Did King Arthur sail to Iceland and subdue it?

Welsh prince Madoc wasn't the only British royal to sail the Atlantic. Mythical King Arthur also sailed across it and conquered Iceland.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1095 – c.1155 AD) in his work History of the Kings of England (see chapter 10, page 158) states that English King Arthur sailed to Iceland. He wrote the following:

"The next summer he fitted out a fleet, and made an expedition into Ireland, which he was desirous to reduce. Upon landing there, he was met by King Guillamurius before mentioned, with a vast number of men, who came with a design to fight him; but at the very beginning of the battle, those naked and unarmed people were miserably routed, and fled to such places as lay open to them for shelter. Guillamurius also in a short time was taken prisoner, and forced to submit; as were also all the other princes of the country after the king's example, being under great consternation at what had happened. After an entire conquest of Ireland, he made a voyage with his fleet to Iceland, which he also subdued. and now a rumor spreading over the rest of the islands, that no country was able to whithstand him, Doldavius, King of Gothland, and Gunfasius, King of the Orkneys, came voluntariliy, and made their submission, on a promise of paying tribute. Then, as soon as Winter was over, he returned back to Britain, where having established the kingdom, he resided in it for twelve years together in peace."

See the same book and quote but translated slightly differently from Latin here.

King Arthur is a mythical figure, probably based on a minor British warlord who fought against the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in the late fifth, early sixth centuries AD. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about Merlin, the legendary Excalibur sword, and his wife, Gwinevere. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he conquered Norway, Iceland, and some regions of France, and created a vast empire. He went to Insula Avalonis (Avalon) to heal a mortal wound, it was also the place where Excalibur was forged. Later additions included Camelot, Lancelot, and the round table.

Arthur is supposed to have lived around 450–550 AD.

If Arthur was a chieftain of the post-Roman Britons who had to defend their territory from the onsalught of Anglo-Saxons, and Jutes from the coasts of what is now Denmark and Northwestern Germany. These Britons were Latinized, Christian Celts who had to fend for themselves after Rome withdrew its last legions in AD 410. They were more civilized than the barbarians that attacked them, but they fared badly as the Germanic tribes settled in eastern England and pushed the locals westwards into Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and the western Lancashire.

pre-Viking Celts in Iceland c.500 AD?

It is interesting to point out that according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Iceland was inhabited at that time ~450-550 AD.

The official records state that a Viking named Naddodd discovered it by chance ~861 AD (300 to 400 years after the dates given by Geoffrey of Monmouth!) and it was not settled until 874 AD when Arnarson arrived from Norway and established himself in Reykjavik.

There is of course an ancient account about Thule (Iceland) by the Greek explorer and navibator Pytheas of Massalia (~350 BC) who recorded in a book (now lost), On the Ocean his voyages. Scraps of this work were quoted by later writers. So we know from Strabo, about "Thule (which Pytheas says is a six days' sail north of Britain, and is near the frozen sea)" (source, also see footnote). He added that " Now Pytheas of Massilia tells us that Thule, the most northerly of the Britannic Islands, is farthest north, and that there the circle of the summer tropic is the same as the arctic circle.⁠163 But from the other writers I learn nothing on the subject — neither that there exists a certain island by the name of Thule, nor whether the northern regions are inhabitable" (Source).

But what has survived of Pytheas' account does not mention inhabitants in Thule.

Later, Roman scholar Tacitus wrote about General Agricola's conquest of the Orkney Islands, and that his fleet almost reached Thule: "Under Agricola a Roman fleet first navigated the shore of the furthest sea [84 AD], and confirmed Britain as an island, in the same voyage reaching the unexplored islands known as the Orcades and claiming them. Thule was merely sighted, as their orders took them only thus far, and winter was approaching. But they declared the waves sluggish, resistant to the oar, and likewise unresponsive to the wind, presumably because mountainous land, the cause and origin of storms, is scarcer, and the unbroken mass of deeper water is harder to set in motion." (Source)

Pliny the Elder also mentions Thule in his Natural History (source), as well as the the Orkney Islands (see § 4.103), and notes that the British Celts sailed to another island called Mictisis, he also mentions other islands from where people embark for Thule. It surely had inhabitants then (Source) - I have not found any other reference about Mictisis by any other author, ancient or modern. Try searching it in Google!

