“The kerne played music and tunes and instruments of song,
Wounded men and women with babes,
And slashed heroes and mangled warriors,
And all the wounded and all the sick,
And the bitterly-wounded of the great world,
They would sleep with the voice of the music,
Ever efficacious, ever sweet, which the kerne played.”
Again, when the kerne approaches anyone, his gait is thus described
half-rythmically by the Scotch narrator:—“A young chap was seen coming
towards them, his two shoulders through his old coat, his two ears
through his old hat, his two squat kickering tatter-y shoes full of cold
roadway-ish water, three feet of his sword sideways in the side of his
haunch after the scabbard was ended.”
The Irish writer makes him come thus:—“And he beheld the slender grey
kerne approaching him straight, and half his sword bared behind his
haunch, and old shoes full of water sousing about him, and the top of his
ears out through his old mantle, and a short butt-burned javelin of holly
in his hand.”
These few specimens, which could be largely multiplied, may be
sufficient for our purpose, as they show that wherever a run occurs in
the Irish the same occurs in the Gaelic, but couched in quite different
language, though preserving a general similarity of meaning. This can
only be accounted for on the supposition already made, that when a
professional bard had invented a successful story it was not there and
then committed to paper, but circulated _vivâ voce_, until it became the
property of every story-teller, and was made part of the stock-in-trade
of professional _filès_, who neither remembered nor cared to remember the
words in which the story was first told, but only the incidents of which
it was composed, and who (as their professional training enabled them to
do) invented or extemporised glowing alliterative runs for themselves at
every point of the story where, according to the inventor of it, a run
should be.
It may be interesting to note that this particular story cannot—at
least in the form in which we find it disseminated both in Ireland and
Scotland—be older than the year 1362, in which year O’Connor Sligo
marched into Munster and carried off great spoil, for in both the Scotch
and Irish versions the kerne is made to accompany that chieftain, and
to disappear in disgust because O’Connor forgot to offer him the first
drink. This story then, and it is probably typical of a great many
others, had its rise in its present shape—for, of course, the germ of
it may be much older—on Irish ground, not earlier than the end of the
fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth century, and was carried by
some Irish bard or professional story-teller to the Gaeldom of Scotland,
where it is told to this day without any great variations, but in a form
very much stunted and shortened. As to the Irish copy, I imagine that it
was not written down for a couple of centuries later, and only after it
had become a stock piece all over the Scotch and Irish Gaeldom; that then
some scribe got hold of a story-teller (one of those professionals who,
according to the Book of Leinster, were obliged to know seven times fifty
stories), and stereotyped in writing the current Irish variation of the
tale, just as Campbell, two, three, or four centuries afterwards, did
with the Scotch Gaelic version.
It may, of course, be alleged that the bombastic and inflated language
of many of the MS. stories is due not to the oral reciter, but to the
scribe, who, in his pride of learning, thought to himself, _nihil quod
tango non orno_; but though it is possible that some scribes threw
in extraneous embellishments, I think the story-teller was the chief
transgressor. Here, for instance, is a verbally collected specimen from
a Connemara story, which contains all the marks of the MS. stories,
and yet it is almost certain that it has been transmitted purely _vivâ
voce_:—“They journeyed to the harbour where there was a vessel waiting
to take them across the sea. They struck into her, and hung up the great
blowing, bellying, equal-long, equal-straight sails, to the tops of the
masts, so that they would not leave a rope without straining, or an oar
without breaking, plowing the seething, surging sea; great whales making
fairy music and service for them, two-thirds going beneath the wave to
the one-third going on the top, sending the smooth sand down below and
the rough sand up above, and the eels in grips with one another, until
they grated on port and harbour in the Eastern world.” This description
is probably nothing to the glowing language which a professional
story-teller, with a trained ear, enormous vocabulary, and complete
command of the language, would have employed a couple of hundred years
ago. When such popular traces of the inflated style even still exist, it
is against all evidence to accredit the invention and propagation of it
to the scribes alone.
