Irish and Scotch Gaelic folk-stories are, as a living form of literature,
by this time pretty nearly a thing of the past. They have been trampled
in the common ruin under the feet of the Zeitgeist, happily not before
a large harvest has been reaped in Scotland, but, unfortunately, before
anything worth mentioning has been done in Ireland to gather in the
crop which grew luxuriantly a few years ago. Until quite recently there
existed in our midst millions of men and women who, when their day’s work
was over, sought and found mental recreation in a domain to which few
indeed of us who read books are permitted to enter. Man, all the world
over, when he is tired of the actualities of life, seeks to unbend his
mind with the creations of fancy. We who can read betake ourselves to
our favourite novelist, and as we peruse his fictions, we can almost see
our author erasing this, heightening that, and laying on such-and-such a
touch for effect. His book is the product of his individual brain, and
some of us or of our contemporaries have been present at its genesis.
But no one can tell us with certainty of the genesis of the folk-tale, no
one has been consciously present at its inception, and no one has marked
its growth. It is in many ways a mystery, part of the flotsam and jetsam
of the ages, still beating feebly against the shore of the nineteenth
century, swallowed up at last in England by the waves of materialism and
civilization combined; but still surviving unengulfed on the western
coasts of Ireland, where I gathered together some bundles of it, of which
the present volume is one.
The folk-lore of Ireland, like its folk-songs and native literature,
remains practically unexploited and ungathered. Attempts have been made
from time to time during the present century to collect Irish folk-lore,
but these attempts, though interesting from a literary point of view, are
not always successes from a scientific one. Crofton Croker’s delightful
book, “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,” first
published anonymously in 1825, led the way. All the other books which
have been published on the subject have but followed in the footsteps
of his; but all have not had the merit of his light style, his pleasant
parallels from classic and foreign literature, and his delightful
annotations, which touch, after a fascinating manner peculiarly his own,
upon all that is of interest in his text. I have written the word “text,”
but that word conveys the idea of an original to be annotated upon; and
Crofton Croker is, alas! too often his own original. There lies his weak
point, and there, too, is the defect of all who have followed him. The
form in which the stories are told is, of course, Croker’s own; but no
one who knows anything of fairy lore will suppose, that his manipulation
of the originals is confined to the form merely. The fact is that he
learned the ground-work of his tales from conversations with the Southern
peasantry, whom he knew well, and then elaborated this over the midnight
oil with great skill and delicacy of touch, in order to give a saleable
book, thus spiced, to the English public.
Setting aside the novelists Carleton and Lover, who only published some
incidental and largely-manipulated Irish stories, the next person to
collect Irish folk-lore in a volume was Patrick Kennedy, a native of the
County Wexford, who published “Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts,”
and in 1870 a good book, entitled, “The Fireside Stories of Ireland,”
which he had himself heard in Wexford when a boy. Many of the stories
which he gives appear to be the detritus of genuine Gaelic folk-stories,
filtered through an English idiom and much impaired and stunted in the
process. He appears, however, not to have adulterated them very much. Two
of the best stories in the book, “Jack, the Cunning Thief,” and “Shawn
an Omadawn,” I heard myself in the adjoining county Wicklow, and the
versions of them that I heard did not differ very widely from Kennedy’s.
It is interesting to note that these counties, close to the Pale as they
are, and under English influence for so long, nevertheless seem to have
preserved a considerable share of the old Gaelic folk-tales in English
dress, while in Leitrim, Longford, Meath, and those counties where Irish
died out only a generation or two ago, there has been made as clean a
sweep of folk-lore and Gaelic traditions as the most uncompromising “West
Briton” could desire. The reason why some of the folk-stories survive in
the eastern counties is probably because the Irish language was there
exchanged for English at a time when, for want of education and printed
books, folk-stories (the only mental recreation of the people) _had_ to
transfer themselves rightly or wrongly into English. When this first
took place I cannot tell, but I have heard from old people in Waterford,
that when some of their fathers or grandfathers marched north to join
the Wexford Irish in ’98, they were astonished to find English nearly
universally used amongst them. Kennedy says of his stories: “I have
endeavoured to present them in a form suitable for the perusal of both
sexes and of all ages”; and “such as they are, they may be received by
our readers as obtained from local sources.” Unfortunately, the sources
are not given by him any more than by Croker, and we cannot be sure how
much belongs to Kennedy the bookseller, and how much to the Wexford
peasant.