"The most remote of all that we find mentioned is Thule, in which, as we have previously stated, there is no night at the summer solstice, when the sun is passing through the sign of Cancer, while on the other hand at the winter solstice there is no day. Some writers are of opinion that this state of things lasts for six whole months together. Timaeus the historian says that an island called Mictisis within six days' sail of Britannia, in which white load is found; and that the Britons sail over to it in boats of osier, covered with sewed hides. There are writers also who make mention of some other islands: Scandia, Dumna, Bergos, and, greater than all, Nerigos, from which persons embark for Thule. At one day's sail from Thule is the frozen ocean, which by some is called the Cronian Sea. "

What was "white load"? Did they use hide-hulled osier boats? Pliny had mentioned them before; they are baskets made with flexible willow shoots (osier) covered with hides, or coracles. Rather flimsy to navigate the North Atlantic. White load is tin: "§ 34.156 [47] The next topic is the nature of lead, of which there are two kinds, black and white. White lead (tin) is the most valuable; the Greeks applied to it the name cassheros, and there was a legendary story of their going to islands of the Atlantic ocean to fetch it and importing it in platted vessels made of osiers and covered with stitched hides. It is now known that it is a product of Lusitania and Gallaecia found in the surface-strata of the ground which is sandy and of a black colour." (source)

There is no tin in Iceland or the Shetlands, Faroe, or Orkneys. The only source of tin other than Cornwall in the Sothwest of Britain, was in Nova Scotia (East Kemptville), it was the largest mine in the world until it closed. (Source).

But, the question is was Iceland inhabited in 450-550 AD, during Arthur's time?

There are written accounts by the Vikings that tell of Irish monks in Iceland when they arrived. For instance (Source): "Islendinga Bok c. 1. «Anciently there lived here Christian folk whom the Norsemen ealled Papar they afterwards went away as they could not endure the society of heathens and they left behind them Irish books bells and pastoral staves so that one could ascertain therefrom that they were Irish». Landnamabok «But before Iceland was peopled by the Norsemen there were folk here who were called by the Norsemen Papar they were Christians and it is thought that they came from the West over the sea for they left behind them Irish books bells and staves and many other articles from which one might conjecture they were West-men.»."

The Irish gaelic monks had established themselves in heathen Ireland starting in 431 with Bishop Palladius and Saint Patrick in 432 AD. Monasteries were built in the sixth-century ~500 AD, by St. Finian, St. Brendan, St. Comgall, St. Kieran, and St. Enda. They probably went north into the Faroe Islands and onwards to Icealand with an escort of Christian Celts ~500 AD (Source).

John Dee and English claims over America

This information was used by John Dee (1527-1608), a well known mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, and scholar of magic and the occult, to promote the English claims over America. He was a favorite of English Queen, Elizabeth I, acting as her adviser and astrologer. He coined the term "British Empire", championed the cause of exploring and claiming North America for England, and was an activist in favor of the Gregorian calendar (which was finally adopted by Britain in 1752).

Spain and Portugal had split the globe between themselves using the meridian that passed through a point 300 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands (Tordesillas Treaty, signed in 1494). Pope Julius II ratified this treaty in 1506. However, other nations like the Dutch and the English ignored it, especially after the break with Rome during the Protestant reformation.

Dee came up with the voyages of Welsh Prince Madoc, and the domination of Iceland and the Norsemen's territory by King Arthur, to set a precedent and legal priority for England's claim to North America, and the territories later occupied by the Vikings (Iceland, Greenland, Vinland, Markland), and the land mentioned by the Zeno brothers (Frisland and Estoitland).

He also used information from an account known as Inventio Fortunata which tells about an English Franciscan friar who was a mathematician at Oxford, who sailed to the North Pole on his own, in 1360 during the reign of Edward III of England. More details on this voyage in a future post.

Since Elizabeth I was a Tudor, and had Welsh roots (The House of Tudor came from the Tudors of Penmynydd, a noble family from Wales), Dee outlined her family tree showing that she was related to Arthur and Madoc!