The relationship between Ireland and the Scottish Gaeldom, was of the
closest kind, and there must have been something like an identity of
literature, nor was there any break in the continuity of these friendly
relations until the plantation of Ulster cut off the high road between
the two Gaelic families. Even during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries it is probable that no sooner did a bardic composition win
fame in Ireland than it was carried over to try its fortune in Scotland
too, just as an English dramatic company will come over from London to
Dublin. A story which throws great light on the dispersion of heroic
tales amongst the Gaelic-speaking peoples, is Conall Gulban, the longest
of all Campbell’s tales. On comparing the Highland version with an Irish
MS., by Father Manus O’Donnell, made in 1708, and another made about the
beginning of this century, by Michael O’Longan, of Carricknavar, I was
surprised to find incident following incident with wonderful regularity
in both versions. Luckily we have proximate data for fixing the date of
this renowned story, a story that, according to Campbell, is “very widely
spread in Scotland, from Beaulay on the east, to Barra on the west, and
Dunoon and Paisley in the south.” Both the Irish and Gaelic stories
relate the exploits of the fifth century chieftain, Conall Gulban, the
son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, and his wars with (amongst others)
the Turks. The Irish story begins with an account of Niall holding his
court, when a herald from the Emperor of Constantinople comes forward
and summons him to join the army of the emperor, and assist in putting
down Christianity, and making the nations of Europe embrace the Turkish
faith. We may fairly surmise that this romance took its rise in the
shock given to Europe by the fall of Constantinople and the career of
Mahomet the Great. This would throw back its date to the latter end of
the fifteenth century at the earliest; but one might almost suppose that
Constantinople had been long enough held by the Turks at the time the
romance was invented to make the inventor suppose that it had always
belonged to them, even in the time of Niall of the Nine Hostages.[9] We
know that romances of this kind continued to be invented at a much later
date, but I fancy none of these ever penetrated to Scotland. One of the
most popular of romantic tales with the scribes of the last century and
the first half of this, was “The Adventures of Torolbh MacStairn,” and
again, the “Adventures of Torolbh MacStairn’s Three Sons,” which most of
the MSS. ascribe to Michael Coiminn, who lived at the beginning of the
eighteenth century,[10] and whose romance was certainly not propagated by
professional story-tellers, as I have tried to prove was the case with
the earlier romances, but by means of numerous manuscript copies; and it
is also certain that Coiminn did not relate this tale as the old bards
did, but wrote it down as modern novelists do their stories. But this
does not invalidate my surmise, or prove that Conall Gulban, and forty
or fifty of the same kind, had their origin in a written manuscript;
it only proves that in the eighteenth century the old order was giving
place to the new, and that the professional bards and story-tellers were
now a thing of the past, they having fallen with the Gaelic nobility
who were their patrons. It would be exceedingly interesting to know
whether any traces of these modern stories that had their rise in written
manuscripts, are to be found amongst the peasantry as folk-lore. I,
certainly, have found no remnant of any such; but this proves nothing.
If Ireland had a few individual workers scattered over the provinces we
would know more on the subject; but, unfortunately, we have hardly any
such people, and what is worse, the present current of political thought,
and the tone of our Irish educational establishments are not likely
to produce them. Until something has been done by us to collect Irish
folk-lore in as thorough a manner as Highland tales have already been
collected, no deductions can be made with certainty upon the subject of
the relationship between Highland and Irish folk-tales, and the relation
of both to the Irish MSS.
Irish folk-stories may roughly be divided into two classes, those which I
believe never had any _conscious_ genesis inside the shores of Ireland,
and those which had. These last we have just been examining. Most of
the _longer_ tales about the Fenians, and all those stories which have
long inflated passages full of alliterative words and poetic epithets,
belong to this class. Under the other head of stories that were never
consciously invented on Irish ground, we may place all such simple
stories as bear a trace of nature myths, and those which appear to belong
to our old Aryan heritage, from the fact of their having parallels
amongst other Aryan-speaking races, such as the story of the man who
wanted to learn to shake with fear, stories of animals and talking
birds, of giants and wizards, and others whose directness and simplicity
show them to have had an unconscious and popular origin, though some
of these may, of course, have arisen on Irish soil. To this second
class belong also that numerous body of traditions rather than tales,
of conversational anecdotes rather than set stories, about appearances
of fairies, or “good people,” or Tuatha De Danann, as they are also
called; of pookas, leprechauns, ghosts, apparitions, water-horses, &c.