After this come Lady Wilde’s volumes;—her “Ancient Legends,” and her
recently published “Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages,” in both of which
books she gives us a large amount of narrative matter in a folk-lore
dress; but, like her predecessors, she disdains to quote an authority,
and scorns to give us the least inkling as to where such-and-such a
legend, or cure, or superstition comes from, from whom it was obtained,
who were her informants, whether peasant or other, in what parishes or
counties the superstition or legend obtains, and all the other collateral
information which the modern folk-lorist is sure to expect. Her entire
ignorance of Irish, through the medium of which alone such tales and
superstitions can properly, if at all, be collected, is apparent every
time she introduces an Irish word. She astonishes us Irish speakers
with such striking observations as this—“Peasants in Ireland wishing
you good luck, say in Irish, ‘The blessing of Bel and the blessing of
Samhain be with you,’ that is, of the sun and of the moon.”[1] It would
be interesting to know the locality where so curious a Pagan custom is
still practised, for I confess that though I have spoken Irish in every
county where it is still spoken, I have never been, nor do I expect to
be, so saluted. Lady Wilde’s volumes, are, nevertheless, a wonderful
and copious record of folk-lore and folk customs, which must lay
Irishmen under one more debt of gratitude to the gifted compiler. It is
unfortunate, however, that these volumes are hardly as valuable as they
are interesting, and for the usual reason—that we do not know what is
Lady Wilde’s and what is not.
Almost contemporaneously with Lady Wilde’s last book there appeared this
year yet another important work, a collection of Irish folk-tales taken
from the Gaelic speakers of the south and north-west, by an American
gentleman, Mr. Jeremiah Curtin. He has collected some twenty tales, which
are told very well, and with much less cooking and flavouring than his
predecessors employed. Mr. Curtin tells us that he has taken his tales
from the old Gaelic-speaking men; but he must have done so through the
awkward medium of an interpreter, for his ignorance of the commonest
Irish words is as startling as Lady Wilde’s.[2] He follows Lady Wilde in
this, too, that he keeps us in profound ignorance of his authorities. He
mentions not one name, and except that he speaks in a general way of old
Gaelic speakers in nooks where the language is still spoken, he leaves
us in complete darkness as to where and from whom, and how he collected
these stories. In this he does not do himself justice, for, from my own
knowledge of Irish folk-lore, such as it is, I can easily recognize that
Mr. Curtin has approached the fountain-head more nearly than any other.
Unfortunately, like his predecessors, he has a literary style of his own,
for which, to say the least of it, there is no counterpart in the Gaelic
from which he has translated.[3]
We have as yet had no folk-lorist in Ireland who could compare for a
moment with such a man as Iain Campbell, of Islay, in investigative
powers, thoroughness of treatment, and acquaintance with the people,
combined with a powerful national sentiment, and, above all, a knowledge
of Gaelic. It is on this last rock that all our workers-up of Irish
folk-lore split. In most circles in Ireland it is a disgrace to be known
to talk Irish; and in the capital, if one makes use of an Irish word to
express one’s meaning, as one sometimes does of a French or German word,
one would be looked upon as positively outside the pale of decency; hence
we need not be surprised at the ignorance of Gaelic Ireland displayed by
littérateurs who write for the English public, and foist upon us modes of
speech which we have not got, and idioms which they never learned from us.
