by W. B. Yeats
Some night that happens once in every seven years, while the Earl is riding round the Curragh, the entrance may be seen by anyone chancing to pass by. About a hundred years ago, a horse-dealer that was late abroad and a little drunk, saw the lighted cavern, and went in. The lights, and the stillness, and the sight of the men in armour, cowed him a good deal, and he became sober. His hands began to tremble, and he let a bridle fall on the pavement. The sound of the bit echoed through the long cave, and one of the warriors that was next him lifted his head a little, and said, in a deep hoarse voice, “Is it time yet?” He had the wit to say, “Not yet, but soon will,” and the heavy helmet sank down on the table. The horse-dealer made the best of his way out, and I never heard of any other one having got the same opportunity.
Many years ago there was a very religious and holy man, one of the monks of a convent, and he was one day kneeling at his prayers in the garden of his monastery, when he heard a little bird singing in one of the rose trees of the garden, and there never was anything that he heard in the world so sweet as the song of that little bird.
And the holy man rose up from his knees where he was kneeling at his prayers to listen to its song; for he thought he never in all his life heard anything so heavenly.
And the little bird, after singing for some time longer in the rose tree, flew away to a grove at some distance from the monastery, and the holy man followed it to listen to its singing, for he felt as if he could never be tired of listening to the sweet song that it was singing out of its throat.
And the little bird after that went away to another distant tree, and sung there for a while, and then to another tree, and so on in the same manner, but ever farther and farther away from the monastery, and the holy man still following it farther, and farther, and farther still listening delighted to its enchanting song.
But at last he was obliged to give up, as it was growing late in the day, and he returned to the convent, and as he approached it in the evening, the sun was setting in the west with all the most heavenly colours that were ever seen in the world, and when he came into the convent, it was nightfall.
And he was quite surprised at everything he saw, for they were all strange faces about him in the monastery that he had never seen before, and the very place itself, and everything about it, seemed to be strangely altered; and, altogether, it seemed entirely different from what it was when he left in the morning; and the garden was not like the garden where he had been kneeling at his devotion when he first heard the singing of the little bird.
And while he was wondering at all he saw, one of the monks of the convent came up to him, and the holy man questioned him, “Brother, what is the cause of all these strange changes that have taken place here since the morning?”
And the monk that he spoke to seemed to wonder greatly at his question, and asked him what he meant by the changes since morning? for, sure, there was no change; that all was just as before. And then he said, “Brother, why do you ask these strange questions, and what is your name? for you wear the habit of our order, though we have never seen you before.”
So upon this the holy man told his name, and said that he had been at mass in the chapel in the morning before he had wandered away from the garden listening to the song of a little bird that was singing among the rose trees, near where he was kneeling at his prayers.
And the brother, while he was speaking, gazed at him very earnestly, and then told him that there was in the convent a tradition of a brother of his name, who had left it two hundred years before, but that what had become of him was never known.
And while he was speaking, the holy man said, “My hour of death is come; blessed be the name of the Lord for all his mercies to me, through the merits of his only-begotten Son.”
And he kneeled down that very moment, and said, “Brother, take my confession, and give me absolution, for my soul is departing.”
And he made his confession, and received his absolution, and was anointed, and before midnight he died.
The little bird, you see, was an angel, one of the cherubim or seraphim; and that was the way that the Almighty was pleased in His mercy to take to Himself the soul of that holy man.
NOTES ON THE STORIES
1: THE STOLEN CHILD
This haunting poem first appeared in the Irish Monthly in December 1886. It marked Yeats’s crucial decision to confine his poetry to Irish subjects. Its dreamy late-Romantic atmosphere is not typical of the folk belief in fairy changelings on which it draws, reflecting instead Yeats’s own misty concept of the “celtic twilight”. In a review of Lady Wilde’s Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland in 1890, he announced that “the grey morning melancholy runs through all the legends of my people” – a view he must have been caused to revise on his later expeditions collecting folklore with Lady Gregory. Real folklore is more down-to-earth and robust than this; but the unearthly fragile elegance of “The Stolen Child” has made it deservedly one of the most popular of Yeats’s early poems. Yeats noted, “The places mentioned are round about Sligo. Further Rosses is a very noted fairy locality. There is here a little point of rocks where, if anyone falls asleep, there is danger of their waking silly, the fairies having carried off their souls.”