These creations of folk-fancy seldom appear, as far as I have observed,
in the folk-tale proper, or at least they only appear as adjuncts, for
in almost all cases the interest of these regular tales centres round a
human hero. Stories about leprechauns, fairies, &c., are very brief, and
generally have local names and scenery attached to them, and are told
conversationally as any other occurrence might be told, whereas there is
a certain solemnity about the repetition of a folk-tale proper.
After spending so much time over the very latest folk-tales, the detritus
of bardic stories, it will be well to cast a glance at some of the most
ancient, such as bear their pre-historic origin upon their face. Some of
these point, beyond all doubt, to rude efforts on the part of primitive
man to realize to himself the phenomena of nature, by personifying them,
and attaching to them explanatory fables. Let us take a specimen from a
story I found in Mayo, not given in this volume—“The Boy who was long on
his Mother.”[11] In this story, which in Von Hahn’s classification would
come under the heading of “the strong man his adventures,” the hero is
a veritable Hercules, whom the king tries to put to death by making him
perform impossible tasks, amongst other things, by sending him down to
hell to drive up the spirits with his club. He is desired by the king to
drain a lake full of water. The lake is very steep on one side like a
reservoir. The hero makes a hole at this side, applies his mouth to it,
and sucks down the water of the lake, with boats, fishes, and everything
else it contained, leaving the lake ċoṁ tirm le bois do láiṁe, “as dry
as the palm of your hand.” Even a sceptic will be likely to confess that
this tale (which has otherwise no meaning) is the remains of a (probably
Aryan) sun-myth, and personifies the action of the warm sun in drying up
a lake and making it a marsh, killing the fishes, and leaving the boats
stranded. But this story, like many others, is suggestive of more than
this, since it would supply an argument for those who, like Professor
Rhys, see in Hercules a sun-god. The descent of our hero into hell, and
his frightening the spirits with his club, the impossible tasks which the
king gives him to perform in the hopes of slaying him, and his successful
accomplishment of them, seem to identify him with the classic Hercules.
But the Irish tradition preserves the incident of drying the lake, which
must have been the work of a sun-god, the very thing that Hercules—but
on much slighter grounds—is supposed to have been.[12] If this story is
not the remains of a nature myth, it is perfectly unintelligible, for no
rational person could hope to impose upon even a child by saying that a
man drank up a lake, ships, and all; and yet this story has been with
strange conservatism repeated from father to son for probably thousands
of years, and must have taken its rise at a time when our ancestors were
in much the same rude and mindless condition as the Australian blacks or
the Indians of California are to-day.
Again, in another story we hear of a boat that sails equally swiftly
over land and sea, and goes straight to its mark. It is so large that if
all the men in the world were to enter it there would remain place for
six hundred more; while it is so small that it folds up into the hand of
the person who has it. But ships do not sail on land, nor grow large and
small, nor go straight to their mark; consequently, it is plain that we
have here another nature myth, vastly old, invented by pre-historic man,
for these ships can be nothing but the clouds which sail over land and
sea, are large enough to hold the largest armies, and small enough to
fold into the hand, and which go straight to their mark. The meaning of
this has been forgotten for countless ages, but the story has survived.
Again, in another tale which I found, called “The Bird of Sweet
Music,”[13] a man follows a sweet singing bird into a cave under the
ground, and finds a country where he wanders for a year and a day, and a
woman who befriends him while there, and enables him to bring back the
bird, which turns out to be a human being. At the end of the tale the
narrator mentions quite casually that it was his mother whom he met down
there. But this touch shows that the land where he wandered was the
Celtic Hades, the country of the dead beneath the ground, and seems to
stamp the tale at once as at least pre-Christian.