Dee prepared maps for the English privateers and navigators like John Davis, Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher, Walter Raleigh, and Humphrey Gilbert, below is one of them, a North Pole view of the world, notice the ice-free Arctic Ocean, the magnetic mountain on the pole, and the many channels cutting across North America. Dee was convinced that a northern passage existed between Europe and the Far East. The map below was given by Dee to Gilbert in 1582-83. It can be enlarged by clicking on the source link.

John Dee's map for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1582-83. Source (click for interactive map)

For those interested in Dee and his British Empire project, I suggest reading the following paper published in 2024: The Artic Arthur and the American Avalon: John Dee’s Brytanici imperii limites (1578) and the North Atlantic island imaginary, by Stewart, B.; Buskes, G.; Cobben, F.; Geerts, W.; Nolten, M.; Verkoren, J. Leidschrift, 39(Februari (1) Er was eens… Sprookjes, folklore en mythes door de eeuwen heen Sprookjes, folklore en mythes door de eeuwen heen), 33-55. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/4198826.

Avalon in America

It is interesting to note that the southwestern tip of Newfoundland was named Avalon peninsula. Which is no other than the mythical island of King Arthur! This spot was the earliest site of English voyages (by Sebastian Cabot), temporary and later, permanent settlement. By chance it was named with an Arthurian placename.

It was named Avalon by Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, (1580-1632), who received a grant from the Crown to settle there in 1621 (many years after Dee's death), by chance, he chose the name Avalon because it was the land where St. Joseph of Arimathea was said to have landed in his mission to christianize Britain ~63 AD.

Back in 2014 I posted about mtDNA C1e haplogroup found only in Iceland. Amerindians have mtDNA C1b, C1c, and C1d but those who may have met the Vikings in Greenland (Innuit - Eskimo) don't carry it. They are unrelated to the Icleandic variant. mtDNA C1a is found in East Asia, and C1f found at extremely low frequencies in the eastern Baltic area. But neither are associated with the Iceland haplogroup. The options are: C1e has an Eurasian root and reached Iceland with its Viking peopling wave, or it is a Native American variant not yet detected in America. Considering its tree (see Fig. 3 in this paper), with C1e equidistant from C1f and C1d, I opt for an Amerindian variant, one that was thriving ~500 AD when Irish, English, or Scottish people navigated to and from America and Ireland and mixed with the natives, bringing it back to Iceland with them. It survived there and ended up in modern Icelandic people. The original Amerindian clade died out in America during the "Great Dying" after the discovery and conquest starting in 1492. However, C1d is particularly prevalent in South America, and at lower frequencies in Central and North America! (see heatmap here).

My next post will look into another Medieval English Polar explorer who sailed in 1360 to the North Pole.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

The Welsh discovery of America, the Madoc myth

Online you can find many pages dedicated to a Welsh prince named Madoc, who set sail from Wales roughly one century before his country was conquered by the English, and settled in North America.

I came across an interesting book, that predates these webpages by 150 years: America Discovered by the Welsh in 1170 A.D., by Benjamin H. Bowen (1876).

Google results: Madoc.

It is fun to read, and mentions among other things, the white, bearded indians of Baroa (on page 140) (I have posted about them), von Humboldt's reference to white Indians in the Orinoco region. It describes linguistic links, and stories told by those who settled and explored North America.

There is a also a long epic poem "Madoc" published in 1805 by Robert Southey (1774-1843) that details the mythic voyage from Wales to America, but not to what is now the U.S., but to Mexico, where he met the Aztecs (Aztlan). But is it based on facts?

Lhoyd's History of Wales, 1584

There is a much older written reference about Madoc by David Powel, published in 1584, and it is found in his work The historie of Cambria, now called Wales: a part of the most famous yland of Brytaine, written in the Brytish language aboue two hundreth yeares past: tr. into English by H. Lhoyd... Corrected, augmented, and continued out of records and best approoued authors, by Dauid Powel (see pages 166-167), quoted below.

The book, in its introduction, says that the official Welsh records it mentions were compiled by Caradoc of Lancaruan and later continued until 1270, and conserved in two Welsh abbeys. It was later translated into English by Humffrey Lhoyd (1527-1568). David Powel added onto Lhoyd's work.