2: THE PRIEST’S SUPPER
This sprightly legend is from the first major collection of Irish folklore, Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–1828). Croker was a senior clerk in the Admiralty in London who gathered stories and traditions on walking tours in southern Ireland, and also begged stories from like-minded friends such as Thomas Keightley, author of The Fairy Mythology. Croker’s first volume, which included “The Priest’s Supper”, “The Legend of Knockgrafton”, “Master and Man” and “Daniel O’Rourke”, was almost immediately translated into German by the Brothers Grimm, who saw its importance. Croker returned the compliment by translating the Grimms’ long introductory essay in his third and final volume, which he dedicated to them. Although there is truth in Thomas Keightley’s disgruntled comment that, “some of the more amusing traits which (the Grimms) give as characteristic of the Irish fairies, owe their origin to the fancy of the writers, who were, in many cases, more anxious to produce amusing tales than to transmit legends faithfully”, Croker’s work was a confident and encouraging start to folklore collecting in Ireland, presenting the stories for the most part “in the style in which they are generally related by those who believe in them”. Yeats originally planned simply to produce a new edition of Croker, before settling on the wider scope of his Fairy and Folk Tales, and Croker remained a chief source for his work. As with most folk tales and legends, “The Priest’s Supper” can be paralleled with similar stories told in many countries, as well as other Irish versions. Folklorists label such stories “The Fairies’ Prospect of Salvation”.
3: THE LEGEND OF KNOCKGRAFTON
This widespread legend is also from Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions. Croker gives a tune for the fairies’ song, “commonly sung by every skilful narrator of the tale”. The fairies’ words mean “Monday, Tuesday”, which Lusmore caps with “and Wednesday”, and Jack Madden ruins with “and Thursday and Friday”. Croker notes that, “In different parts of the country, of course various raths and mounds are assigned as the scene of fairy revelry. The writer’s reason for selecting the moat of Knockgrafton was his having been told the legend within view of the place in August 1816, and with little variation from the words of the text.” A “moat” is a tumulus or barrow; that of Knockgrafton is in Munster. Similar tales are told in many countries, but this type, known as “The Gifts of the Little People”, seems particularly popular in Ireland and in Japan, where it is used to point a moral to children. See the story “The Old Man Who Had Wens” in Keigo Seki Folktales of Japan (1963).
4: A DONEGAL FAIRY
From Letitia McClintock “Folk Lore of the County Donegal”, Dublin University Magazine vol. 89, 1877. The “Noman” motif, familiar from The Odyss
ey is found in many folk literatures. This version is unusual in that it avoids the joke that the human who has harmed the fairy or ogre gives their name as “My ainsel” or some such, so that when the injured party is asked who hurt them, they can only say “Myself”. Instead the story is used to point the moral that “the gentry” will avenge all ill-treatment, and so must be treated with respect. Letitia McClintock collected many Ulster traditions but published only a few articles. She gives the narrator of “A Donegal Fairy” as “old Matt Craig”, but this is probably a made-up name. It is typical of Yeats’s small alterations to his sources that he amends her stage-Irish “crathurs” to “creatures”.
5: JAMIE FREEL AND THE YOUNG LADY
Also from Letitia McClintock “Folk Lore of the County Donegal”. There are several Irish parallels, of which the closest is the story of “Guleesh” collected by Douglas Hyde and translated in his Beside the Fire (1890). A recent retelling is N. Philip Guleesh and the King of France’s Daughter (1986), illustrated with Victorian magic lantern slides by H. M. J. Underhill.
