Irish Folk Tales

by Henry Glassie

  Young Tom takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers them around. Johnny reaches out to light us. Mr. Nolan cracks a match and sucks its flame into the remains at the bottom of his pipe. Smoking together, we watch the fire. A turf fire does not flare and snap. It smolders, rolling into itself, providing a spectacle that is only about as engaging as a television set. For a while the mind follows the eye through the transformations of color into the red-gold heart of the fire, discovering tiny flecks of blue and green and curls of rosy smoke that rise past black iron pothooks and crooks into the soot-choked gullet of the chimney. The mind needs more, and it wanders, and when it wanders here, among farmers poor in the things of the world, they worry because, they say, if you think you will become sad, for life is short and death is long, and if sadness grips you it will drag you toward despair, a state in which you are of no use to your neighbor or yourself, in which you forget God’s special love for you. In silent contemplation, in brooding, you drop toward damnation. You must, at all costs, avoid thinking. Your hard life has already taught you the truths philosophers seek, so you rise and go upon the roads, no matter the cold and the dark, and you gather someplace where others will help you keep your mind off the pains in your joints and the damned old cows and the muck and the winds and the rains and the terrors that visit in silence, someplace where you can help others remain alive to life. We watch the fire and we are not silent. It is just that the topics we try, the usual topics of the health of the neighbors and the prices of cattle and the bombs in the towns, all fail. None is collectively lifted toward entertainment. “Entertainment” is their word for good conversation, for music and dance, for food, for all that brings immediate pleasure and carries one forward.

  A clock ticks out of the darkness behind us. Hugh Nolan shoves his chair back and makes his way along old routes over the clay of the floor, between the sharp edges of furniture, and returns, dropping turf on the fire and splashing it with oil. For an instant it blazes, bathing our faces in heat, then it settles again into its slow consuming of itself. Mr. Nolan tells us that the radio predicted frost, but, he reminds us, it has been a good year. The crop was bountiful, the cattle are fat. We agree.

  A click of the latch announces another ceilier. “Well, men,” a voice says. “How’s Packie?” Hugh Nolan asks. “The best,” replies Johnny’s brother, squeezing between Tom and me on the wooden thing Mr. Nolan uses for a bed. He bends forward, opening his palms to the fire, and tells us that the radio predicted frost. This news raises its chorus of agreement, then the chat sinks and shreds. The clock ticks. Shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, we crowd around the fire. The white cat is purring in my lap. Packie is whistling snatches of old reels under his breath. Outside the winds creak in the hedges and rattle the bones of the trees, while we hold to the topic of weather, not a trite topic for farming people whose well-being depends on the climate, whose work is conducted outdoors, whose houses do not allow them to forget. Inside and outside, it is cold and dark. The wind pops the tin of the roof, demanding that we speak of the weather. “There would not be weather the like of this now in America,” Johnny says, asking. The question is courteously indirect. I am not made to perform, and months ago I would not have been forced, however obliquely, to entertain the company, but I am no longer a stranger, so I describe cold weather in America and am led to tell what I know of Iceland, drawn from the sagas and William Morris’ diary of his travels. A little time passes, and the hearth’s small flame shows Hugh Nolan to be at work in the enormity of his memory. A light gleams in the shadows beneath his cap.

  The wind, rising and falling and pounding with the rhythms of the ocean, blows great winds into the mind and great winds carry tales. A shy smile breaks in the shadows, and I expect, and I imagine others expect, to hear again of John Brodison, one of the wits of Hugh’s youth, who told of the night so windy that he saw a haystack with a man clinging to its side blown down the road past the chapel. Instead, he reminds us of George Armstrong. All of us know him from stories Mr. Nolan has used in the past to pass the time. Armstrong emigrated to Australia, but, while others prosper abroad and return only to mock the penury of those who remain, Armstrong returned impoverished and so shriveled from cholera that his mother kept him in a wee basket at the hearth. But this was later. George had recovered and he was living in a small house at the Church of Ireland Rectory. We know the spot, at Bellanaleck, a few miles distant. The Orange Hall stands there and an old gray church and the store where people go to buy life’s little necessities. It was wet, this day in the past, and the men who had come to cut timber were driven for shelter into George’s house. The picture forms in our minds. Aye, we understand.

