPA:  or  (exactly where the "tch" falls syllabically is open to interpretation).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:38, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Restoring better edits
The restored edits are peer reviewed and from better sources. The old stuff looks mostly false data or inaccurate, MacRitchieFan (talk) 05:28, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

these were what were added to replace the old:


 * Allen, Grant. (1881). "Who Were the Fairies". Cornhill Magazine. 43: 335-348.
 * Evans-Wentz, W. Y. (1911). The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. "Anthropological Examination of the Evidence" [Chapter]. H. Frowde.
 * Macculloch, C. J. A. (1932). "Were Fairies an Earlier Race of Men?". Folklore. 43(4): 362-375.
 * Silver, C. (1986). "On the Origin of Fairies: Victorians, Romantics, and Folk Belief". Browning Institute Studies. 14: 141-156.
 * Silver, C. (1987). "East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Victorians and Fairy Brides". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 6(2): 283-298.
 * Silver, C. (1998). Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
 * Hendersen, L., Cowan, E. J. (2001). Scottish Fairy Belief: A History. Tuckwell Press.
 * Grydehøj, A. (2013). "Ethnicity and the origins of local identity in Shetland, UK-Part I: Picts, Vikings, Fairies, Finns, and Aryans". J. Mar. Is. Cult. 2(1): 39-48.
 * Grydehøj, A. (2013). "Ethnicity and the origins of local identity in Shetland, UK-Part II: Picts, Vikings, Fairies, Finns, and Aryans". J. Mar. Is. Cult. 2(2), 107-114. MacRitchieFan (talk) 05:29, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * My inclination is to do the same as and revert the edits by OldScrolls. It incorporates far too much in the way of lengthy quotations and I cannot see where some of the sources indicated above are used as inline citations? I see  has been asked for his opinion.  SagaciousPhil  - Chat 09:58, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree about too many quotations, but I'm sorry, not enolugh time to go through the sources issue. Dougweller (talk) 16:31, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Found paragraph that needs splitting
Specifically, this one. Could anyone please tell me where to split it? Thylacine24 (talk) 17:16, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅, along with some other cleanup.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:31, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Fairy euhemerisation section needs updating with real science
While I've worked over the material a little to no longer imply that his "theory" scientifically viable, this section needs improvement to cover what the actual current scientific consensus is. Some key points: There are probably other matters of pertinence as well. However, it would take a lot of reliable source research to work this up into encyclopedic material, and then compress it enough to fit properly into this article. Not even sure where to start (or whether I want to be much involved, since this is an obscure bio and an obscure "theory", and I have much bigger fish to fry). But hopefully this outline will at least serve as a roadmap. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:41, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
 * MacRitchie's "model" is based on taking folkloric accounts as if factual evidence (e.g. of dwarf stature, unusually long beards, etc.), and then running wild with them (in a Joseph Campbell sort of vein) with comparative mythology to make assumptions that vaguely similar stories must all be based on the same underlying reality.
 * However, there is no archaeological or even Classical-era quasi-historical evidence of huge-bearded tiny people in the British isles.
 * It is well known that early writers (thus also creators of oral traditions) used giant or dwarf stature and other exaggeratory descriptions of physical characterisations metaphorically; a group might be remembered as small because they were defeated, as giants because they were fierce or crude by the standards of the writer, as "black" or "dark" because of their pagan or violent ways, etc., etc. There does seem to be a scholarly consensus that the outlandish descriptions of various population groups in the Irish Book of Invasions probably reflects this sort of moralising exaggeration.
 * Culturally, archaeology tells us quite a lot about distinct cultural phases of Europe, Northwestern Europe in particular, and the British Isles in even more particular, with a great deal now known about Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age material-culture groups, and much also about linguistic-culture groups in the latter periods (and it is now understood that these two types of cultural groupings cannot be simplistically equated, much less treated as if they correspond to "races").
 * The entire racialist and essentialist nature of MacRitchie's and related notions has been completely debunked.
 * The sort of craniometry and other heavily racialised anthropometrics that MacRitchie and his peers were obsessed with has also been abandoned as mostly nonsense by modern physical anthropology and related science. (Anthropometry still exists as a scientific anthropology tool, but in other directions, e.g. statistical analysis of environmental (climate, disease, nutrition, etc.) effects on populations. This is, for example, how we know that the Vikings and other Scandinavians were in fact larger in stature on average than their more southerly counterparts; it wasn't just legend, though was exaggerated by contemporary writers.)
 * What modern genetics (including archaeogenetics using samples from prehistoric skeletons) does tell us is that, contrary to popular belief until well into the second half of the 20th century, the British Islese were not subject to one or more Celtic invasions that mostly wiped out a prehistoric, pre-Celtic aboriginal population, and likewise England was not subject to an Anglo-Saxon (and Dane and Jute) invasion that mostly wiped out the Celtic (Brittonic/Brythonic) population there. Rather, there is tremendous genetic continuity even in the heart of England all the way back to the Mesolithic. What really happened was just like the Norman invasion much later: takeovers by a comparatively small number of miliary elites who imposed new language and cultural institutions, along with interbreeding with the local population over time, but nothing like a wipe-out. (Somewhat extraneous point: the extent to which this Mesolithic through Iron Age genetic continuity occurred varies widely across Europe, and all of Eurasia for that matter. The general lack of it in Central Europe is one of the reasons that "the Celts" as an ethno-racial and even general-cultural, rather than mostly linguistic, concept is falling apart; the population responsible for the Hallstatt culture, long regarded as the "early Celts", appear to have actually been replaced. Meanwhile, the continuity level in some other areas including the British Isles and Iberia is very high.)
 * More to the point, there simply is no evidence of any kind of prehistoric races of [comparative] dwarves and giants in Britain (or anywhere else in Europe). While average size difference between various different population groups (e.g. people on the western fringes of Ireland and deep in the mountains of Wales were on average a bit smaller than Mediterraneans, in turn on average shorter than Scandinavians), and this could in theory contribute to folk-memory of some groups being "dwarves" or "giants", it is not evidence of any kind of different "races" with drastically different statures having populated Britain in different periods, much less that all the fairy/elf/dwarf/giant/ogre folklore reflects these "races".
 * All the evidence to date strongly indicates that the ancient British Isles were largely populated from Iberia (in multiple waves) plus some input from what is now the area of northern France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Denmark (before their Germanicisation during and after the late Roman Empire. Some migration from that region dates back to before the submerging of Doggerland, but it is unlikely that groups from that far back represented any permanent British settlement.)
 * There is no evidence of any kind to date of what MacRitchie improperly combined into a "Lapp–Ainu–Eskimo" sort of meta-ethnicity having colonized Northern Britain. There actually a historical linguistics model with growing support that the Eskaleut languages are distantly (as in from the Mesolithic and back to Ancient Paleo-Siberians) related to the Uralic languages and perhaps some of the other Siberian language families. But this in no way implies any sort of trans-continental culture or "race", and is as problematic as the Victorian-to-mid-20th-century misconception of "the Indo-Europeans" as a racial group instead of as a language family (i.e. as a form of cultural memetics without much connection to gene flow, or even transmission of material culture).