6: A LEGEND OF KNOCKMANY
This story, first printed in Chambers’s Journal, is taken from William Carleton’s Tales and Sketches illustrating the Character, Usages, Traditions, Sports and Pastimes of the Irish Peasantry (1845). Incorporating various devices known to folklorists as “Tales of the Stupid Ogre”, it is a skit on two of the great heroes of Irish story-telling, Finn and Cuchulain. Another version, “Fion MacCuil and the Scotch Giant”, is in Patrick Kennedy’s Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866). The tale first appeared in print in 1834, in Captain Marryat’s seafaring novel Peter Simple, in which the master’s mate O’Brien tells Peter “how Fingal bothered the great Scotch giant”.
7: THE TWELVE WILD GEESE
With “The Twelve Wild Geese” we enter the world of the international wonder tale. This type is known as “The Maiden Who Seeks her Brothers”; the Grimms’ version is called “The Six Swans”. The story comes from The Fireside Stories of Ireland (1870) by the Dublin bookseller Patrick Kennedy, who published several excellent collections of stories he remembered from his childhood in County Wexford. These stories were told in English, though they are clearly derived from the Gaelic storytelling tradition. “Bog-down”, from which the shirts have to be made, is cotton-grass. There is another excellent Irish version, “The Twelve Brothers”, in Séamus Ó Duilearga Seán Ó Conaill’s Book (tr. Maire MacNeill, 1981), a marvellous collection which gives the entire repertoire of a master storyteller.
8: THE LAZY BEAUTY AND HER AUNTS
“Lazy Beauty” is another of Patrick Kennedy’s Fireside Tales. It is a version of the international tale known as “The Three Old Women Helpers”, which is itself essentially a variant of the “Rumpelstiltskin” type.
9: THE HAUGHTY PRINCESS
This third story from Kennedy’s Fireside Tales is a version of the tale type known to scholars by the title of the Grimms’ story, “King Thrushbeard”.
10: FAR DARRIG IN DONEGAL
Yeats gave his own title to this story from Letitia McClintock’s “Folk Lore of the County Donegal”, associating the “big man” of the story with the supernatural being known as the Far Darrig (Fear Dearg, red man), whom he describes as “the practical joker of the other world”. Yeats himself recorded a rather inferior version of this tale from a Sligo man named Michael Hart, and published it as “A Fairy Enchantment” in Irish Fairy Tales and with variations elsewhere. The tale of “The Man Who Had No Story” is common in Ireland and Scotland, and seems to be peculiar to the Gaelic tradition.
11: DONALD AND HIS NEIGHBOURS
From a rare early nineteenth-century chapbook, the Royal Hibernian Tales. Yeats could not find a copy of this, so his friend AE (the poet and mystic George Russell) copied it out for him in Dublin. It has now been reprinted in Béaloideas, the Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, vol. 10, 1940. The Royal Hibernian Tales are mentioned by William Makepeace Thackeray in his Irish Sketchbook (1842), in which he too printed the story of “Donald and his Neighbours”. The story is a version of the type internationally known as “The Rich and the Poor Peasant”. Henry Glassie’s excellent anthology Irish Folktales (1985) contains a version of this story, “Huddon and Duddon and Donald O’Leary” tape-recorded from the Fermanagh storyteller Hugh Nolan in 1972 which is of particular interest as Mr Nolan evidently learned the story from a reprint of the Royal Hibernian Tales text. His version shows what a gifted storyteller’s creative involvement with his material can mean, while still remaining faithful to the original.
12: MASTER AND MAN
From T. Crofton Croker Fairy Legends and Traditions. Croker was told many stories of men obliged to keep company with the fairies, “going far and near with them, day and night – to London one night and to America the next; and the only horses they made use of for these great journeys were cabbage stumps in the form of natural horses.” Sean O’Sullivan’s Folktales of Ireland (1966) has a splendid tale. “Seán Palmer’s Voyage to America with the Fairies”, in which the journey is taken in a fairy boat, and the contented Seán draws the cheerful moral, “a lucky man only needs to be born”. The Rinka (rinceadh) is an Irish dance.