The story of Madoc is the following: When the Welsh King Owen Gwyneth died in 1170, his sons and heirs began fighting among themselves for the throne. One of them, Macoc opted out and set sail across the Atlantic to find a new place to settle and reign over. Below is the story of his adventures:

"...Madoc another of Owen Gwyneth his sonnes left the land in contention betwixt his brethren, and prepared certaine ships with men and munition, and sought aduentures by seas, sailing West, and leauing the coast of Ireland so far north, that he came to a land unknowen, where he saw manie strange things. This land must needs be some part of that countrie of which the Spaniardes affirme themselues to be the first finders sith Hannos time; for by reason and order of Cosmographie, this land, to the which Madoc came, must needs be some part of Noua Hispania or Florida. Whereupon it is manifest, that that countrie was long before by Brytaines discovered, afore either Columbus or Americus Vesputius lead anie Spaniards thither. Of the viage and returne of this Madoc there be manie fables fained, as the common people doo vse in distance of place and length of time rather to augment than to diminish: but sure it is, that there he was. And after he had returned home and declared the pleasant and fruitfull countries that he had seene without inhabitants; and vpon the contrarie part, for what barren and wild ground his brethren and nephues did murther one another: he prepared a number of ships, and got with him such men and women as were desirous to liue in quietnes, and taking leaue of his freends tooke his iournie thitherward againe. Therefore it is to be presupposed, that he and his people inhabited part of those countries; for it appeareth by Francis Loues, that in Acusanus and other places, the people honored the crosse: whereby it may be gathered that Christians had beene there, before the comming of the Spaniards. But bicause this people were not manie, they folowed the maners of the land, they came vnto, and vsed the language they found there.

†‡† This Madoc arriuing in that Westerne countrie, vnto the which he came, in the yeare 1170. left most of his people there: and returning backe for more of his owne nation, acquaintance and freends, to inhabite that faire and large countrie: went thither againe with ten sailes, as I find noted by Gutyn Owen. Gutyn Owen. I am of opinion that the land, wherevnto he came, was some part of Mexico: the causes which make me to thinke so be these.

1 The common report of the inhabitants of that countrie, which affirme, that their rulers descended from a strange nation, that came thither from a farre countrie: which thing is confessed by Mutezuma king of that countrie, in his oration made for quieting of his people, at his submission to the king of Castile, Hernando Curteis being then present, which is laid downe in the Spanish Chron cles of the conquest of the West Indies.

2 The Brytish words and names of places, vsed in that countrie euen to this daie, doo argue the same as when they talke togither, they use this word Gwrando, which is, Hearken or listen. Also they haue a certeine bird with a white head, which they call Pengwin, that is, white head. But the Iland of Corroeso, the cape of Bryton, the riuer of Gwyndor, and the white rocke of Pengwyn, which be all Brytish or Welsh words, doo manifestlie shew that it was that countrie which Madoc and his people inhabited."

The footnotes 1 and 2 were taken from Sir George Peckham's true Report of the late discoueries, published in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. by Richard Hakluyt. See p. 14. (and here, Chapter III)

Context

It has been suggested that this reference to Madoc and America during the Elizabethan period was created to set a precedent and first discovery by the British Welsh people and justify England's colonial pretences in America during Queen Elizabeth the First's time. In 1586 the English established the short-lived English colony of Roanoke Island, in what is now North Carolina, and it failed. However, in 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh named the eastern coast Virgina, in honor of the Queen. Sir Humphrey Gibson claimed Newfoundland for England in 1583. Was Madoc "invented" to justify the English Crown's claim? (see p. 281 in the work quoted above, which uses Madoc to justify these territorial claims.)

Peckham quotes David Ingram, a British sailor who said he walked 2,000 km (3,200 miles) from Tampico in the Gulf of Mexico to Maine - Nova Scotia in 1566-69. He lived among the natives. It was Ingram who mentions the word "Gwrando" a Welsh greeting used by the natives. He also mentions them using the same name to identify penguins. But note that these are not those found in the southern Oceans, but the great auk (Pinguinus impennis), which was known as penguin or garefowl. It was exterminated by the mid-1800s. It is not related to the Southern penguins which were named after them, as they looked very similar (black and white, swimming, flightless birds). The English word "penguin" comes from the Welsh "pen" "gwyn" "white" and "head", respectively. Referring to the auk. Ingram was rescued by a French ship in 1569, in Nova Scotia. His journey was recorded, but that will be the subject of another post.

