Irish Folk Tales

by Henry Glassie

  Rolleston, T. W. The High Deeds of Finn, and Other Bardic Romances. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1910.

  Sayers, Peig. An Old Woman’s Reflections. Translated by Seamus Ennis. London: Oxford University Press, 1962; first pub. 1939.

  Sayers, Peig. Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island. Translated by Bryan MacMahon. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1974; written 1935.

  Seymour, St. John. Irish Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Causeway, 1973; first pub. 1913.

  Shaw, Rose. Carleton’s Country. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1930.

  Sheehy, Jeanne. The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival, 1830–1930. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980.

  Skelton, Robin. The Writings of J. M. Synge. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

  Smythe, Colin, ed. Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory. New York: Macmillan, 1974.

  Stephens, James. The Crock of Gold. New York: Macmillan, 1926; first pub. 1913.

  Stephens, James. Irish Fairy Tales. New York: Macmillan, 1923.

  Stephens, Lilo, ed. My Wallet of Photographs: The Collected Photographs of J. M. Synge. Dolmen Editions 13. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971.

  Synge, John Millington. The Aran Islands. Boston: John W. Luce, 1911; first pub. 1906.

  Tunney, Paddy. The Stone Fiddle: My Way to Traditional Song. Dublin: Gilbert Dalton, 1979.

  Wilde, Lady Jane. Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland: Contributions to Irish Lore. London: Ward & Downey, 1890.

  Wilde, Lady Jane. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland: With Sketches of the Irish Past. London: Chatto & Windus, 1902; first ed. 1887.

  Wilde, Sir William R. Irish Popular Superstitions. Dublin: McGlashan, [1852].

  Yeats, William Butler. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of Reveries over Childhood and Youth, The Trembling of the Veil, and Dramatis Personae. New York: Macmillan, 1953.

  Yeats, William Butler. The Celtic Twilight. Dublin: Maunsel; London: A. H. Bullen, 1902; first ed. 1893.

  Yeats, William Butler. Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland. New York: Macmillan, 1973. (Reprint of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 1888, and Irish Fairy Tales, 1892.)

  Yeats, William Butler. Stories from Carleton: With an Introduction. London: Walter Scott, [1889].

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  The story of Saint Patrick was built out of tales described by Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (1967), pp. 116, 383. The scribe’s characterization of the Tain as a deception and figment comes as a coda to the text Cecile O’Rahilly provides in Táin Bó Cúalnge from the Book of Leinster (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970), p. 272. John O’Donovan edited the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters in seven volumes (1854). It was written in Donegal between 1632 and 1636. Geoffrey Keating’s General History of Ireland, written between 1620 and 1634, was translated in the eighteenth century by Dermod O’Connor, and in the twentieth century for the Irish Texts Society (1902-1914) by David Comyn and Patrick S. Dinneen.

  INTRODUCTION

  AT THE END OF A SHORT WINTER’S DAY This is the night of November 22, 1972. I recorded the stories George Armstrong told the rector on August 14, 1978, and December 18, 1979. John Brodison’s story of the Big Wind can be found in Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), pp. 45-47. The story of George Armstrong’s return is tale 42 in this collection.

  CONNECTIONS At the heart of this brief discussion is the idea in the currently dominant American definition of folklore, propounded by Dan Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” in Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman, eds., Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), pp. 3-15.

  TRADITION For T. Crofton Croker I relied primarily on the memoir written by his son, T. F. Dillon Croker, published in Thomas Wright’s edition of Croker’s Fairy Legends (1862), pp. iv–xix. Kevin Danaher added a biographical introduction to the reprint of Researches in the South of Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), pp. v-viii. Richard M. Dorson treats Croker in The British Folklorists (1968), pp. 44-52, and he treats Thomas Keightley on pp. 52-57. Croker’s descriptions of his fieldwork come from a letter he wrote in 1825, quoted in T. F. D. Croker’s memoir, Fairy Legends (1862), pp. vi–vii. Croker’s account of fairy habitations come from Researches in the South of Ireland, p. 80. Keightley’s “Leprechaun in the Garden” is in The Fairy Mythology (1850), pp. 376–378. Croker’s “Seeing Is Believing” is in Fairy Legends (1862), pp. 85–88. Samuel Lover tells of telling his sketches orally in Legends and Stories of Ireland (1834 [1831]), pp. viii-ix. His description of Paddy the Sport comes from the same book, pp. 205, and 212. Paddy’s tale appears as tale 37 in this collection. Croker’s stories “The Crookened Back” and “The Capture of Bridget Pursell” both appear in this collection: tales 87 and 58.

