Irish Folk Tales

by Henry Glassie

  Let me tell you just what I have done to prepare the tales for you. I maintained my professional dedication to exact transcription unless it ran athwart the obligations I owe to the tales and their tellers. They have the right to communicate. So, without adding a word or shifting any out of order, I edited the opening sentences of a few of the tales that I lifted out of long runs of prose. Then, to bring the stories I found in print a little closer to those I heard, I broke some long paragraphs into shorter ones. In addition, I regularized punctuation and spelling. That sounds easy, but it was not. Writers have done wild things with spelling to capture the English spoken in Ireland. In their own place and day, they might have been successful, but their efforts have erected barriers between the storyteller and the reader and dragged their tales toward oblivion, so, even in texts of my own, I have shifted spelling toward standard literary usage. The distinctive textures of the Irish dialects of English remain in syntax and word choice. Mere spelling should not stand between you and the people who spoke the stories. Not all of the tales came with titles, so I invented some of them, a small matter because it is my experience that most folktales, unlike folksongs, do not exist in the tradition with native titles. After the title for each tale you will find a little information, first the name of a teller and a county, then the name of a writer and a date. Sometimes these few facts eluded me—a sad commentary on past practice—and sometimes I guessed a bit, but I wished to make the big story of the Irish folktale and its subplots clearer by setting each story in place and time. Still more, I wished the repetition of names to remind you that these stories do not come to us from some mystical agency called tradition. We owe them to the collaborative efforts of real people. I held my editing to a minimum to honor both the storyteller and the writer, but every change I made came because my first responsibility is to the storyteller.

  It is the storyteller’s culture I wish you to enter. To that end I clumped the texts into chapters, but the chapters do not follow scholastic convention. Academic categories serve academic needs, and they have tended to obscure whole classes of traditional narration. They rise from the values of scholars, but the values I wish you to understand are those of the tellers of tale, men like Hugh Nolan, women like Ellen Cutler, so my chapters represent neither old nor new schemes of classification. They are but hints to ease your entry into the Irish folk culture. Here is the course I recommend for your journey:

  THE OLD STORY

  Three texts review the Introduction and form a prelude to the collection. Each represents one of the classes of tale that have most engaged Irish collectors: fairy legends, Fenian tales, Märchen. And in sequence they teach of the progress in the recording of stories, from T. Crofton Croker’s sketch of 1825, to Patrick Kennedy’s mid-nineteenth-century attempt to write down a story as he heard it, to Douglas Hyde’s exact translation of a tale taken down verbatim and published in the first truly modern Irish folktale collection, Beside the Fire of 1890.

  FAITH

  At the dawn of human time, in the first mythic moment, the saints arrive and put the finishing touches on the Irish land, planting it with proof of God’s existence. They take control of nature, vanquish the Druids, convert the old warriors, and charge the people of the future to obey God’s law of love. Some do.

  WIT

  Intelligence balances power. Inbuilt wit enables the lawyer to win his case against Satan, the outlaw to escape the authorities, and the peasant to outfox the outlaw. The tenant of story is the master of the landlord. The victory of the humbler brother proves that poverty and weakness tell nothing of wisdom or courage. Even the toughest enemy—boredom—falls before the person who can command the language to yield poetry, who can conquer pain in comic hyperbole.

  MYSTERY

  This world and the other occasionally veer near collision. The witnesses speak sincerely. They have heard death announced in the earth and felt the ghost’s weight and seen the wizened changelings the fairies leave. It seems impossible, but if there are no ghosts, is there no immortal soul, no life after death? Fairies are the angels who fell with Lucifer after defeat at the War of Heaven. They seem, like cats, to have constructed an alternative social order in our midst. If fairies do not exist, then what of angels, what of Heaven? And what about people who foretell the future and cure ills with charms? The shape of reality remains at question, so serious investigators adhere to strict rules of evidence and argue earnestly over the facts, while sly people step into the space between terror and amusement to contrive little fictions.

  HISTORY

  The endless Irish chronicle of war, of invasion and resistance, expands and grows with detail during the long era of difficulty that begins with defeat at Kinsale in 1601, that intensifies during the seventeenth-century campaigns of Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange, that sinks with the failure of the Rising of 1798, and ends in the terrible Famine of 1846. This period of pain displays Irish courage and Irish error, and it teaches that in the worst of times God protects those who struggle to endure.

  FIRESIDE TALES

  Away from the serious mysteries of the world, storytellers have constructed an enchanted realm in which the heroes of a time before history wage beautiful, uproarious war and little children seek maturity. Child after child abandons the comforts of home and takes the strange road, learning to form proper alliances and act with courage in order to enter through marriage a new state of being. Now mature, they are left with their faith, which bids them to endure, and with their wit, out of which they learn to turn fear into laughter and life into a story.