Needs expansion, about MacRitchie's other works and their "theories"
Breaking this into subsections for per-publication notes. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:49, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Ancient and Modern Britons
In particular, Ancient and Modern Britons is a crackpot work dominated by a hypothesis of the British Isles being colonized by Africans, and even that the Vikings were Africans. MacRitchie didn't just promote in 1893 an idea that the Picts were "Lapp–Ainu–Eskimos", but earlier, in 1884, that they had been Black Africans. This seems largely based on debunked craniometry stuff again (about "proto-Negroid features"), commingled with observations of metaphoric use of "black" by contemporary writers (general Christian opinion of their motives and behavior, i.e. "black-heartedness" of warlike pagans, not a skin-tone description), swirled into a mixture of quasi-philological and not very scholarly comparative mythology and historiography, plus leaps of faith based on the fact that Black people occasionally show up in Classical to Late Medieval European art. It reminds me strongly of the Victorian works on the Scottish clans and their tartans, which were a farcical myth-making exercise, leaping to exaggeratory conclusions from flimsiest purported evidence, all based on selection bias, circular reasoning, and other fallacies. This is a work of the same sort.

This nonsense has no support of any kind in science, but received enthusiastic socio-political support from pan-Africanism quarters as recently as a 1985 reprint (ISBNs 0939222027, 0939222035), with an introduction by one William Preston (apparently not someone we have an article about) promoting MacRitchie's work as "evidence" of foundational African influence on, even control of, all the important aspects of European society, plus of course a conspiracy to suppress this "information". (Also relies on other crackpots from even earlier, like Godfrey Higgins and fellow believers in the general notion of the British being foundationally from Egypt (i.e. Classical-era North Africa) and the adjacent Holy Land. This stuff has it roots in early medieval pseudo-history, tying various British Isles royal lineages back to quasi-historical Biblical figures as a form of origin-myth-reinvention to help legitimise authority of the ruling class as a continuation of the Roman Empire, and legitimation of Roman Catholic Christianity (particular against early "heretical" versions in the region, like the Culdees).