  William Carleton is excellently introduced by Benedict Kiely, Poor Scholar (1972.). I also used Patrick Kavanagh’s edition of The Autobiography of William Carleton (1968) and Carleton’s autobiographical introduction to Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1869), 1: i–xxiv, during which, p. iv, he praises Samuel Lover. Carleton as a writer of sketches is represented by tale 70 in this collection, and Carleton as a storyteller is represented by his tale of the blacksmith and the Devil, tale 119 in this collection. W. B. Yeats describes Carleton in his Stories from Carleton (1889), pp. xvi-xvii.

  William Butler Yeats’ great manifesto for folk art comes from The Celtic Twilight (1902), pp. 232–233. Joseph Hone tells of Yeats in the period of the Nobel Prize in W. B. Yeats (1943), pp. 366–390. Yeats’ statement that Lady Gregory and Synge should have accompanied him is found at p. 381 in Hone’s biography. For John Millington Synge, I found these books especially helpful: Edward Stephens’ My Uncle John (1974), edited by Andrew Carpenter; Robin Skelton’s The Writings of J. M. Synge (1971); and Daniel Corkery’s Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1966). Corkery quotes Yeats’ advice to Synge on p. 62, and on p. 66 quotes Synge on the collaborative nature of art. The folktale from which Synge wrote In the Shadow of the Glen is tale 25 in this collection.

  Douglas Hyde is presented by Dominic Daly in The Young Douglas Hyde (1974) and Gareth W. Dunleavy in Douglas Hyde (1974). W. B. Yeats describes Hyde in the introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888); reprinted in Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (1973), p. 7. Douglas Hyde characterizes nineteenth-century work on Irish folktales in Beside the Fire (1890), p. x.

  The encounter of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce is described and analyzed by Richard Ellmann in James Joyce (1959), pp. 102–114. Stanislaus Joyce tells of Joyce’s review of Poets and Dreamers in My Brother’s Keeper (1958), pp. 220–224. Joyce’s benefactor, Lady Gregory, is rudely mentioned in Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare & Company, 1922), p. 208.

  The founding and development of the Irish Folklore Commission is described by Richard M. Dorson in his foreword, pp. xxvi-xxxii, and Sean O’Sullivan in his introduction, pp. xxxiii-xxxix, to O’Sullivan’s Folktales of Ireland (1966), and by Séamas Ó Catháin in The Bedside Book of Irish Folklore (1980), pp. 32–34. James H. Delargy’s argument can be found in his paper in the Irish Free State Official Handbook (1932), pp. 264–266.

  Dell Hymes describes the poetic nature of American Indian narrative in his paper in New Literary History (1976–1977), pp. 431–457, gathered into his important book, “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1981), pp. 309–341. See also Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). I describe my treatment of stories in Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), pp. 36–49.

  COMMUNICATION Thomas Wright evaluates Crofton Croker’s work in the editor’s preface to Fairy Legends (1862), p. ii. Croker’s observation on the similarity of legends comes in that volume, p. 21, and his linking of an Irish tale to t
he East comes on p. 50. Samuel Lover’s warning to scholars appears in the introduction to Legends and Stories of Ireland (1834 [1831]), p. xviii. Lover’s comment on the German analogue to “The Devil’s Mill” is in the same volume, p. 156. A version of the tale Lover sketched appears as tale 43 in this collection. Croker states his purpose in Fairy Legends (1828), p. vii.

  Folklore’s historic-geographic method is presented by Kaarle Krohn, Folklore Methodology: Formulated by Julius Krohn and Expanded by Nordic Researchers, trans. Roger L. Welsch (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971; first pub. 1926). Douglas Hyde classifies the stories of Ireland in Beside the Fire (1890), pp. xxxiv–xli. In this collection, “Finn and His Men Bewitched” and tales 109, 110, and 111 are Fenian tales, and Aarne-Thompson international tale type 300 is represented by tales 114 and 115.

  Lady Gregory is excellently introduced by Elizabeth Coxhead in Lady Gregory (1966). I also found helpful Lennox Robinson’s edition of Lady Gregory’s Journals (1947) and Colin Smythe’s edition of her autobiography, Seventy Years (1974). Lady Gregory tells of her interest in the stories’ beautiful sentences in Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1970), p. 15. W. B. Yeats praised her language in his preface to her Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902). She asserted the scientific responsibility of the folklorist in The Kiltartan Wonder Book (1910), p. 105. In The Kiltartan History Book (1909), p. 49, (1926), p. 152, she wrote that she might have named it “Myths in the Making.”

