Celtic Fairy Tales

by Joseph Jacobs

  Parallels.—Prof. Zimmer's paper contains three other accounts of the terra repromissionis in the Irish sagas, one of them being the similar adventure of Cormac the nephew of Connla, or Condla Ruad as he should be called. The fairy apple of gold occurs in Cormac Mac Art's visit to the Brug of Manannan (Nutt's Holy Grail, 193).

  Remarks.—Conn the hundred-fighter had the head-kingship of Ireland 123-157 A.D., according to the Annals of the Four Masters, i. 105. On the day of his birth the five great roads from Tara to all parts of Ireland were completed: one of them from Dublin is still used. Connaught is said to have been named after him, but this is scarcely consonant with Joyce's identification with Ptolemy's Nagnatai (Irish Local Names, i. 75). But there can be little doubt of Conn's existence as a powerful ruler in Ireland in the second century. The historic existence of Connla seems also to be authenticated by the reference to him as Conly, the eldest son of Conn, in the Annals of Clonmacnoise. As Conn was succeeded by his third son, Art Enear, Connla was either slain or disappeared during his father's lifetime. Under these circumstances it is not unlikely that our legend grew up within the century after Conn—i.e., during the latter half of the second century.

  As regards the present form of it, Prof. Zimmer (l.c. 261-2) places it in the seventh century. It has clearly been touched up by a Christian hand who introduced the reference to the day of judgment and to the waning power of the Druids. But nothing turns upon this interpolation, so that it is likely that even the present form of the legend is pre-Christian-i.e. for Ireland, pre-Patrician, before the fifth century.

  The tale of Connla is thus the earliest fairy tale of modern Europe. Besides this interest it contains an early account of one of the most characteristic Celtic conceptions, that of the earthly Paradise, the Isle of Youth, Tir-nan-Og. This has impressed itself on the European imagination; in the Arthuriad it is represented by the Vale of Avalon, and as represented in the various Celtic visions of the future life, it forms one of the main sources of Dante's Divina Commedia. It is possible too, I think, that the Homeric Hesperides and the Fortunate Isles of the ancients had a Celtic origin (as is well known, the early place-names of Europe are predominantly Celtic). I have found, I believe, a reference to the conception in one of the earliest passages in the classics dealing with the Druids. Lucan, in his Pharsalia (i. 450-8), addresses them in these high terms of reverence:

  Et vos barbaricos ritus, moremque sinistrum, Sacrorum, Druidae, positis repetistis ab armis, Solis nosse Deos et coeli numera vobis Aut solis nescire datum; nemora alta remotis Incolitis lucis. Vobis auctoribus umbrae, Non tacitas Erebi sedes, Ditisque profundi, Pallida regna petunt: regit idem spiritus artus Orbe alio: longae, canitis si cognita, vitae Mors media est.

  The passage certainly seems to me to imply a different conception from the ordinary classical views of the life after death, the dark and dismal plains of Erebus peopled with ghosts; and the passage I have italicised would chime in well with the conception of a continuance of youth (idem spiritus) in Tir-nan-Og (orbe alio).

  One of the most pathetic, beautiful, and typical scenes in Irish legend is the return of Ossian from Tir-nan-Og, and his interview with St. Patrick. The old faith and the new, the old order of things and that which replaced it, meet in two of the most characteristic products of the Irish imagination (for the Patrick of legend is as much a legendary figure as Oisin himself). Ossian had gone away to Tir-nan-Og with the fairy Niamh under very much the same circumstances as Condla Ruad; time flies in the land of eternal youth, and when Ossian returns, after a year as he thinks, more than three centuries had passed, and St. Patrick had just succeeded in introducing the new faith. The contrast of Past and Present has never been more vividly or beautifully represented.

  II. GULEESH.

  Source.—From Dr. Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire, 104- 28, where it is a translation from the same author's Leabhar Sgeulaighteachta. Dr Hyde got it from one Shamus O'Hart, a gamekeeper of Frenchpark. One is curious to know how far the very beautiful landscapes in the story are due to Dr. Hyde, who confesses to have only taken notes. I have omitted a journey to Rome, paralleled, as Mr. Nutt has pointed out, by the similar one of Michael Scott (Waifs and Strays, i. 46), and not bearing on the main lines of the story. I have also dropped a part of Guleesh's name: in the original he is "Guleesh na guss dhu," Guleesh of the black feet, because he never washed them; nothing turns on this in the present form of the story, but one cannot but suspect it was of importance in the original form.