This being the case, the chief interest in too many of our folk-tale
writers lies in their individual treatment of the skeletons of the
various Gaelic stories obtained through English mediums, and it is not
devoid of interest to watch the various garbs in which the sophisticated
minds of the ladies and gentlemen who trifled in such matters, clothed
the dry bones. But when the skeletons were thus padded round and clad,
although built upon folk-lore, they were no longer folk-lore themselves,
for folk-lore can only find a fitting garment in the language that comes
from the mouths of those whose minds are so primitive that they retain
with pleasure those tales which the more sophisticated invariably forget.
For this reason folk-lore is presented in an uncertain and unsuitable
medium, whenever the contents of the stories are divorced from their
original expression in language. Seeing how Irish writers have managed
it hitherto, it is hardly to be wondered at that the writer of the
article on folk-lore in the “Encyclopedia Britanica,” though he gives
the names of some fifty authorities on the subject, has not mentioned a
single Irish collection. In the present book, as well as in my Leabhar
Sgeuluigheachta, I have attempted—if nothing else—to be a little more
accurate than my predecessors, and to give the _exact language_ of my
informants, together with their names and various localities—information
which must always be the very first requisite of any work upon which a
future scientist may rely when he proceeds to draw honey (is it always
honey?) from the flowers which we collectors have culled for him.
It is difficult to say whether there still exist in Ireland many stories
of the sort given in this volume. That is a question which cannot be
answered without further investigation. In any other country the great
body of Gaelic folk-lore in the four provinces would have been collected
long ago, but the “Hiberni incuriosi suorum” appear at the present day
to care little for anything that is Gaelic; and so their folk-lore has
remained practically uncollected.
Anyone who reads this volume as a representative one of Irish folk-tales
might, at first sight, imagine that there is a broad difference between
the Gaelic tales of the Highlands and those of Ireland, because very few
of the stories given here have parallels in the volumes of Campbell and
MacInnes. I have, however, particularly chosen the tales in the present
volume on account of their dissimilarity to any published Highland
tales, for, as a general rule, the main body of tales in Ireland and
Scotland bear a very near relation to each other. Most of Mr. Curtin’s
stories, for instance, have Scotch Gaelic parallels. It would be only
natural, however, that many stories should exist in Ireland which are
now forgotten in Scotland, or which possibly were never carried there
by that section of the Irish which colonized it; and some of the most
modern—especially of the kind whose genesis I have called conscious—must
have arisen amongst the Irish since then, while on the other hand some
of the Scotch stories may have been bequeathed to the Gaelic language
by those races who were displaced by the Milesian Conquest in the fifth
century.
Many of the incidents of the Highland stories have parallels in Irish
MSS., even incidents of which I have met no trace in the folk-lore of
the people. This is curious, because these Irish MSS. used to circulate
widely, and be constantly read at the firesides of the peasantry, while
there is no trace of MSS. being in use historical times amongst the
Highland cabins. Of such stories as were most popular, a very imperfect
list of about forty is given in Mr. Standish O’Grady’s excellent preface
to the third volume of the Ossianic Society’s publications. After reading
most of these in MSS. of various dates, and comparing them with such
folk-lore as I had collected orally, I was surprised to find how few
points of contact existed between the two. The men who committed stories
to paper seem to have chiefly confined themselves to the inventions
of the bards or professional story-tellers—often founded, however, on
folk-lore incidents—while the taste of the people was more conservative,
and willingly forgot the bardic inventions to perpetuate their old Aryan
traditions, of which this volume gives some specimens. The discrepancy
in style and contents between the MS. stories and those of the people
leads me to believe that the stories in the MSS. are not so much old
Aryan folk-tales written down by scholars as the inventions of individual
brains, consciously inventing, as modern novelists do. This theory,
however, must be somewhat modified before it can be applied, for, as I
have said, there are incidents in Scotch Gaelic folk-tales which resemble
those of some of the MS. stories rather nearly. Let us glance at a single
instance—one only out of many—where Highland tradition preserves a trait
which, were it not for such preservation, would assuredly be ascribed to
the imaginative brain of an inventive Irish writer.
