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all indigenous to the district, and even in MacKenzie's time gulls were largely used for
human food at Ness.
Although Mackenzie felt that he had laid to rest the theory of the existence of pig-
mies, he also felt that, despite a large part of the legend being tied to the bones in the
structure at Luchruban, allowance had to be made for the exaggeration of tradition and
folklore which 'measured its low-statured peoples by inches, just as it measures its tall
peoples by yards.' From this observation he stated 'we have pigmies and giants to rep-
resent races who were shorter or taller than the race perpetuating the traditions'. The
folklore of the area seems to have grown up around the existence of the pigmies, com-
pletely separate to the discovery of the small bones which were used to bolster the le-
gends.
Mackenzie said that it appeared to be fairly obvious that:
the pigmies of Luchruban were simply a prehistoric people of short stature and dark
hair, who were contemptuously called Danibeg or 'little men' by their successors, a
name which was inaccurately Englished and perpetuated as 'pigmies'. Naturally, the
discovery of the small bones would give a tremendous fillip to the pigmy idea, and so
the error persisted owing to the ignorance of comparative anatomy which prevailed. It
is at least satisfactory to have given this myth a final burial.
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He went on to say that the Isle of Lewis offered a remarkably rich field of investigation
to the ethnologist, in view of the marked diversity of the types on the island. The
prominent Victorian ethnologist Dr John Beddoe, suggested that one of the types was
'a short, thick-set, snub-nosed, dark-haired, and even dark-eyed race', and that it was
more than likely aboriginal and possibly even Finnish in origin. It was possible that
Laplanders or Finns have some physical affinities with the shorter and darker type of
Lewisman (a type which in Mackenzie's time were sparsely represented in the island),
whiletheqammarorhutsoftheLapps,asdescribedbytravellers,beararesemblanceto
the Luchruban structure as it must have been originally designed. There were also (re-
marked by W.C. Mackenzie) customs which lingered in Lewis as recently as the eight-
eenth, or even the nineteenth century, which have elsewhere been regarded as peculiar
to Lapland.
The Swedish zoologist and archaeologist, Professor Sven Nilssen, carried out re-
searchwhichshowedthatthepigmiesoftraditionandthedwarfsoftheSagasbelonged
to the same race as the Laplanders of the present day. Moreover, the well-authenticated
traditions in Shetland about the Finn-men apparently offer corroboration of the view
that the 'little men' of these islands were of Finnish or Lapponic origin. The Firbolg
were a race of short, dark men in Irish mythology, who were driven from Ireland to the