  Parallels.—Dr. Hyde refers to two short stories, "Midnight Ride" (to Rome) and "Stolen Bride," in Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends. But the closest parallel is given by Miss Maclintock's Donegal tale of "Jamie Freel and the Young Lady," reprinted in Mr. Yeats' Irish Folk and Fairy Tales, 52-9. In the Hibernian Tales, "Mann o' Malaghan and the Fairies," as reported by Thackeray in the Irish Sketch-Book, c. xvi., begins like "Guleesh."

  III. FIELD OF BOLIAUNS.

  Source.—T. Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, ed. Wright, pp. 135-9. In the original the gnome is a Cluricaune, but as a friend of Mr. Batten's has recently heard the tale told of a Lepracaun, I have adopted the better known title.

  Remarks.—Lepracaun is from the Irish leith bhrogan, the one-shoemaker (cf. brogue), according to Dr. Hyde. He is generally seen (and to this day, too) working at a single shoe, cf. Croker's story "Little Shoe," l.c. pp. 142-4. According to a writer in the Revue Celtique, i. 256, the true etymology is luchor pan, "little man." Dr. Joyce also gives the same etymology in Irish Names and Places, i. 183, where he mentions several places named after them.

  IV. HORNED WOMEN.

  Source.—Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends, the first story.

  Parallels.—A similar version was given by Mr. D. Fitzgerald in the Revue Celtique, iv. 181, but without the significant and impressive horns. He refers to Cornhill for February 1877, and to Campbell's "Sauntraigh" No. xxii. Pop. Tales, ii. 52 4, in which a "woman of peace" (a fairy) borrows a woman's kettle and returns it with flesh in it, but at last the woman refuses, and is persecuted by the fairy. I fail to see much analogy. A much closer one is in Campbell, ii. p. 63, where fairies are got rid of by shouting "Dunveilg is on fire." The familiar "lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children at home," will occur to English minds. Another version in Kennedy's Legendary Fictions, p. 164, "Black Stairs on Fire."

  Remarks.—Slievenamon is a famous fairy palace in Tipperary according to Dr. Joyce, l.c. i. 178. It was the hill on which Finn stood when he gave himself as the prize to the Irish maiden who should run up it quickest. Grainne won him with dire consequences, as all the world knows or ought to know (Kennedy, Legend Fict., 222, "How Fion selected a Wife").

  V. CONAL YELLOWCLAW.

  Source.—Campbell, Pop. Tales of West Highlands, No. v. pp. 105-8, "Conall Cra Bhuidhe." I have softened the third episode, which is somewhat too ghastly in the original. I have translated "Cra Bhuide" Yellowclaw on the strength of Campbell's etymology, l.c. p. 158.

  Parallels.—Campbell's vi. and vii. are two variants showing how widespread the story is in Gaelic Scotland. It occurs in Ireland where it has been printed in the chapbook, Hibernian Tales, as the "Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen," the Black Thief being Conall, and the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr. Lang's Red Fairy Book). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his Irish Sketch-Book, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost" (why "almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of the giant's breath occurs in the story of Koisha Kayn, MacInnes' Tales, i. 241, as well as the Polyphemus one, ibid. 265. One-eyed giants are frequent in Celtic folk-tales (e.g. in The Pursuit of Diarmaid and in the Mabinogi of Owen).

  Remarks.—Thacker
ay's reference to the "Arabian Nights" is especially apt, as the tale of Conall is a framework story like The 1001 Nights, the three stories told by Conall being framed, as it were, in a fourth which is nominally the real story. This method employed by the Indian story-tellers and from them adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all European literatures (Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally thought to be peculiar to the East, and to be ultimately derived from the Jatakas or Birth Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in former incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also in "The Story-teller at Fault" in this collection, and the story of Koisha Kayn in MacInnes' Argyllshire Tales, a variant of which, collected but not published by Campbell, has no less than nineteen tales enclosed in a framework. The question is whether the method was adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign influences. Confining ourselves to "Conal Yellowclaw," it seems not unlikely that the whole story is an importation. For the second episode is clearly the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which was known in Ireland perhaps as early as the tenth century (see Prof. K. Meyer's edition of Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis, Pref. p. xii). It also crept into the voyages of Sindbad in the Arabian Nights. And as told in the Highlands it bears comparison even with the Homeric version. As Mr. Nutt remarks (Celt. Mag. xii.) the address of the giant to the buck is as effective as that of Polyphemus to his ram. The narrator, James Wilson, was a blind man who would naturally feel the pathos of the address; "it comes from the heart of the narrator;" says Campbell (l.c., 148), "it is the ornament which his mind hangs on the frame of the story."

