Due to the Celtic heritage of many whites living in Appalachia , a series of prolonged violent engagements in late - nineteenth-century Kentucky and West Virginia were referred to commonly as feuds , a tendency that was partly due to the nineteenth-century popularity of William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott , authors who both wrote semihistorical accounts of blood feuds . Due to the Celtic heritage of many whites living in Appalachia , a series of prolonged violent engagements in late - nineteenth-century Kentucky and West Virginia were referred to commonly as feuds , a tendency that was partly due to the nineteenth-century popularity of William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott , both of whom wrote semihistorical accounts of blood feuds .