  These chapters are but a beginning. The stories I have set within them will disrupt and eradicate their boundaries. I do not want to slice tales up and box them apart. Instead, I want the tales to grope toward unity, so you will find tales that transform other tales, and tales that root up generic distinctions, and tales that interfere with each other, interpenetrating to raise the themes that hold power in the traditional consciousness and that have been molded into artful order by centuries of wise and brave Irish people.

  THE TALES

  FOLKLORIST AND STORYTELLER

  Patrick Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts, 1866

  THE LEGEND OF KNOCKFIERNA

  CORK

  T. CROFTON CROKER 1825

  It is a very good thing not to be any way in dread of the fairies, for without doubt they have then less power over a person. But to make too free with them, or to disbelieve in them altogether, is as foolish a thing as man, woman, or child can do.

  It has been truly said that “good manners are no burthen,” and that “civility costs nothing.” But there are some people foolhardy enough to disregard doing a civil thing, which, whatever they may think, can never harm themselves or anyone else, and who at the same time will go out of their way for a bit of mischief, which never can serve them. But sooner or later they will come to know better, as you shall hear of Carroll O’Daly, a strapping young fellow up out of Connacht, whom they used to call, in his own country, “Devil Daly.”

  Carroll O’Daly used to go roving about from one place to another, and the fear of nothing stopped him. He would as soon pass an old churchyard, or a regular fairy ground, at any hour of the night, as go from one room into another, without ever making the sign of the cross, or saying, “Good luck attend you, gentlemen.”

  It so happened that he was once journeying in the County of Limerick, towards “the Baalbek of Ireland,” the venerable town of Kilmallock, and just at the foot of Knockfierna he overtook a respectable-looking man jogging along upon a white pony. The night was coming on, and they rode side by side for some time, without much conversation passing between them, further than saluting each other very kindly. At last, Carroll O’Daly asked his companion how far he was going.

  “Not far your way,” said the farmer, for such his appearance bespoke him. “I’m only going to the top of this hill here.”

  “And what might take you there,” said O’Daly, “at this time of th
e night?”

  “Why then,” replied the farmer, “if you want to know, ’tis the Good People.”

  “The fairies, you mean,” said O’Daly.

  “Whist! whist!” said his fellow-traveler, “or you may be sorry for it.” And he turned his pony off the road they were going towards a little path which led up the side of the mountain, wishing Carroll O’Daly good night and a safe journey.

  “That fellow,” thought Carroll, “is about no good this blessed night, and I would have no fear of swearing wrong if I took my Bible oath, that it is something else beside the fairies, or the Good People, as he calls them, that is taking him up the mountain at this hour. The fairies!” he repeated. “Is it for a well-shaped man like him to be going after little chaps like the fairies? To be sure some say there are such things, and more say not. But I know this, that never afraid would I be of a dozen of them, aye, of two dozen, for that matter, if they are no bigger than what I hear tell of.”

  Carroll O’Daly, whilst these thoughts were passing in his mind, had fixed his eyes steadfastly on the mountain, behind which the full moon was rising majestically. Upon an elevated point that appeared darkly against the moon’s disk, he beheld the figure of a man leading a pony, and he had no doubt it was that of the farmer with whom he had just parted company.

  A sudden resolve to follow flashed across the mind of O’Daly with the speed of lightning. Both his courage and curiosity had been worked up by his cogitations to a pitch of chivalry, and muttering, “Here’s after you, old boy,” he dismounted from his horse, bound him to an old thorn tree, and then commenced vigorously ascending the mountain.

  Following as well as he could the direction taken by the figures of the man and pony, he pursued his way, occasionally guided by their partial appearance, and after toiling nearly three hours over a rugged and sometimes swampy path, came to a green spot on the top of the mountain, where he saw the white pony at full liberty, grazing as quietly as may be. O’Daly looked around for the rider, but he was nowhere to be seen; he however soon discovered close to where the pony stood an opening in the mountain like the mouth of a pit, and he remembered having heard, when a child, many a tale about the “Poul-duve,” or Black Hole, of Knockfierna; how it was the entrance to the fairy castle which was within the mountain; and how a man whose name was Ahern, a land surveyor in that part of the country, had once attempted to fathom it with a line, and had been drawn down into it and was never again heard of; with many other tales of the like nature.

  “But,” thought O’Daly, “these are old women’s stories. And since I’ve come up so far I’ll just knock at the castle door, and see if the fairies are at home.”

  No sooner said than done; for seizing a large stone as big, aye, bigger than his two hands, he flung it with all his strength down into the Poul-duve of Knockfierna. He heard it bounding and tumbling about from one rock to another with a terrible noise, and he leant his head over to try and hear if it would reach the bottom—when what should the very stone he had thrown in do but come up again with as much force as it had gone down, and gave him such a blow full in the face, that it sent him rolling down the side of Knockfierna, head over heels, tumbling from one crag to another, much faster than he came up. And in the morning Carroll O’Daly was found lying beside his horse; the bridge of his nose broken, which disfigured him for life; his head all cut and bruised, and both his eyes closed up, and as black as if Sir Daniel Donnelly had painted them for him.