Other later mentions of Madoc

Madoc Leaving Wales. Source

The image above comes from A Popular History of the United States (p. 66 onwards) by William Bryant and Sydney Gay (1888), which tells about Madoc and of reports from the late 1600s of a pale-skinned Native American tribe speaking a British language in North America. With later reports from the 1770s and 1780s, a tribe called Mandans, who had Welsh traits:

"Among them were in use certain words in which is a resemblance or a fancied resemblance to the old British language. In the manufacture of their pottery and in the making of blue beads they are said to have shown a superiority over the ordinary savage. Mr Catlin believed them to be a cross theory and between the Indians and the Welsh and is inclined to accept a theory favored also by some other writers that the Mandans are the descendants of the Mound Builders and that the builders of those numerous earth works were the people originating in Madoc's Colony. The boat they used Catlin says was more like the coracle of the Welsh than the canoe of other Indians and he asserts that in complexion in the color of their hair and eyes they seemed rather to be allied to the white than the red race"

Closing Comments

Madoc's voyages is an interesting story. But, is it True? It would be hard to find Welsh genes among the surviving Native Americans of the East Coast. They were decimated and expelled from their territories as the European settlers occupied the eastern seabord. Then the Indian Removal Act promoted by President Andrew Jackson and signed by him on May 28, 1830 led to the forced removal of all surviving Native American tribes in the East, to what is now Oklahoma, beyond the Mississippi River.

Did the Welsh bring Old World diseases with them? Did they share their European technology like iron smelting, farming, dogs, horses, or cattle with the natives? If they did, it seems that just as with the Vikings before them, who set up a small settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland c.1000 AD, the Natives didn't adopt the new knowledge, and probably liquidated the settlers, or expelled them.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Tennessee Pygmies

Back in 1820, in Tennessee, U.S.A., the newspapers reported that some farmers had discovered tombs containing the remains of pygmies! Of course we know there were no pygmies in Tennessee, but the reports about the tiny people refused to go away, and they persisted for decades, well into the late 1800s. Even nowadays they reappear again and again, like when the Flores Island "Hobbit" was discovered in 2004, the Tennesee pygmy resurfaced as an American relative. Let's look into the fake news of these pygmies.

The whole story is very well summarized by Kevin Smith in his article "Tennessee’s Ancient Pygmy Graveyards: The “Wonder of the Western Country" (Tennesee Archaeology, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 2013, p.42)↺.

The first report was published in the Nashville Whig on July 5th, 1820, reporting that Mr. Turner Lane, found between 200 and 300 small graves on his farm five miles east of Sparta, Tennessee (TN) - see spot on Google maps, the graves contained small skeletons: "skull bones, about three inches in diameter, nearly sound; the other bones being proportionally small."

John Haywoodin in his "Natural History of Tennesee..." published in 1823 (see p. 200, "Of their Pygmies") gives the account of Lane's findings adding some comments and details: "it seems to be intimated, that there hath been a race of people here in ancient times, whose height was from two feet, ten inches to three feet".

Towards the end of the book, on p. 360, Haywood reports another find:

"In 1818, Mr. Long, the proprietor of a farm on the south side of the Merimac river, fifteen miles from St. Louis, in the state of Missouri, discovered... a number of graves, the size of which appeared uncommonly small. He made a minute examination, which convinced him they were the remains of human beings much smaller than those of the present day."

However, by the 1830s, people were more critical. Robert Montgomery Bird in 1838 (Peter Pilgrim, p. 24) wrote with a more rational tone:

"The belief in the former existence of races of pygmies and giants in the Mississippi Valley is extremely prevalent in many Western communities though the visits of scientific men to the cemeteries of the former have been productive of results that have shaken the faith of many in regard to the pygmies. The celebrated graveyard on the Merameg (sic) river in Missouri was examined by some of the scientific gentlemen attached to Long's Expedition who found bones of men and infants of the ordinary Indian races in great abundance but no others. Bones from the Lilliputian graves in White County Tennessee have also been proved to belong to mortals of ordinary stature."