Even in such an unpretending-looking story as “The King of Ireland’s
Son” (the third in this volume), there are elements which must be vastly
old. In a short Czech story, “George with the Goat,” we find some of
the prince’s companions figuring, only slightly metamorphosed. We have
the man with one foot over his shoulder, who jumps a hundred miles when
he puts it down; while the gun-man of the Irish story who performs two
parts—that of seeing and shooting—is replaced in the Bohemian tale by two
different men, one of whom has such sight that he must keep a bandage
over his eyes, for if he removed it he could see a hundred miles, and the
other has, instead of a gun, a bottle with his thumb stuck into it for
a stopper, because if he took it out it would squirt a hundred miles.
George hires one after the other, just as the prince does in the Irish
story. George goes to try to win the king’s daughter, as the Irish prince
does, and, amongst other things, is desired to bring a goblet of water
from a well a hundred miles off in a minute. “So,” says the story,[14]
“George said to the man who had the foot on his shoulder, ‘You said that
if you took the foot down you could jump a hundred miles.’ He replied:
‘I’ll easily do that.’ He took the foot down, jumped, and was there; but
after this there was only a very little time to spare, and by this he
ought to have been back. So George said to the second, ‘You said that if
you removed the bandage from your eyes you could see a hundred miles;
peep, and see what is going on.’ ‘Ah, sir, goodness gracious! he’s fallen
asleep.’ ‘That will be a bad job,’ said George; ‘the time will be up.
You third man, you said if you pulled your thumb out you could squirt
a hundred miles. Be quick, and squirt thither, that he may get up; and
you, look whether he is moving, or what.’ ‘Oh, sir, he’s getting up now;
he’s knocking the dust off; he’s drawing the water.’ He then gave a jump,
and was there exactly in time.” Now, this Bohemian story seems also to
bear traces of a nature myth; for, as Mr. Wratislaw has remarked: “the
man who jumps a hundred miles appears to be the rainbow, the man with
bandaged eyes the lightning, and the man with the bottle the cloud.”
The Irish story, while in every other way superior to the Bohemian, has
quite obscured this point; and were it not for the striking Sclavonic
parallel, people might be found to assert that the story was of recent
origin. This discovery of the Czech tale, however, throws it at once
three thousand years back; for the similarity of the Irish and Bohemian
story can hardly be accounted for, except on the supposition, that both
Slavs and Celts carried it from the original home of the Aryan race, in
pre-historic times, or at least from some place where the two races were
in contiguity with one another, and that it, too—little as it appears so
now—was at one time in all probability a nature myth.
Such myth stories as these ought to be preserved, since they are about
the last visible link connecting civilized with pre-historic man; for,
of all the traces that man in his earliest period has left behind him,
there is nothing except a few drilled stones or flint arrow-heads
that approaches the antiquity of these tales, as told to-day by a
half-starving peasant in a smoky Connacht cabin.
It is time to say a word about the narrators of these stories. The
people who can recite them are, as far as my researches have gone, to
be found only amongst the oldest, most neglected, and poorest of the
Irish-speaking population. English-speaking people either do not know
them at all, or else tell them in so bald and condensed a form as to
be useless. Almost all the men from whom I used to hear stories in the
County Roscommon are dead. Ten or fifteen years ago I used to hear a
great many stories, but I did not understand their value. Now when I go
back for them I cannot find them. They have died out, and will never
again be heard on the hillsides, where they probably existed for a
couple of thousand years; they will never be repeated there again, to
use the Irish phrase, while grass grows or water runs. Several of these
stories I got from an old man, one Shawn Cunningham, on the border of
the County Roscommon, where it joins Mayo. He never spoke more than a
few words of English till he was fifteen years old. He was taught by a
hedge schoolmaster from the South of Ireland out of Irish MSS. As far
as I could make out from him the teaching seemed to consist in making
him learn Irish poems by heart. His next schoolmaster, however, tied a
piece of stick round his neck, and when he came to school in the morning
the schoolmaster used to inspect the piece of wood and pretend that it
told him how often he had spoken Irish when at home. In some cases the
schoolmasters made the parents put a notch in the stick every time the
child failed to speak English. He was beaten then, and always beaten
whenever he was heard speaking a word of Irish, even though at this time
he could hardly speak a word of English. His son and daughter now speak
Irish, though not fluently, his grandchildren do not even understand it.