What actual science and reliable history do tell us is multi-part:
 * All of humanity originally came from Africa, so genetic continuity of various haplogroups and stuff in modern science (also reflected in early anthropometrics) will of course demonstrate long-term population connections; it could not be any other way. This does not translate into Mesolithic to Early Medieval African invasions of northern Britain and Scandinavia; there's simply no evidence of any kind to support this idea.
 * The British Isles were largely prehistorically populated from Iberia. There had always been geneflow into this area across the narrow Straight of Gibraltar from Berber-ancestral populations of North Africa (they also populated the Canary Islands, etc.; humans were more mobile and intrepid in prehistory than most people imagine). There will thus of course be some level of continuity from North Africa onward. And Iberia's population genetics, like those of the British Isles and of Scandinavia, show much more genetic continuity back to the Stone Ages than do Central European genetics.
 * In early Antiquity, the Phoenician/Punic peoples, Afro-Asiatic and speaking one or more Semitic languages, explored and established maritime trade far beyond the Mediterranean (where they spread the concept of writing to many places), including north to the British Isles, and there's even considerable linguistic evidence of them having reached Scandinavia and maintaining a coastal presence there long enough for some influence on Proto-Germanic (summarized in John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, as a secondary source, though there may be newer primary journal research on the matter since then).
 * In Classical Antiquity, there really was no such thing as "Europe" meta-culturally; rather, there was the Mediterranean, and it involved a great deal of cultural and genetic flow between African, European, Semitic, and other groups and their competing empires. During the Roman Republic and Empire, African population and cultural flow into Europe increased dramatically because of the annexation of large parts of North Africa, and Rome's "make everyone Roman" model (inspired by Alexander's much earlier "make everyone Hellenic" imperial-conquest process). The North Africa-based Carthaginian empire held considerable territory in Southern Europe, west of Greece, for extended periods, too.
 * The long Muslim invasion of Spain, which involved both Semitic/Arabic and African groups, introduced both genetic and cultural mixture into Western Europe. Similar also happened in Sicily and various other Mediterranean parts of Europe. In this era, there still was not a meta-cultural sense of "Europe", but rather of Christendom (versus heathendom, especially Islam, with most of the pagans long gone, and Hindu India too distant for immediate crusade-oriented concern). Christendom, as a broad meta-cultural alliance (which included a great deal of trade and movement of people and material culture) included various parts of Africa: Egypt since the 1st century AD, and as far south as Ethiopia since 330 AD.
 * So, not only has there been genetic post-Ice Age inflow from Africa into Europe since at least the Mesolithic, there has been cultural contact and movement of substantial numbers of actual people from Africa into Europe (especially the Mediterranean fringe), and vice versa, since early Antiquity (i.e. the Bronze Age onward, and we now know from a wealth of archaeological evidence that there was vastly more cross-continental trade in that early era than was supposed by writers in MacRitchie's time). This contact and exchange of course accelerated markedly during the Colonial era (and reached much further, with increased direct movement of limited number of Africans into Northwestern Europe). But everyone in Europe, even illiterate peasants, were already well aware of Africans, and even general (though sometimes distorted) facts about Africa like what sorts of large animals lived there and roughly what they looked like, from Antiquity continuously through to the present.
 * But not one sliver of any of that supports the idea of ethno-racially Black populations controlling part of northern Britain and Scandinavia to become the Picts and the Vikings. This is pure fantasy.

As with the thread above, this stuff would have to be tightly compressed down to an encyclopedic set of points to cover with regard to this writer's work (and its apparently continuing fringe impact), with a bunch of sources. I have too much going on to do all that work (both with regard to on-WP "work"-load, and my off-site projects), but this outline may suggest where someone(s) else can start.

Other works by this same author probably also need at least summary critical coverage, probably in due proportion to things like whether they have been reprinted, whether they have attracted modern published support and criticism, how close or far they are from current scientific consensus, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:29, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Testimony of Tradition
This one is closely related to the fairy-euhermisation work, Fians, Faires and Picts of 1893. In ToT (1890), MacRitchie lays out a "theory" that the Finns or Finnic peoples in general populated the Orkneys, Shetlands, elsewhere in Scotland as far south as Galloway, and Ireland, possibly even Iberia, and ties them into legends of merfolk and selkies somehow. He claims (seemingly on little basis beyond the coincidental "false friend" lettering similarity of "Finn" and "Fionn/Fianna", as well as the fact that historical people in the northern British/Irish region, as well as in northern Iberia, used coracles and other boats of similar general construction to those used in Finland, that the Fianna of Irish legend are necessarily Finns, that they are the same as the Cruthin/Cruithne also of Irish legend and quasi-history, and since the latter can be plausibly identified as a Pictish group that took over part of the north of Ireland (that much is at least plausible though scholarly debated for over a century still) that the Picts were also Finnish. Oh, and of course it also weaves in dwarves and giants. It diverges later into witches and trolls, then attempts to identify various Irish mythological populations (Tuatha Dé Danann, Fir Bolg, etc.) with various kinds of later fairies and such. The final chapter outlines his "hairy dwarf race" hypothesis of aboriginal British pygmies he would later put out in full book form in FF&P.