  Jeremiah Curtin is sketched in James H. Delargy’s introduction to Irish Folk-Tales (1943). Douglas Hyde’s opinion of Curtin comes in Beside the Fire, p. xv.

  THE TALES

  THE OLD STORY

  THE LEGEND OF KNOCKFIERNA T. Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends (1862), pp. 6–9.

  FINN AND HIS MEN BEWITCHED Patrick Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866), pp. 206–208. This story blends numbers 2, 29, and 10 from Sean O’Sullivan’s typology of Fenian tales in his Handbook of Irish Folklore (1963), pp. 590–595. See tale 110 in this collection.

  THE KING OF IRELAND’S SON Douglas Hyde, Beside the Fire (1890), pp. 19–47. This is Aarne-Thompson international tale type 513A, with type 507A added.

  Type 513A, Six Go Through the World, is one of the most common Märchen in Europe and in Ireland. For a sense of the flexibility of folk themes and structures, compare this tale with numbers 116, 117, and 121 in this collection.

  FAITH

  SAINTS

  1 THE BAPTISM OF CONOR MAC NESSA Sean O’Sullivan, Legends from Ireland (1977), pp. 104–105. Recorded for the Irish Folklore Commission by Seán Ó hEochaidh. Published in Irish in Béaloideas (1951–1952), pp. 26–27. Conor was the king of Ulster in the time of the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, of which Thomas Kinsella has prepared a superb translation for modern readers, The Tain (1969).

  2 SAINT PATRICK Lady Gregory, The Kiltartan History Book (1926), p. 24. Not in the first edition (1909). The traditional date for Patrick’s arrival in Ireland is 432. The traditional date of his death is March 17, 493. James Carney adroitly weighs the historical evidence in The Problem of St. Patrick (1973).

  3 SAINT PATRICK ON INISHMORE Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), p. 170; Irish Folk History (1982), pp. 21–22. Mr. Nolan’s account of Saint Patrick’s company accords with the description provided by the Four Masters in the seventeenth century. See John O’Donovan, ed., Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland (1854), 1: 134–141. Inishmore is an island in Upper Lough Erne.

  4 SAINT PATRICK AND CROM DUBH Douglas Hyde, Legends of Saints and Sinners (1915), pp. 3–11. Another tale of the encounter of Saint Patrick and Crom Dubh appears in Sean O’Sullivan, Legends from Ireland (1977), pp. 109–112. Saint Patrick’s battle seems to be a memory of the saint’s destruction of a ring of stone idols, Cromm Cruiach, at Magh Sleacht in County Cavan. See Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (1967), pp. 84–88.

  5 SAINT BRIGIT These are stories 1, 2, 3, 8, 18, and 19 from the twenty in the first edition (1906), pp. 1–14, and the twenty-two in the first commercial edition (1907), pp. 1–16, of Lady Gregory’s Book of Saints and Wonders. The fourth in this sequence is a version of O’Sullivan-Christiansen Irish folktale type 2400, known widely in Ireland.

  6 SAINT COLUMCILLE Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), pp. 176–178; Irish Folk History (1982), pp. 29–32. Adamnan’s seventh-century biography, edited by Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson (1961), tells of the battle of Cúl Dreimne in 561, which led to Columcille’s exile, and the Council of Druim Ceat in 575, but it does not include the tale of the dispute over the book. That is found in A. O’Kelleher and G. Schoepperle, eds., Life of Columcille Compiled by Manus O’Donnell in 1532 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1918), pp. 176–201. Sean O’Sullivan, Legends from Ireland (1977), pp. 106–108, offers another folk text.

  7 COLUMCILLE’S COFFIN Séamas Ó Catháin, The Bedside Book of Irish Folklore (1980), pp. 77–78. Columcille died at Iona in June 597.

  8 SAINT KEVIN These three tales were gathered from those included in Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Ireland (1850), 1: 221–223. The third of the stories, the only one in this book to which I made an addition (the word “O’Toole” in the first sentence), is a popular one, appearing, for instance, as the first sketch in Samuel Lover’s first series of Legends and Stories of Ireland (1834 [1831]), pp. 1–16.

  9 SAINT FINBAR Sean O’Sullivan, Legends from Ireland (1977), p. 152. Recorded for the Irish Folklore Commission by Nora Ní Chróinín.