He had at one time, as he expressed it, “the full of a sack of stories,”
but he had forgotten them. His grandchildren stood by his knee while
he told me one or two, but it was evident they did not understand a
word. His son and daughter laughed at them as nonsense. Even in Achill
where, if anywhere, one ought to find folk-stories in their purity, a
fine-looking dark man of about forty-five, who told me a number of them,
and could repeat Ossian’s poems, assured me that now-a-days when he went
into a house in the evening and the old people got him to recite, the
boys would go out; “they wouldn’t understand me,” said he, “and when they
wouldn’t, they’d sooner be listening to géimneaċ na mbó,” “the lowing
of the cows.” This, too, in an island where many people cannot speak
English. I do not know whether the Achill schoolmasters make use of the
notch of wood to-day, but it is hardly wanted now. It is curious that
this was the device universally employed all over Connacht and Munster
to kill the language. This took place under the eye of O’Connell and the
Parliamentarians, and, of course, under the eye and with the sanction of
the Catholic priesthood and prelates, some of whom, according to Father
Keegan, of St. Louis, distinguished themselves by driving the Irish
teachers out of their dioceses and burning their books. At the present
day, such is the irony of fate, if a stranger talks Irish he runs a good
chance of being looked upon as an enemy, this because some attempts were
made to proselytize “natives” by circulating Irish bibles, and sending
some Irish scripture-readers amongst them. Surely nothing so exquisitely
ludicrous ever took place outside of this island of anomalies, as that a
stranger who tries to speak Irish in Ireland runs the serious risk of
being looked upon as a proselytizing Englishman. As matters are still
progressing gaily in this direction, let nobody be surprised if a pure
Aryan language which, at the time of the famine, in ’47, was spoken by at
least four million souls (more than the whole population of Switzerland),
becomes in a few years as extinct as Cornish. Of course, there is not a
shadow of necessity, either social or economical, for this. All the world
knows that bi-linguists are superior to men who know only one language,
yet in Ireland everyone pretends to believe the contrary. A few words
from the influential leaders of the race when next they visit Achill, for
instance, would help to keep Irish alive there in _sæcula sæculorum_, and
with the Irish language, the old Aryan folk-lore, the Ossianic poems,
numberless ballads, folk-songs, and proverbs, and a thousand and one
other interesting things that survive when Irish is spoken, and die when
it dies. But, from a complexity of causes which I am afraid to explain,
the men who for the last sixty years have had the ear of the Irish race
have persistently shown the cold shoulder to everything that was Irish
and racial, and while protesting, or pretending to protest, against West
Britonism, have helped, more than anyone else, by their example, to
assimilate us to England and the English, thus running counter to the
entire voice of modern Europe, which is in favour of extracting the best
from the various races of men who inhabit it, by helping them to develop
themselves on national and racial lines. The people are not the better
for it either, for one would fancy it required little culture to see that
the man who reads Irish MSS., and repeats Ossianic poetry, is a higher
and more interesting type than the man whose mental training is confined
to spelling through an article in _United Ireland_.[15]
I may mention here that it is not as easy a thing as might be imagined
to collect Irish stories. One hears that tales are to be had from such
and such a man, generally, alas! a very old one. With difficulty one
manages to find him out, only to discover, probably, that he has some
work on hand. If it happens to be harvest time it is nearly useless going
to him at all, unless one is prepared to sit up with him all night, for
his mind is sure to be so distraught with harvest operations that he can
tell you nothing. If it is winter time, however, and you fortunately find
him unoccupied, nevertheless it requires some management to get him to
tell his stories. Half a glass of _ishka-baha_, a pipe of tobacco, and a
story of one’s own are the best things to begin with. If, however, you
start to take down the story _verbatim_ with pencil and paper, as an
unwary collector might do, you destroy all, or your shanachie becomes
irritable. He will not wait for you to write down your sentence, and if
you call out, “Stop, stop, wait till I get this down,” he will forget
what he was going to tell you, and you will not get a third of his story,
though you may think you have it all. What you must generally do is to
sit quietly smoking your pipe, without the slightest interruption, not
even when he comes to words and phrases which you do not understand.