I don't have the patience to wade through it all, but it's clearly nonsensical where it wanders anywhere close to historical, cultural/ethnic, and linguistic claims, though aspects of its folklore anaysis as it pertains to legendary peoples in the Book of Invasions and related works, and how these translate into later Brittano-Irish folklore, could have some merits; he seems to have been at least faintly reasonable as a folklorist, just an unbearably awful historian.

One thing that stands out is that MacRitchie really had no idea what he believed, and in the space of just a handful of years veered from claiming that the original Hiberno-Brittanic aboriginal population were Black Africans, to Finns, to Lapp–Ainu–Eskimos, seeming based on whatever ideas popped into his head as inspired by some book he'd read or some antiquarian (proto-archaelogical) report that had come out. It's surprising that this inconsistent, confused, and largely baseless material got professionally published, even toward the end of the Romantic-tinged, credulous, and excessive Celtic Twilight. But perhaps there's no surprise that various elements of his output have inspired zealous latching onto by racialist fantasts, and even republication as recently as the 1980s.

Anyway, I'm not sure yet what kind of independent analysis of this work has been published that we could use for writing a section or subsection about it. But his material is wildly fringe enough that it is worth documenting a summarized refutation here in the interests of public education. PS: I haven't hunted them down yet, but it seems very likely that Pygmies in Northern Scotland, The Underground Life, The Northern Trolls, Memories of the Picts, Underground Dwellings, Fairy Mounds, Celtic Civilisation, Druids and Mound Dwellers, Les Pygmies chez les Anciens Egyptiens et les Hebreux (note the tie-in to the perennial "Britons as a Wandering People from the Middle East" nonsense), Les kayaks dans le nord de l'Europe, The Duns of the North, The Savages of Gaelic Tradition, and The Aborigines of Shetland and Orkney (and perhaps also The Ainos, Great and Little Britain, and The Celtic Numerals of Strathclyde) all tie closely into his rapidly changing "theory" about pre-Celtic Britain and early western Eurasia generally. It might ultimately be best to cover this in a section, and arrange the material chronologically, tracing the idea as it mutated over the course of successive books and articles. I also have to wonder whether any of this fairly copious but utterly crank output has been cited anywhere in our articles as a "reliable source" or even given any weight at all when mentioned somewhere. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:49, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

His "Gypsy" material
These writings seem to span Accounts of the Gypsies of India; Scottish Gypsies under the Stewarts; Shelta, the Caird's Language; and possibly related material in some other, less specific, books like Hints of Evolution in Tradition. The gist is that he's clearly confused the Irish Travellers and indigenous Highland Travellers (who may not be particularly closely related to each other in any way other than being from the Gaelic population), with the actual "Gypsies", the Romani/Roma/Rom, ultimately originating in India (they were once commonly believed to have been from Egypt, which is where the exonym "Gypsy" came from). This confusion was very common up until recently, probably due to the fact that actual Romani groups of course did eventually make their way to Britain (as the Romanichal) and became co-established there (but not in Ireland), and there has been considerable cultural exchange between the groups in Britain (Scottish Traveller Cant is about half Anglo-Romani, with the rest drawing on Scots and Gaelic plus novel coinages).

While this confusion is understandable in retrospect, it means that later uncritical writers have likely relied on MacRitchie for proclamations about the Travellers that are not accurate (either at all with regard to indigenous groups of the British Isles, nor in historical particulars with regard to later groups who are actually Roma[ni]). Is it also likely that MacRitchie's material on this subject ties in with his outright crackpot "racial" notions; it's noteworthy that the Finnish Kale, a Romani group, actually trace their origin to a Romani group in Scotland who left by ship for Scandinavia (and not the other way around), but much of MacRitchie's material outlined in sections above above is making wild claims about Finns and/or Sámi having colonised the British Isles. It seems highly likely that MacRitchie believed that various Traveller groups represented remnants of the original population (with further ties to the Middle East and thence to India) and that because of links between Finnish and Scottish ones that this means they originated in Finland, since it suits his pseudo-model of Finnish and/or "Lapp" colonisation.

But this is more material that would need to be examined in more depth to encyclopedically summarize it, and then present whatever critical or (at least in theory) supporting modern scholarship can be found about that material. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:49, 16 March 2024 (UTC)