The extraordinary creature of which Campbell found traces in the
Highlands, the Fáchan, of which he has drawn a whimsical engraving,[4]
is met with in an Irish MS. called Iollann Arm-dearg. Old MacPhie,
Campbell’s informant, called him the “Desert creature of Glen Eite, the
son of Colin,” and described him as having “one hand out of his chest,
one leg out of his haunch, and one eye out of the front of his face;” and
again, “ugly was the make of the Fáchan, there was one hand out of the
ridge of his chest, and one tuft out of the top of his head, and it were
easier to take a mountain from the root than to bend that tuft.” This
one-legged, one-handed, one-eyed creature, unknown, as Campbell remarks,
to German or Norse mythology, is thus described in the Irish manuscript:
“And he (Iollann) was not long at this, until he saw the devilish
misformed element, and the fierce and horrible spectre, and the gloomy
disgusting enemy, and the morose unlovely churl (moga); and this is how
he was: he held a very thick iron flail-club in his skinny hand, and
twenty chains out of it, and fifty apples on each chain of them, and a
venomous spell on each great apple of them, and a girdle of the skins of
deer and roebuck around the thing that was his body, and one eye in the
forehead of his black-faced countenance, and one bare, hard, very hairy
hand coming out of his chest, and one veiny, thick-soled leg supporting
him and a close, firm, dark blue mantle of twisted hard-thick feathers,
protecting his body, and surely he was more like unto devil than to man.”
This creature inhabited a desert, as the Highlander said, and were it
not for this corroborating Scotch tradition, I should not have hesitated
to put down the whole incident as the whimsical invention of some Irish
writer, the more so as I had never heard any accounts of this wonderful
creature in local tradition. This discovery of his counterpart in the
Highlands puts a new complexion on the matter. Is the Highland spectre
derived from the Irish manuscript story, or does the writer of the
Irish story only embody in his tale a piece of folk-lore common at one
time to all branches of the Gaelic race, and now all but extinct. This
last supposition is certainly the true one, for it is borne out by the
fact that the Irish writer ascribes no name to this monster, while the
Highlander calls him a Fáchan,[5] a word, as far as I know, not to be
found elsewhere.
But we have further ground for pausing before we ascribe the Irish
manuscript story to the invention of some single bard or writer. If
we read it closely we shall see that it is largely the embodiment of
other folk-tales. Many of the incidents of which it is composed can be
paralleled from Scotch Gaelic sources, and one of the most remarkable,
that of the prince becoming a journeyman fuller, I have found in a
Connacht folk-tale. This diffusion of incidents in various tales
collected all over the Gaelic-speaking world, would point to the fact
that the story, as far as many of the incidents go, is not the invention
of the writer, but is genuine folk-lore thrown by him into a new form,
with, perhaps, added incidents of his own, and a brand new dress.
But now in tracing this typical story, we come across another remarkable
fact—the fresh start the story took on its being thus recast and made up
new. Once the order and progress of the incidents were thus stereotyped,
as it were, the tale seems to have taken a new lease of its life, and
gone forth to conquer; for while it continued to be constantly copied
in Irish manuscripts, thus proving its popularity as a written tale,
it continued to be recited verbally in Scotland in something like the
same bardic and inflated language made use of by the Irish writer,
and with pretty nearly the same sequence of incidents, the three
adventurers, whose Irish names are Ur, Artuir, and Iollann, having
become transmogrified into Ur, Athairt, and Iullar, in the mouth of the
Highland reciter. I think it highly improbable, however, that at the time
of this story being composed—largely out of folk-tale incidents—it was
also committed to paper. I think it much more likely that the story was
committed to writing by some Irish scribe, only after it had gained so
great a vogue as to spread through both Ireland and Scotland. This would
account for the fact that all the existing MSS. of this story, and of
many others like it, are, as far as I am aware, comparatively modern.[6]
Another argument in favour of this supposition, that bardic tales were
only committed to writing when they had become popular, may be drawn from
the fact that both in Ireland and the Highlands we find in many folk-lore
stories traces of bardic compositions easily known by their poetical,
alliterative, and inflated language, of which no MSS. are found in either
country. It may, of course, be said, that the MSS. have perished; and
we know how grotesquely indifferent the modern Irish are about their
literary and antiquarian remains; yet, had they ever existed, I cannot
help thinking that some trace of them, or allusion to them, would be
found in our surviving literature.
