"There are many scholars, as you yourself confess, who think that the origin of the Brownie was in some mad belief in the old race of the Picts, which still survived somewhere in the hills."
Fascinating!
And quite possibly the bleed happened by exactly this route, with a character in fiction citing the theory; then later stories removed that intermediate step.
Man, the way people interact with narrative is the weirdest thing.
(It isn't the same kind of phenomenon, but I flashed on the Angels of Mons and then the way a version of that story is offered as an eyewitness account in FairyTale: A True Story (1997), which being a riff on the Cottingsley Fairies must have known what it was doing.)
no subject
Fascinating!
And quite possibly the bleed happened by exactly this route, with a character in fiction citing the theory; then later stories removed that intermediate step.
Man, the way people interact with narrative is the weirdest thing.
(It isn't the same kind of phenomenon, but I flashed on the Angels of Mons and then the way a version of that story is offered as an eyewitness account in FairyTale: A True Story (1997), which being a riff on the Cottingsley Fairies must have known what it was doing.)