Wet Mantle. Against Striker, the great blower, no one can do anything at
sea. This is the kind of hero who can walk on the water, or at least who
never sinks in it much beyond his ankles. This Striker appears in another
story as a giant out in the ocean, which he is beating with a club.
In Wet Mantle, whose virtue is in his cloak, which is rain itself, we
have an excellent friend for a rain-maker.
_Coldfeet._
This is a good hero, an excellent herdsman and cattle-thief. What a
splendid cowboy he would be in the Indian Territory or Wyoming. He has a
good strain of simplicity and heroism in him. The bottle of water that is
never drained, is like the basket of trout’s blood (also water) in the
Indian tale of Walokit and Tumukit.
_Lawn Dyarrig, Son of the King of Erin, and the Knight of Terrible
Valley._
The serpent that sleeps seven years can be matched by monsters in
American tales. The hearts of these creatures are sliced away by heroes
who go down their throats and find other people before them, alive,
but unable to escape. Sometimes the monster is killed; sometimes it is
weakened and rendered comparatively harmless. There was an Indian monster
of this kind in the Columbia River, near the Dalles, and one in the
Klamath River, near its mouth.
_Balor and Glas Gavlen._
This was a great tale in the old time; but it is badly broken up now.
If we could discover who Balor and his daughter were really, we might,
perhaps, be able to understand why his grandson was fated to kill him.
The theft of Glas Gavlen is the first act in a series which ends with
the death of Balor. No doubt the whole story is as natural as that of
Wimaloimis, the grisly-bear cloud-woman (Introduction) who tries to eat
her own sons, lightning and thunder, and is killed by them afterward.
_Art, the King’s Son._
This is a striking tale, the head following the body of the gruagach
into the earth is peculiar. The pursuit of Art by Balor is as vigorous
as it could be. Shall we say that the blade of the screeching sword is
lightning, and the screech itself thunder?
In Balor’s account of how his wife maltreated him, we have the incident
of the infant saved by the faithful animal. Balor, however, when a wolf,
saved himself by prompt action from the fate of Llewelyn’s dog and that
of the ichneumen in the Sanscrit tale.
There is no more interesting fact than this in myth tales, that no
matter how good the hero, he must have the right weapon. Often there is
only one spear or sword, or one kind of spear or sword, in the world with
which a certain deed can be done. The hero must have that weapon or fail.
_Shawn Mac Breogan._
In Gaelic, we meet more frequently the cloak of darkness, a cloak of
effacement. In this tale we have a cloak or mantle of power, one that
makes the wearer the finest person in the world. This is like the mantle
of the prophet, which, if it falls on a successor to the office, gives
him power equal to that of his predecessor. Of a similar character is the
garment of the Wet Mantle Hero, in Cahal, son of King Conor, whose power
is in his mantle, which is rain itself.
In a certain Indian tale, two skins are described,—one the skin of a
black rain cloud, the other the skin of a gray snow cloud; whenever
rain is wanted, the black skin is shaken out in the air, when snow is
desired, the gray one is shaken. This shaking is done by two deities in
the sky (stones at present), who thus produce rain and snow _ad libitum_.
The mantles of power were skins originally. When people had forgotten
the special virtue of the skins, and mantles were of cloth or skin
indifferently, or later on of cloth exclusively, the virtue connected
with mantles by tradition remained to them without reference to material.
In Hungarian tales the food of the steed, very often a mare, is glowing
coals. There are Hungarian tales in which little if any doubt is left
that the steed is lightning. It was a steed of this character that
carried Cahal, son of King Conor, to Striker’s castle, a place to which
no ship could go.
The skin of the white mare is like the skin of Klakherrit or Pitis in the
Indian tale. When the young woman puts on the skin, she becomes the white
mare; when she takes it off, she is herself again.
_The Cotter’s Son and the Half Slim Champion._
Instead of a king’s son, the more usual substitute for an earlier hero,
we have in this tale a cotter’s son. The scene of shaking ashes from
his person by a mourner who has sat by the fire for a long time, finds
a parallel in Indian stories. The Gaelic heroes, however, manage to get
vastly more ashes onto themselves than the Indians. The son of the King
of Lochlin in this case shakes off seven tons. In one Irish tale that I
know, the hero goes out into the field after mourning long at the hearth,
and shakes from his person an amount of ashes that covers seven acres in
front of him, seven acres behind him, seven acres on his right hand, and
seven acres on his left.
The old King of Lochlin, who has the same kind of story to tell as Balor,
is a tremendously stubborn old fellow; there is a savage cruelty in the
torture which his son inflicts on him that is without parallel, even
in myth tales. The old man goes through the roasting with a strength
which no stoic or martyr could equal. When he yields at last, he does so
serenely, and tells a tale which solves the conundrum completely.
_Fin MacCool, the three Giants, and the Small Men._
The theft of the children of the King of the Big Men has an interesting
parallel in an Indian tale from California, a part of which is as
follows:—
There was a man named Kuril (which means rib). He didn’t seem
to know much; but he could walk right through rocks, in at one
side and out at the other. He walked across gullies, through
thickets, and over precipices, as easily as on a smooth road.
One evening people saw him coming from the west toward the
village. When he had come near, the sun went down, and Kuril
disappeared right before their eyes. They saw this several
times afterwards. He came always just before sunset, never came
quite to the village. The children used to play in the evening;
and he would stop and look at them, and at sunset he would be
gone, turned into something.
One evening a very poor man saw Kuril pass his thumbnail
along the top of his head, and split himself, the left half
of him became a woman, and the right half remained a man.
That night the new pair appeared to the poor man who had seen
the splitting, they said that each of them was to be called
Kukupiwit now (crooked breast), and talked with him. After that
the poor man had great luck, killed many deer; what he wanted,
he had. The male Kukupiwit came home late every evening. His
other half watched the village children playing; if one stepped
aside, or left the others, she thrust it into a basket, and
ran home. People looked for their children, but never found
them. She would listen, climb a house where she heard a child
cry, and look down the smoke-hole. One evening a little boy
was crying; his mother could not stop him. At last she said,
“Cry away; I’ll go to sleep.” The woman fell asleep; the boy
sat crying by the hearth. Soon he saw a piece of roast venison
hanging by a string over the fire. He took a piece, ate it,
stopped crying, took another; the string was drawn up a little.
He reached after it; the string was drawn farther. He reached
higher; Kukupiwit the woman caught his hand, pulled him up, put
him in her basket, and ran home.
The mother woke now; the boy was gone. She roused her husband;
they looked everywhere, found no trace of their son. Next night
all in the village were watching. In one house a baby cried,
and soon the men who were there heard creeping on the house.
One man took the baby, held it high over the fire, and said,
“Take this baby!” Kukupiwit reached down; the man lowered the
child a little. She reached farther; that moment five or six
men caught her arm, and tried to pull her down; but all who
were in the house could not do that. One man chopped her arm
right off with a flint knife, and threw it out; she fell to the
ground where her arm was, she picked it up, and ran home.
_The Hard Gilla._
This tale has a special interest, in that it gives the cause of the
Battle of Ventry, described in the next tale. The cause, like that of the
Trojan war, was a woman. The daughter of the High King of the World goes
to Fin at first, and is then stolen away by him afterwards.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Hero-Tales of Ireland, by Jeremiah Curtin