  VI. HUDDEN AND DUDDEN.

  Source.—From oral tradition, by the late D. W. Logie, taken down by Mr. Alfred Nutt.

  Parallels.—Lover has a tale, "Little Fairly," obviously derived from this folk-tale; and there is another very similar, "Darby Darly." Another version of our tale is given under the title "Donald and his Neighbours," in the chapbook Hibernian Talesm whence it was reprinted by Thackeray in his Irish Sketch- Book, c. xvi. This has the incident of the "accidental matricide," on which see Prof. R. Köhler on Gonzenbach Sicil. Mährchen, ii. 224. No less than four tales of Campbell are of this type (Pop. Tales, ii. 218-31). M. Cosquin, in his "Contes populaires de Lorraine," the storehouse of "storiology," has elaborate excursuses in this class of tales attached to his Nos. x. and xx. Mr. Clouston discusses it also in his Pop. Tales, ii. 229-88. Both these writers are inclined to trace the chief incidents to India. It is to be observed that one of the earliest popular drolls in Europe, Unibos, a Latin poem of the eleventh, and perhaps the tenth, century, has the main outlines of the story, the fraudulent sale of worthless objects and the escape from the sack trick. The same story occurs in Straparola, the European earliest collection of folk-tales in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the gold sticking to the scales is familiar to us in Ali Baba. (Cf. Cosquin, l.c., i. 225-6, 229).

  Remarks.—It is indeed curious to find, as M. Cosquin points out, a cunning fellow tied in a sack getting out by crying, "I won't marry the princess," in countries so far apart as Ireland, Sicily (Gonzenbach, No. 71), Afghanistan (Thorburn, Bannu, p. 184), and Jamaica (Folk-Lore Record, iii. 53). It is indeed impossible to think these are disconnected, and for drolls of this kind a good case has been made out for the borrowing hypotheses by M. Cosquin and Mr. Clouston. Who borrowed from whom is another and more difficult question which has to be judged on its merits in each individual case.

  This is a type of Celtic folk-tales which are European in spread, have analogies with the East, and can only be said to be Celtic by adoption and by colouring. They form a distinct section of the tales told by the Celts, and must be represented in any characteristic selection. Other examples are xi., xv., xx., and perhaps xxii.

  VII. SHEPHERD OF MYDDVAI.

  Source.—Preface to the edition of "The Physicians of Myddvai"; their prescription-book, from the Red Book of Hergest, published by the Welsh MS. Society in 1861. The legend is not given in the Red Book, but from oral tradition by Mr. W. Rees, p. xxi. As this is the first of the Welsh tales in this book it may be as well to give the reader such guidance as I can afford him on the intricacies of Welsh pronunciation, especially with regard to the mysterious w's and y's of Welsh orthography. For w substitute double o, as in "fool," and for y, the short u in but, and as near approach to Cymric speech will be reached as is possible for the outlander. It maybe added that double d equals th, and double l is something like Fl, as Shakespeare knew in calling his Welsh soldier Fluellen (Llewelyn). Thus "Meddygon Myddvai" would be Anglicè "Methugon Muthvai."

  Parallels.—Other versions of the legend of the Van Pool are given in Cambro-Briton, ii. 315; W. Sikes, British Goblins, p. 40. Mr. E. Sidney Hartland has discussed these and others in a set of papers contributed to the first volume of The Archaeological Review (now incorporated into Folk-Lore), the substance of which is now given in his Science of Fairy Tales, 274-332. (See also the references given in Revue Celtique, iv., 187 and 268). Mr. Hartland gives there an ecumenical collection of parallels to the several incidents that go to make up our story—(1) The bride-capture of the Swan-Maiden, (2) the recognition of the bride, (3) the taboo against causeless blows, (4) doomed to be broken, and (5) disappearance of the Swan-Maiden, with (6) her return as Guardian Spirit to her descendants. In each case Mr. Hartland gives what he considers to be the most primitive form of the incident. With reference to our present tale, he comes to the conclusion, if I understand him aright, that the lake-maiden was once regarded as a local divinity. The physicians of Myddvai were historic personages, renowned for their medical skill for some six centuries, till the race died out with John Jones, fl. 1743. To explain their skill and uncanny knowledge of herbs, the folk traced them to a supernatural ancestress, who taught them their craft in a place still called Pant-y-Meddygon ("Doctors' Dingle"). Their medical knowledge did not require any such remarkable origin, as Mr. Hartland has shown in a paper "On Welsh Folk-Medicine," contributed to Y Cymmrodor, vol. xii. On the other hand, the Swan-Maiden type of story is widespread through the Old World. Mr. Morris' "Land East of the Moon and West of the Sun," in The Earthly Paradise, is taken from the Norse version. Parallels are accumulated by the Grimms, ii. 432; Köhler on Gonzenbach, ii. 20; or Blade, 149; Stokes' Indian Fairy Tales, 243, 276; and Messrs. Jones and Koopf, Magyar Folk-Tales, 362-5. It remains to be proved that one of these versions did not travel to Wales, and become there localised. We shall see other instances of such localisation or specialisation of general legends.