  Carroll O’Daly was never bold again in riding alone near the haunts of the fairies after dusk. But small blame to him for that. And if ever he happened to be benighted in a lonesome place he would make the best of his way to his journey’s end, without asking questions, or turning to the right or to the left, to seek after the Good People, or any who kept company with them.

  FINN AND HIS MEN BEWITCHED

  JEMMY REDDY WEXFORD

  PATRICK KENNEDY 1866

  The king of Greek’s daughter had a great spite to Finn MacCumhail, and Goll, one of his great heroes, and Oscar his grandson. So she came one day and appeared like a white doe before him. And bedad he chased her with his two hounds, Bran and another, till she led them away to the bottom of the black North. She vanished from them at the edge of a lake, and while they were looking about for her, a beautiful lady appeared sitting on the bank, tearing her hair, and crying.

  “What ails you, lady?” says Finn.

  “My ring is dropped into the water,” says she, “and my father and mother will murder me if I go home without it.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” says he, and he dived three times one after another for it. The third time he felt the chill of death on him, and when he was handing the ring to her, he was a decrepid, weak, gray-haired old man.

  “Now,” says she, “maybe you’ll remember the king of Greek’s daughter, and how you killed her husband and her two sons.”

  “If I did,” says he, “it was on the battlefield, fighting man to man.” She left him there as helpless as the child two days old, and went away with herself.

  There was great sorrow and trouble that night at Finn’s house, and the next day all his warriors, except Oscar, set out after him. Well, they traveled and they traveled, till they were tired and hungry, and at last they entered an old fort, and what did they see but a fine table laid out, and seven stone seats around it. They were too hungry to make much ceremony, so they sat down, and ate and drank. And just as they were done, in walks the lady, and says she: “Sith ye merry, gentlemen. I hope your meal agreed with you. Finn is at the edge of that lake you see down there. If you like, you may come with me to pay him a visit.”

  They gave a shout of joy, but bedad, when they offered to get up they found themselves glued to their stone seats. Oh, weren’t they miserable! And they could see poor Finn lying on a bank by the lake not able to stir hand or foot.

  There they stayed in grief for a day and a night, and at last they saw Oscar following Bran that was after going a hundred miles in quest of him. Bran found Oscar lying asleep by the Lake of Killarney, and he barked so loud that the wolves, and deers, and foxes, and hares, run fifty miles away; the eagles, and kites, and hawks, flew five miles up in the sky, and the fishes jumped out on dry land.

  Never a wake did Oscar wake, and then Bran bit his little finger to the bone. “Tattheration to you for an Oscar!” says poor Bran, and then he was so mad he seized him by the nose. Very few can stand to have any liberty taken with the handle of their face—no more did Oscar. He opened his eyes, and was going to make gibbets of the dog, but he put up his muzzle, and began to keen, and then trotted off, looking round at Oscar.

  “Oh ho!” says he, “Finn or Goll is in danger,” and he followed him hotfoot to the North. He came up to Finn, but could hardly hear what he was striving to tell him. So Oscar put Finn’s thumb to his lips, for himself wasn’t able to stir hand or foot. “And now, Finn,” says he, “by the virtue of your thumb, tell me how I’m to get this pishrogue removed.”

  “Go,” says he, in a whisper that had hardly anything between it and dead silence, “go to the fairy hill, and make the enchanter that lives there give you the drink of youth.”

  When he came to the hill, the thief of a fairy man sunk down seven perches into the ground, but Oscar was not to be circumvented. He dug after him till the clay and stones made a new hill, and when they came to the solid rock he pinned him, and brought him up to the light of the sun. His face was as gray as ashes, and as shriveled as a russidan apple, and very unwilling he was to give up the cup. But he was forced to do so, and it wasn’t long till Oscar was by Finn’s side, and spilling a little, drop by drop, down his throat. Up he sprung five yards in the air, and shouted till the rocks rung. And it wasn’t long till himself, and Oscar, and Bran were in the middle of the enchanted men. Well, they were nearly ashamed of themselves pinned to their seats, but Oscar didn’t leave them long in grief. He spilled some of the cup down by every man’s thigh, and freed he was. But, be the laws, there
wasn’t hardly a drop in the cup when he came to the ounkran of a make-game, foul-mouthed, bald Conan. He could only free a part of one thigh, and at last Oscar, getting impatient, took him body and sleeves, and pulled him off the stone. What a roar he let out of him! His breeches—if it’s breeches they wore in them old times—stuck to the seat, and a trifle of Conan’s skin along with it. “Whisht!” says Oscar, “we’ll get a sheepskin sewed on you, and you’ll be as comfortable as any May-boy after it.”