David MacRitchie

David MacRitchie (16 April 1851 – 14 January 1925) was a Scottish folklorist and antiquarian. He is remembered for proposing that stories of fairies originated with an aboriginal race that occupied the British Isles before Celts and other groups arrived.

David MacRitchie was the younger son of William Dawson MacRitchie and Elizabeth Elder MacRitchie. He was born in Edinburgh and attended the Edinburgh Southern Academy, the Edinburgh Institute and the University of Edinburgh. He did not gain a degree but qualified as a Chartered Accountant. His father had been a surgeon in the East India Company.

In 1888 MacRitchie founded the Gypsy Lore Society to study the history and lore of Gypsies. He was also a member of several folklore societies. In 1914 he joined the Council of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, serving as vice-president from 1917 – 1920. He was noted for his interest in archaeology, being appointed as a trustee for Lord Abercromby's endowment for an Archaeology department at the University of Edinburgh. He was also a member of the Scottish Arts Club and Vice-president of the Philosophical Institution.

In 1922 until his death he served as the treasurer of the Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society.

David MacRitchie was a prominent proponent of the euhemeristic origin of fairies, a theory tracable to the early 19th century that considers fairies in British folklore to have been rooted in a historical pygmy, dwarf or short sized aboriginal race, that lived during Neolithic Britain or even earlier.

MacRitchie is often credited as being the founder of the euhemerist school regarding British fairies. However historian Edward J. Cowan has noted that the folklorist John Francis Campbell first founded this school of thought about 30 years before MacRitchie. Carole G. Silver, Professor of English at Yeshiva University has also traced the euhemerist theory of fairies further back to Walter Scott in his Letters on Demonology (1830). With the emergence of anthropological schools in the late 19th century, various renowned anthropologists such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1871) became proponents of the euhemeristic origin of fairies, in direct conflict with the religious or psychological theories of their origin.

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