  VIII. THE SPRIGHTLY TAILOR.

  Source.—Notes and Queries for December 21, 1861; to which it was communicated by "Cuthbert Bede," the author of Verdant Green, who collected it in Cantyre.

  Parallels.—Miss Dempster gives the same story in her Sutherland Collection, No. vii. (referred to by Campbell in his Gaelic list, at end of vol. iv.); Mrs. John Faed, I am informed by a friend, knows the Gaelic version, as told by her nurse in her youth. Chambers' "Strange Visitor," Pop. Rhymes of Scotland, 64, of which I gave an Anglicised version in my English Fairy Tales, No. xxxii., is clearly a variant.

  Remarks.—The Macdonald of Saddell Castle was a very great man indeed. Once, when dining with the Lord-Lieutenant, an apology was made to him for placing him so far away from the head of the table. "Where the Macdonald sits," was the proud response, "there is the head of the table."

  IX. DEIRDRE.

  Source.—Celtic Magazine, xiii. pp. 69, seq. I have abridged somewhat, made the sons of Fergus all faithful instead of two traitors, and omitted an incident in the house of the wild men called here "strangers." The original Gaelic was given in the Transactions of the Inverness Gaelic Society for 1887, p. 241, seq., by Mr. Carmichael. I have inserted Deirdre's "Lament" from the Book of Leinster.

  Parallels.—This is one of the three most sorrowful Tales of Erin, (the other two, Children of Lir and Children of Tureen, are given in Dr. Joyce's Old Celtic Romances), and is a specimen of the old heroic sagas of elopement, a list of which is given in t
he Book of Leinster. The "outcast child" is a frequent episode in folk and hero-tales: an instance occurs in my English Fairy Tales, No. xxxv., and Prof. Köhler gives many others in Archiv. f. Slav. Philologie, i. 288. Mr. Nutt adds tenth century Celtic parallels in Folk-Lore, vol. ii. The wooing of hero by heroine is a characteristic Celtic touch. See "Connla" here, and other examples given by Mr. Nutt in his notes to MacInnes' Tales. The trees growing from the lovers' graves occurs in the English ballad of Lord Lovel and has been studied in Mélusine.

  Remarks.—The "Story of Deirdre" is a remarkable instance of the tenacity of oral tradition among the Celts. It has been preserved in no less than five versions (or six, including Macpherson's "Darthula") ranging from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. The earliest is in the twelfth century, Book of Leinster, to be dated about 1140 (edited in facsimile under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy, i. 147, seq.). Then comes a fifteenth century version, edited and translated by Dr. Stokes in Windisch's Irische Texte II., ii. 109, seq., "Death of the Sons of Uisnech." Keating in his History of Ireland gave another version in the seventeenth century. The Dublin Gaelic Society published an eighteenth century version in their Transactions for 1808. And lastly we have the version before us, collected only a few years ago, yet agreeing in all essential details with the version of the Book of Leinster. Such a record is unique in the history of oral tradition, outside Ireland, where, however, it is quite a customary experience in the study of the Finn-saga. It is now recognised that Macpherson had, or could have had, ample material for his rechauffé of the Finn or "Fingal" saga. His "Darthula" is a similar cobbling of our present story. I leave to Celtic specialists the task of settling the exact relations of these various texts. I content myself with pointing out the fact that in these latter days of a seemingly prosaic century in these British Isles there has been collected from the lips of the folk a heroic story like this of "Deirdre," full of romantic incidents, told with tender feeling and considerable literary skill. No other country in Europe, except perhaps Russia, could provide a parallel to this living on of Romance among the common folk. Surely it is a bounden duty of those who are in the position to put on record any such utterances of the folk- imagination of the Celts before it is too late.