  “And it wasn’t very long till the rector come in.” It makes sense that the Protestant rector, escaping the storm and seeking entertainment, would join the workers in George’s home, for George Armstrong was a great star. He glittered against the darkness around him. Mr. Nolan continues:

  “So they joined to talk about storms and about—ye’d often hear tell of the windy night of eighteen and thirty-nine. It done a lot of damage in Ireland that night.

  “So the rector says, I heared a lot about the damage that was done, the windy night, but some way or another, he says, I think that a lot of it wasn’t the case. Because if a storm was traveling at the rate it was traveling, it would have swept a little country like Ireland away altogether.”

  The rector’s bid, his witty comment, sends a little laugh around the hearth, but we know Armstrong is the star, so we do not delay but hasten Mr. Nolan with yes and aye to hear George’s retort.

  “Ah now, says George, wait’ll I tell ye, your reverence.

  “John MacManus, he says, had a pup in a barrel at the end of the house.

  “And the pup was blew out of the barrel and it was blew in through a window at Lisbellaw.”

  Now we can laugh. Lisbellaw lies east of Bellanaleck, across the width of Lough Erne. We continue laughing, more because it feels good than because the story was good, more to join together than to take pleasure from the small farmer’s victory in a match of wit. Hugh Nolan is free to laugh with us, for his story was not focused upon himself. He is a historian, the curator and donor of the wealth of the past. “Oh now,” he says laughing, cracking another match. He has reminded his neighbors of the genius of a man like themselves. He puffs and chuckles, and we shift as one, smiling, while Mr. Nolan tells us that Armstrong told the rector about his sister who had emigrated to America. As the next story begins, we remove our eyes from him and return them into the ashes, leaving him alone in the vaults of his mind, and, while he shapes thoughts into words, we fill the tiny pauses that follow each line of his tale with quick, quiet encouragement—“Aye,” “Man dear,” “That’s a sight”—urging him forward and helping him locate the proper pace of narration.

  “She went to America when she was a young girl.” Mr. Nolan’s pipe is nested in his great fists. He is looking, as we are looking, into the fire. “Aye,” some one of us says. Many have gone away to America. “Aye, indeed.”

  “And she kept writing to the mother continually.

  “And she was always planning to come home. But she never came.

  “And still the letters came from her.

  “But anyhow, there was a twelve weeks’ frost. And the Atlantic Ocean, it froze, the whole way over till America.

  “So, she had heard tell of people coming and going on the ice.

  “And she thought that she’d try it herself, and that she’d go home to see the mother.

  “And she had a bicycle.

  “And she came out on Boston Street at nine o’clock in the morning.

  “And she went to get on the bicycle. And the bicycle slipped and she fell on the street.

  “There come a policeman along, and he lifted the bicycle, and he came to where she was standing.

  “And he threw his arm around her, and he left her sitting on the saddle.

  “He says, You go on now.

 
“So she left Boston at nine o’clock.

  “And she was at Bellanaleck Cross at half three in the evening.”

  Together we laugh and congratulate Hugh Nolan. The storyteller’s goal is not verbal trickery but clarity, the smooth, precise, spare realization of a concept in words. He was wholly successful, the master of his gift, and the deep light burns in his eyes. “Well,” he says, “George told that to the rector anyway.” We imagine the rector’s amusement, and it adds to our own. Hugh says, “George says to him, she was the first for to introduce a bicycle into this country.” These farmers who ride black bikes through a world arranged for the convenience of automobiles get one last little laugh.