In a similar vein, in 1852, Dr. Samuel Morton in his Physical Type of the American Indians,in "Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the... Indian Tribes of the United States", p. 318), reports that he analyzed remains from the "pygmy Cemetery" in White County, Tennessee, and is categorical in declaring they are not pygmys at all:

"...these facts are to me an additional and convincing proof of what I have never doubted viz that the asserted Pygmies of the western country were mere children who for reasons not precisely known but which appear also to influence some communities of even our own race were buried apart from the adult people of their tribe."

In 1869, H.C. Williams wrote about them: "I think in the year 1825 in the Review a printed at Sparta the seat of justice of White County... Fiske and some other gentleman made an examination of an ancient cemetery near that town and finding no of adults came to the conclusion that the country had been by a race of pigmies. The graves were numerous covering more than an acre were generally three feet long and eighteen inches deep with a fin of slaty rocks. The bones were so much decomposed that they fell to pieces after a few moments exposure to the atmosphere."

The Smithsonian intervenes

Nevertheless, the belief in these pygmies continued (see Edward J. Wood, 1868, Giants and Dwarfs, p. 247, or Harper's Magazine, 1869, p. 208) so the Smithsonian Institution sent someone to investigate the findings, the sites and clarify the situation.

An article published by the Smithsonian Institution on January 20, 1876, (The Academy. The Tennessee Pygmies) mentions that the institution sent a person to investigate the "recent revival of the tradition... recent diggings unearthed the remains which have given origin a new to the recent reports." The search in Sparta TN where it had been said that 300 skeletons of "Tiny Folk" had been found during the past ten years only yielded "very few skeletal remains, all collected not filling more than a small box. The fragments thus sent proved on examination to be in no way abnormal... and and were evidently the remains of children between three and four years old... With the human remains forwarded were teeth of the beaver, the costal segments of a turtle, some rough pottery and broken valves of unios. These suggest the ordinary Indian sepulture"

The article says that the idea about pygmies comes from the size of the graves rather than their contents. The graves were small, 2 feet long (61 cm) and 14 inches wide (36 cm) and 12 in. deep (31 cm). They were covered with slabs of sandstone. They lie below the surface of the ground and are discovered when a farmer plows the land. Then they are removed, to clear the fields.

Another piece published in the American Naturalist, June 1876 conveys similar information:

"The following evidence that no pygmy race left their remains in this part of our country must be conclusive... Mr WM Clark employed during the last year by the Smithsonian Institution to investigate the same subject ... distinctly proves that the little slab graves are either those of children or are ossuaries... the most convincing proof brought forward from the examination of hundreds of graves that the small cists are either children's graves or ossuaries..."

Tennesee Pygmies in a Smithsonian article from 1875. Source

A publication from 1883 (Tennesee Pygmies, The Comic Liar, 1883) mocked the idea of pygmies and compared them to the finding of giant skeletons in Kentucky:

"... their discovery of a grave yard contain ing the skeletons of seventy five thousand pygmies of the average height of three feet each. What are the three nine foot giants of Kentucky in comparison with so great a cloud of pygmies. If we may judge from the price usually paid by circus managers for living giants and dwarfs a three foot dwarf is decidedly more valuable than a nine foot giant and if the same standard governs the price of fossils the seventy five thousand Tennessee pigmies are worth fully twenty five thousand times as much as the three Kentucky giants."

In 1910, Bennett H. Young published in his work The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky: A History of what is Known of Their Lives and Habits, and on p. 24, he mentions pygmies as follows "Small stone cists measuring not more than two feet in length by fifteen inches and even less in breadth, are frequently unearthed. In these the bones of the dead, after having been disarticulated, were placed in a mass. The small size of these graves in former days gave rise to the belief that the valleys of the Cumberland and Green rivers were once the home of a race of pygmies." This shows that the myth about small folks spread northwards from Tennessee into Kentucky!

The myth lives on

But old myths, like conspiracy theories seem to fascinate us, and even if proven false, they take a long time to die. Some, like this one, manage to revive based on pseudoscientific factoids.