13: THE WITCHES’ EXCURSION
From Patrick Kennedy Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866). This legend, like “Master and Man” and “Jamie Freel” makes use of the common motif of the ride with the fairies, this time transferred to witches. Among many versions of this in British legend, one might mention the story of the Laird of Duffus, given in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: he was whirled to the King of France’s cellar when he repeated the fairies’ cry of “Horse and Hattock”, and found there drunk by the king’s butler the following morning.
14: THE MAN WHO NEVER KNEW FEAR
Collected and translated by Douglas Hyde, this tale is internationally known as “The Youth Who Wanted to Know what Fear Is”. It is common in Ireland.
15: THE HORNED WOMEN
From Lady Jane Francesca Wilde Ancient Legends, Mystic charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887). A number of legends incorporate this “your house is on fire” ruse for getting rid of unwelcome fairy guests, with its reminiscence of the children’s rhyme of “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home”, but the eerie horns of the witches are unique to this powerful legend of Lady Wilde’s. Lady Wilde and her husband Sir William, parents of the playwright Oscar Wilde, were notably eccentric figures in nineteenth-century Dublin. Some of their own actions and words have passed into folklore: Lady Wilde is particularly remembered for her rebuke to a slatternly maid, “Why do you put the plates on the coal scuttle? What are the chairs meant for?” Sir William was a doctor who accepted payment in folklore from his poorer patients, publishing a volume on Irish Popular Superstitions (1853). Lady Wilde, who also published political verse as “Speranza”, gathered her husband’s collections into two fascinating if unreliable rag-bags of books, Ancient Legends and its sequel, Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages in Ireland (1890).
16: DANIEL O’ROURKE
From Croker Fairy Legends and Traditions. Croker compares Daniel O’Rourke to Astolpho, who travels to the moon in Ariosto’s epic sixteenth-century poem Orlando Furioso, and says that the tale “is a very common one, and is here related according to the most authentic version”. Folklorists list such stories under the title, “The Man Carried Through the Air by Geese”.
17: THE SOUL CAGES
From Croker Fairy Legends and Traditions. The notion of the soul cages is most poetic and intriguing, but is not confined to Ireland; as Croker noted, the Grimms had collected a similar legend in Germany, translated by Donald Ward as “The Merman and the Farmer” in The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (1981).
18: THE GIANT’S STAIRS
From Croker Fairy Legends and Traditions. This and the following story both conform to the widespread legend type known as “The Seven Sleepers”.
19: THE ENCHANTMENT OF EARL GERALD
&
nbsp; From Patrick Kennedy Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts. Kennedy says that “What we heard from Mrs K. (his grandmother) in 1816, or thereabouts, is here given to the reader most conscientiously.”
20: THE STORY OF THE LITTLE BIRD
Contributed by T. Crofton Croker to The Amulet, or Christian and Literary Remembrancer for 1827, edited by S. C. Hall. Croker explains that on a recent trip to the south of Ireland collecting “legendary tales” he often found people willing to share stories at the religious assemblies known as “patterns” held at the holy well dedicated to a patron saint. At such meetings, “legends of all descriptions, but more particularly legends of saints, are told more freely than under other circumstances”. He describes the scene: “It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and, weary with walking, I had sat down to rest upon a grassy bank, close to a holy well. I felt refreshed at the sight of the clear cold water, through which pebbles glistened, and sparks of silvery air shot upwards: in short, I was in the temper to be pleased. An old woman had concluded her prayers, and was about to depart, when I entered into conversation with her, and I have written the very words in which she related to me the legend of the Song of the Little Bird.” This legend is again internationally known, as “The Monk and the Bird”, but it is perhaps particularly at home in Ireland. Sean O’Sullivan prints another version in his Legends from Ireland. and rightly remarks that the monk’s sudden ageing recalls the fate of the hero Oisín when he returns to Ireland from the Land of Youth. It also brings to mind the little verse scribbled in the margin of a manuscript by an unknown Irish monk of the eighth or ninth century, translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson in his Celtic Miscellany: “The little bird has given a whistle from the tip of its bright yellow beak; the blackbird from the yellow-topped bough sends forth its call over Loch Loígh.”