  We are warm now. Hours remain before we part, moving over the lanes to our separate homes, and nothing else happens. But Mr. Nolan’s story was enough. Not much, ten minutes out of six hours, but it was enough so that tomorrow, when we meet on the road and turn our backs to the wet winds for a trade of cigarettes and matches, we can call the night before a good one.

  CONNECTIONS

  When one old star on a bad cold night told the men gathered around him of another old star on a bad wet day who entertained the men around him by whipping the weather into a joke, he made two connections simultaneously and gracefully. One is the connection linking the teller of the tale with the source of the tale. The other is the connection linking the teller and the members of his audience. Hugh Nolan knew and admired George Armstrong, and he kept faith with the past through the accurate and artful restatement of the dead man’s tale. He knew the men at his hearth, and he gave them something that would amuse them in the moment and carry them forward with a memory worth having. In preserving the artistic tradition he shared with a man of the past while communicating with the men of the present, Hugh Nolan asserted himself into time, bundling up the past to make it a gift to the future, and he positioned himself responsibly within society by pulling the people of his place into deeper association. To unify time and society—tradition and communication—in a narrative is to tell a folktale.

  When an outsider, like myself, intrudes and claims a relationship to a tale by freezing the social arrangements of the instant into a text in ink, the unity that the storyteller achieves breaks apart, space opens, and problems arise. Hugh Nolan could answer the call of his personal muse and meet the obligations he owed history by repeating George Armstrong’s story. His art and Armstrong’s shared genre and style. But the aesthetic conventions and creative urges of the writer who retells folktales do not necessarily converge with those of the storyteller. Hugh Nolan knew his audience; their values ran toward oneness. He knew which ideas of significance would engage and aid the men around him, and he found those ideas in a story already set in his mind. But the ideas that move writers and their audiences do not necessarily mesh with the values built into the stories that writers discover and then attempt to re-create on the page. While striving to do anew what the storyteller has already done, connecting to a source and an audience while weaving a text, the writer meets and solves new problems.

  Problems do not lie in the mere presence of an outsider. It is not strange to find a stranger at the hospitable hearth. The rector was an outsider at George Armstrong’s. I was an outsider at Hugh Nolan’s. But we did not retard, we probably encouraged, the storyteller’s art. Problems arise when the tale that brought its teller, his source, and his audience together is relocated in a new literary context. Then dislocations appear as a result of the distance that opens between the writer and the storyteller, and confusions arise from the different motives that writers and storytellers have for telling their tales to others.

  All printed texts of folktales are compromises between the written and the spoken word, between writers and storytellers. To understand the Irish folktales that we can read, let us consider together two relationships and the questions they entail. First is the relationship of the narrator and the source, the connection of tradition in which the question is: how do we approach and treat seriously the art of another? Second is the relationship of the narrator and the audience, the connection of communication in which the question is: why has the tale been preserved and told again?

  TRADITION

  At the beginning of the modern study of the Irish folktale stands a sprightly serious man, T. Crofton Croker. Descended from Elizabethan English settlers of Cork, and the son of a British army officer, Croker was born in the year of the Rising of 1798. He left Ireland at the age of twenty and in 1850 retired from his position as a senior clerk of the first class of the Admiralty in London. He was a dutiful civil servant and he was an artist, friend of the painter Maclise, husband to the daughter of the English watercolorist Francis Nicholson, and he was a writer, correspondent of Thomas Moore and Sir Walter Scott, who surrounded himself in England with authors who knew his native Ireland, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, the poet F. S. Mahony, the antiquarian Thomas Wright, the travelers Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall. Thomas Crofton Croker claims our attention because, as Richard Dorson writes in The British Folklorists, he was the first person in the English-speaking world who set out to collect and publish the texts of folktales. Croker called his pursuit a “sport.” He wrote of “hunting up and bagging all the old ‘grey superstitions.’ ”

  In Croker’s day it was not unusual for ladies and gentlemen to delight in antiquarian hobbies. Croker was not alone in recording the details of fallen gravestones and ruined churches, but when he was only fourteen he discovered for himself that “ancient and decaying” antiquities not only lay upon the Irish earth, they lived, if only dimly, in the minds of elderly people. From 1812 to 1815 he traveled Ireland, and later he returned from England, adventuring “in caves and out of caves, upon hill-tops, with bootmakers and broguemakers, with smugglers and coastguard-men, with magistrates and murderers, with pilgrims and pedlars” to build his monument, his admirable stack of books.