  THE PRIEST AND HIS PEOPLE

  10 JAMES MURRAY AND SAINT MARTIN Jeremiah Curtin, Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World (1895), pp. 118–121. Three comparable tales in Irish can be found in Sean O’Sullivan’s important collection of religious stories, “Scéalta Cráibtheacha,” Béaloideas (1951–1952), pp. 202–207. Two of them are translated in O’Sullivan’s Legends from Ireland (1977), pp. 114–116.

  11 THE BEST ROAD TO HEAVEN Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers (1903), pp. 106–107.

  12 THE MAN FROM KILMACOLIVER Rose Springfield, “Folklore of Slievenamon: The Legend of the Seven Bishops,” in James Maher, ed., Romantic Slievenamon in History, Folklore, and Song (1955), p. 94. The richly carved Ahenny Cross dates to the eighth century.

  13 THE PIOUS MAN Kevin Danaher, Folktales of the Irish Countryside (1967), pp. 38–39. This is O’Sullivan-Christiansen Irish folktale type 1848*, known especially in the South and West of Ireland, and related to Aarne-Thompson international tale type 1848, distributed lightly through western Europe.

  14 AN ACTUAL SAINT Lawrence Millman, Our Like Will Not Be There Again (1977), pp. 50–51. This story, related to Aarne-Thompson international type 759B, is especially common in the West of Ireland. A comparable story in Irish appears in Sean O’Sullivan’s “Scéalta Cráibtheacha,” Béaloideas (1951–1952), pp. 233–235.

  15 OLD THORNS AND OLD PRIESTS Michael J. Murphy, Now You’re Talking (1975), pp. 11–12.

  16 PRIESTS AND FARMING MEN Unpublished. Tape-recorded from Peter Flanagan, November 12, 1972. This pair of “bids” comes as a set. Mr. Flanagan also told them to me on January 2, 1974, and December 12, 1983.

  17 SAVED BY THE PRIEST Séamas Ó Catháin, Irish Life and Lore (1982), pp. 70–72.

  18 THE DOOM Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1902), pp. 67–69. Assuming “Innismore” to be one of the Arans, I attribute the tale to Galway.

  19 THE RIGHT CURE George A. Little, Malachi Horan Remembers (1944), pp. 88–91. Peter Flanagan similarly describes the significance of the curing power of holy wells in Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), pp. 171–174, 307–310.

  20 HELL AND HEAVEN W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (1902), pp. 77–78. This text, lacking the last paragraph, also appears in Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1970), pp. 200–201.

  21 THE WOLF’S PROPHECY Lady Gregory, A Book of Saints and Wonders (1907), pp. 131–133.

  WIT

  THE WISE AND THE F
OOLISH

  22 THE THREE QUESTIONS Michael J. Murphy, Now You’re Talking (1975), pp. 16–17. Murphy presents a slightly different version of this tale (Aarne-Thompson international type 922), which he remembered from his father, in “Folktales and Traditions from County Cavan and South Armagh,” Ulster Folklife (1973), pp. 34–35.

  23 THE FARMER’S ANSWERS Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers (1903), pp. 183–184. Aarne-Thompson international tale type 922 is found commonly and widely in Ireland. See O’Sullivan and Christiansen’s Types of the Irish Folktale, pp. 181–182. And it is known in India, throughout Europe from Turkey to Sweden, and in North and South America.

  24 HALF A BLANKET Michael J. Murphy, Now You’re Talking (1975), p. 42. This is Aarne-Thompson international tale type 980A, known in China, Japan, and widely in Europe.

  25 THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN John M. Synge, The Aran Islands (1911), pp. 57–60. Out of this tale (Aarne-Thompson international tale type 1350, known throughout Ireland), Synge wrote his play In the Shadow of the Glen in 1902.

  26 A HUNGRY HIRED BOY Michael J. Murphy, Now You’re Talking (1975), pp. 19–21.

  27 THE FIRST MIRROR Séamas Ó Catháin, The Bedside Book of Irish Folklore (1980), pp. 8-10. Ireland shares this tale, Aarne-Thompson international type 1336A, with Finland, Greece, Turkey, China, and the southern United States.

  28 ROBIN’S ESCAPE Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers (1903), pp. 150–153. Aarne-Thompson international tale type 1641 is known throughout Ireland, the rest of Europe, the Orient, and North and South America.

  WITS AND POETS

  29 JONATHAN SWIFT, DEAN OF SAINT PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL Lady Gregory, The Kiltartan History Book (1926), pp. 56–58. Swift does not appear in the first edition (1909). The popularity of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) as a folktale character in Ireland is described by Mackie L. Jarrell, “ ‘Jack and the Dane,’ ” Journal of American Folklore (1964), pp. 99–117.