There is also the greatest discrepancy in the poetical passages which
occur in the Highland oral version and the Irish manuscript version of
such tales as in incident are nearly identical. Now, if the story had
been propagated from a manuscript written out once for all, and then
copied, I feel pretty sure that the resemblance between the alliterative
passages in the two would be much closer. The dissimilarity between them
seems to show that the incidents and not the language were the things to
be remembered, and that every wandering bard who picked up a new story
from a colleague, stereotyped the incidents in his mind, but uttered them
whenever he recited the story, in his own language; and whenever he came
to the description of a storm at sea, or a battle, or anything else which
the original poet had seen fit to describe poetically, he did so too, but
not in the same way or the same language, for to remember the language
of his predecessor on these occasions, from merely hearing it, would be
well-nigh impossible. It is likely, then, that each bard or story-teller
observed the places where the poetical runs should come in, but trusted
to his own cultivated eloquence for supplying them. It will be well to
give an example or two from this tale of Iollann. Here is the sea-run, as
given in the Highland oral version, after the three warriors embark in
their vessel:—
“They gave her prow to sea and her stern to shore,
They hoisted the speckled flapping bare-topped sails,
Up against the tall tough splintering masts,
And they had a pleasant breeze as they might chose themselves,
Would bring heather from the hill, leaf from grove, willow from its
roots,
Would put thatch of the houses in furrows of the ridges,
The day that neither the son nor the father could do it,
That same was neither little nor much for them,
But using it and taking it as it might come.
The sea plunging and surging,
The red sea the blue sea lashing,
And striking hither and thither about her planks,
The whorled dun whelk that was down on the floor of the ocean,
Would give a _snag_ on her gunwale and a crack on her floor,
She would cut a slender oaten straw with the excellence of her going.”
It will be observed how different the corresponding run in the Irish
manuscript is, when thrown into verse, for the language in both versions
is only measured prose:—
“Then they gave an eager very quick courageous high-spirited flood-leap
To meet and to face the sea and the great ocean.
And great was the horror....
Then there arose before them a fierceness in the sea,
And they replied patiently stoutly strongly and vigorously,
To the roar of the green sided high-strong waves,
Till they made a high quick very-furious rowing
Till the deep-margined dreadful blue-bordered sea
Arose in broad-sloping fierce-frothing plains
And in rushing murmuring flood-quick ever-deep platforms.
And in gloomy horrible swift great valleys
Of very terrible green sea, and the beating and the pounding
Of the strong dangerous waves smiting against the decks
And against the sides of that full-great full-tight bark.”
It may, however, be objected that the sea-runs are so common and so
numerous, that one might easily usurp the place of another, and that
this alone is no proof that the various story-tellers or professional
bards, contented themselves with remembering the incidents of a story,
but either extemporised their own runs after what flourish their nature
would, or else had a stock of these, of their own composing, always
ready at hand. Let us look, then, at another story of which Campbell has
preserved the Highland version, while I have a good Irish MS. of the
same, written by some northern scribe, in 1762. This story, “The Slender
Grey Kerne,” or “Slim Swarthy Champion,” as Campbell translates it, is
full of alliterative runs, which the Highland reciter has retained
in their proper places, but couched in different language, while he
introduces a run of his own which the Irish has not got, in describing
the swift movement of the kerne. Every time the kerne is asked where he
comes from, the Highlander makes him say—
“I came from hurry-skurry,
From the land of endless spring,[7]
From the loved swanny glen,
A night in Islay and a night in Man,
A night on cold watching cairns
On the face of a mountain.
In the Scotch king’s town was I born,
A soiled sorry champion am I
Though I happened upon this town.”