  A natural gulf yawned between this Protestant gentleman and the people whose traditions called him. When he began to gather their art into his own, he possessed no ready genre, no convention to guide his effort. He tried different techniques. In his first great work, Researches in the South of Ireland, published in 1824, he alternates between two literary modes, the travel account and the antiquarian description. Neither of them suggested that he should present the beliefs he met upon the land as distinct texts. He plunged through the words of the people to pluck out conceptual essences. These he framed into generalizations that took historical significance from the comparisons he made between his findings and the words of the authors of olden times. In his landmark chapter, “Fairies and Supernatural Agency,” he first informs his reader of the similarity of Irish and Scottish belief, and then, skirting the issue of ultimate origins, whether they lay in the East or in the North, he provides an account, running for twenty smooth pages, of the Irish fairy faith.

  A century and a half later I would be told that the Iron Age raths, the “forths” that stand atop thousands of Irish hills, are fairy places, best to avoid. Croker put it succinctly in 1824:

  “The circular intrenchments and barrows, known by the name of Danish forts, in Ireland, are pointed out as the abode of fairy communities, and to disturb their habitation, in other words to dig, or plough up a rath or fort, whose construction the superstitious natives ascribe to the labour and ingenuity of the ‘good people,’ is considered as unlucky and entailing some severe disaster on the violator and his kindred. An industrious peasant, who purchased a farm in the neighbourhood of Mallow, from a near relative of mine, commenced his improvements by building upon it a good stone house, together with a lime-kiln. Soon after, he waited on the proprietor, to state ‘the trouble he was come to by reason of the old fort, the fairies not approving of his having placed the lime-kiln so near their dwelling;—he had lost his sow with nine bonniveens (sucking pigs), his horse fell into a quarry and was killed, and three of his sheep died, “all through the means of the fairies.” ’ Though the lime-kiln had cost him five guineas, h
e declared he would never burn another stone in it, but take it down, without delay, and build one away from the fort, saying, he was wrong in putting that kiln in the way of the ‘good people,’ who were thus obliged to go out of their usual track. The back door of his house unfortunately also faced the same fort, but this offence was obviated by almost closing it up, leaving only a small hole at the top, to allow the good people free passage, should they require it. In these raths, fairies are represented as holding their festive meetings, and entering into all the fantastic and wanton mirth that music and glittering banquets are capable of inspiring.”

  Crofton Croker’s topic was the whole of the land and its tradition, and it made sense for him in the sweep of his narrative to generalize from his experience and to quote sparingly. In our own day we find Irish custom and belief treated similarly in the magnificent books written by the geographer E. Estyn Evans. But as Croker worked, his focus tightened on the stories and songs of the country people. Our word “folklore” had not yet been invented, but Croker became a folklorist. He followed his first book with two series of Fairy Legends, 1825 and 1828, and one volume of Popular Songs of Ireland in 1839. Concentrating upon stories while compiling Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, Croker became obliged to present folktales as texts, ungeneralized and particular, but his own tradition offered him no genre of presentation. Though his books brought him fame and colleagues, he was nearly alone at first, and he had to invent some way to get oral stories into print. He tried two ways. Both not only survived through the successive editions of the Fairy Legends, both continued to be employed throughout the nineteenth century by Irish writers.

  Croker developed one of his styles of folktale presentation from the literary genre of the sketch, in which a journalistic observation is shaped into a sparkling essay or amusing story. Sketching the folktale, Croker retold it in his own words, providing his reader with a piece of entertainment while establishing an artful tension between his diction and culture and those of his characters. Out of that tension a little humor arose.