In 1992, an online magazine (Science Frontiers Online) published a note about American Pygmies which dismisses the children bones theory and promotes genuind pygmies that somehow reached America from Asia, small folk related to the Aeta negrito people of the Philippines. It mentions a paper by Pilapil, Virgilio R. MD., (The Aetas In America, B.C.. Journal of Filipino American Historical Society, University of Hawai'i Press, Vol. 2, 1992 pp. 30-35. 🔒) about this theory, its abstract states that:

"... Among the archeological finds were also hundreds of fragmented human bones from 600 burials which were dug from sites in east Tennessee... These pygmies with small, round heads (brachycephalic) and prominent, projecting (prognathous) jaws are similar to the pygmies of the Philippines and Malaysia, who probably originated in southern Mongolia. The pygmy bones and those of the other races present in the burial were in a similar state of preservation indicating that the pygmies were contemporary with the other races. Carbon-14 dating with carbon-13 correction done on the bone collagen yielded an age of 2,160 +- 135 years, putting these pygmies at about the third century B.C..."

Another website - Archaeology General Index hosted at the University of California, Riverside, in one of its many webpage articles European Bronze Age Visitors in America ⁄ Summary of Discoveries of Dr. Barry & René Fell, says the following:

"... it is clear that the pygmies of Tennessee were of Oriental--that is to say, East Asian--origin; and since pygmies are not maritime people, they can have reached the Americas only by the land route.
They must once have been more widely dispersed than our present finds imply. However, since they reached as far east as east Tennessee, and their bones have been found in association with Europoids and inscribed artifacts of Europoid type, such as loom weights and pottery stamps, lettered in ancient Irish (noted as Celtic) and Basque [see Figs. 183, 185, 186, 187 & 189], Fell concluded that there were in fact meetings of the two races, and that therefore the European visitors could well have taken back to Europe some account of these mysterious undersized people. An inscription that Professors Heizer and Martin Baumhoff had recorded from California (Fig. 63), when deciphered as Ancient Irish ogam, seemed also to suggest that early explorers had encountered some pygmy race that they considered dangerous."

This Californian inscription "fig. 63" can be seen in this image which is captioned as follows "A traveler’s warning written in Old Irish ogam, from Inyo County, CA, Site INY-430 of Heltzer & Bassenhoff (1942). The warning states: 'The men [here] are savages, small and ill nourished, but hostile.' (Fell 1982)."

They cite: Fell, Barry. 1982. Bronze Age America. Little, Brown and Co., Boston, Toronto. 304 p.

This blends Celts, Asians, "Europids" and the Tennessee pygmies into a surreal tale, which seems to be based on flimsy facts.

Similar nonsense is posted on a 2024 webpage titled Did Miniature “Moon-Eyed” People Really Inhabit The Appalachian Mountains - Somehow, the Welsh are mixed up in this baffling myth, which suggests that the short white pygmies called "Moon-Eyed" people by the Cherokee people of the Appalachians, were Welsh miners, offspring of the men who accompanied Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, a Welsh prince c.1170 AD.

In The Lost History of the Little People (2013), (see Chap. 7 - The Wee People among other entries on these pygmies), Susan Martinez mentions the Tennessee pygmies with a distinct culture (they used copper and pearls) that set them apart from the Amerincians, they were the mound builders, an ancient race with large eyes, sensitive to light, that built mounds and pyramids across the planet, and who, in the Appalachians were known to the native Cherokee as "little people". Farfetched? Improbable? Very likely.

Closing Comments

I must point out that the Cherokee people believed in mythical tiny people which they called yunwi tsunsdi. They were short, and reached the height of a man's knee, they had long hair, were kind and helpful, and lived in caves on the slopes of the hills, some, known as yunwi amaiyinehi, were aquatic. They resemble the beliefs of the ngen spirits of the Mapuche, stewards of the waters, and their Trauco dwarves. Perhaps humans imagine the same mythical beings time and time again, around the world, repeating the same motif as a recurring theme.

Another option is that ancient human beings encountered dwarwfish hominins like those whose remains have been found in Flores Island, or in Palau, and retained this memory in their myths and legends about dwarves, elfs, trolls, etc.

There have been proper scientific papers written about the native burials in Tennessee, like the one mentioned at the beginning of this post, and for instance: Dowd, John T. (2008). The Cumberland Stone-Box Burials of Middle Tennessee. Tennessee Archaeology 3(2):163-180. From which the following images of box-like tombs were taken, notice the sandstone sides (top is similar, but were been removed to show the interior of the graves. They were dated to around 1350 AD.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©