He must be allowed his own way to the end, and then after judiciously
praising him and discussing the story, you remark, as if the thought had
suddenly struck you, “buḋ ṁaiṫ liom sin a ḃeiṫ agam air ṗáipeur,” “I’d
like to have that on paper.” Then you can get it from him easily enough,
and when he leaves out whole incidents, as he is sure to do, you who have
just heard the story can put him right, and so get it from him nearly in
its entirety. Still it is not always easy to write down these stories,
for they are full of old or corrupted words, which neither you nor your
narrator understand, and if you press him too much over the meaning of
these he gets confused and irritable.
The present volume consists of about half the stories in the _Leabhar
Sgeuluigheachta_, translated into English, together with some half
dozen other stories given in the original together with a close English
translation. It is not very easy to make a good translation from Irish
into English, for there are no two Aryan languages more opposed to each
other in spirit and idiom. Still, the English spoken by three-fourths of
the people of Ireland is largely influenced by Gaelic idioms, for most of
those expressions which surprise Englishmen are really translations from
that Irish which was the language of the speaker’s father, grandfather,
or great-grandfather—according to the part of the country you may be
in—and there have perpetuated themselves, even in districts where you
will scarce find a trace of an Irish word. There are, however, also
hundreds of Gaelic idioms not reproduced in the English spoken by the
people, and it is difficult to render these fitly. Campbell of Islay has
run into rather an extreme in his translations, for in order to make
them picturesque, he has rendered his Gaelic originals something too
literally. Thus, he invariably translates _bhain se an ceann deth_, by
“he reaped the head off him,” a form of speech which, I notice, a modern
Irish poet and M.P. has adopted from him; but bain, though it certainly
means “reap” amongst other things, is the word used for taking off a hat
as well as a head. Again, he always translates _thu_ by “thou,” which
gives his stories a strange antique air, which is partly artificial, for
the Gaelic “thou” corresponds to the English “you,” the second person
plural not being used except in speaking of more than one. In this way,
Campbell has given his excellent and thoroughly reliable translations
a scarcely legitimate colouring, which I have tried to avoid. For this
reason, I have not always translated the Irish idioms quite literally,
though I have used much unidiomatic English, but only of the kind used
all over Ireland, the kind the people themselves use. I do not translate,
for instance, the Irish for “he died,” by “he got death,” for this,
though the literal translation, is not adopted into Hibernian English;
but I do translate the Irish _ghnidheadh se sin_ by “he used to do that,”
which is the ordinary Anglo-Irish attempt at making—what they have not
got in English—a consuetudinal tense. I have scarcely used the pluperfect
at all. No such tense exists in Irish, and the people who speak English
do not seem to feel the want of it, and make no hesitation in saying,
“I’d speak sooner if I knew that,” where they mean, “if I had known that
I would have spoken sooner.” I do not translate (as Campbell would), “it
rose with me to do it,” but “I succeeded in doing it,” for the first,
though the literal translation of the Irish idiom, has not been adopted
into English; but I do translate “he did it and he drunk,” instead
of, “he did it while he was drunk;” for the first phrase (the literal
translation of the Irish) is universally used throughout English-speaking
Ireland. Where, as sometimes happens, the English language contains no
exact equivalent for an Irish expression, I have rendered the original as
well as I could, as one generally does render for linguistic purposes,
from one language into another.
In conclusion, it only remains for me to thank Mr. Alfred Nutt for
enriching this book as he has done, and for bearing with the dilatoriness
of the Irish printers, who find so much difficulty in setting Irish type,
that many good Irishmen have of late come round to the idea of printing
our language in Roman characters; and to express my gratitude to Father
Eugene O’Growney for the unwearying kindness with which he read and
corrected my Irish proofs, and for the manifold aid which he has afforded
me on this and other occasions.