[_Notes in brackets signed A.N., by Alfred Nutt. The references to
Arg. Tales are to “Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition; Argyllshire
Series II.; Folk and Hero Tales from Argyllshire” collected, edited, and
translated by the Rev. D. MacInnes, with Notes by the editor and Alfred
Nutt. London, 1889._]
“THE TAILOR AND THE THREE BEASTS.”
Page 1. In another variant of this tale, which I got from one Martin
Brennan—more usually pronounced Brannan; in Irish, O’Braonáin—in
Roscommon, the thing which the tailor kills is a swallow, which flew past
him. He flung his needle at the bird, and it went through its eye and
killed it. This success excites the tailor to further deeds of prowess.
In this variant occurred also the widely-spread incident of the tailor’s
tricking the giant by pretending to squeeze water out of a stone.
Page 2. Garraun (gearrán), is a common Anglicised Irish word in many
parts of Ireland. It means properly a gelding or hack-horse; but in
Donegal, strangely enough, it means a horse, and coppul capáll, the
ordinary word for a horse elsewhere, means there a mare. The old English
seem to have borrowed this word capal from the Irish, _cf._ Percy’s
version of “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,” where the latter is thus
represented—
“A sword and a dagger he wore by his side,
Of manye a man the bane;
And he was clad in his capull hyde,
Topp and tayle and mayne.”
Page 7, line 4. The modder-alla (madra-allta, wild dog), is properly a
wolf, not a lion; but the reciter explained it thus, “madar alla, sin
leó ṁan,” “modder álla, that’s a l’yone,” _i.e._, “a lion,” which I have
accordingly translated it.
Page 9, line 18. The giant’s shouting at night, or at dawn of day, is a
common incident in these tales. In the story of “The Speckled Bull,” not
here given, there are three giants who each utter a shout every morning,
“that the whole country hears them.” The Irish for giant, in all these
stories, is faṫaċ (pronounced fahuch), while the Scotch Gaelic word is
_famhair_, a word which we have not got, but which is evidently the same
as the Fomhor, or sea pirate of Irish mythical history, in whom Professor
Rhys sees a kind of water god. The only place in Campbell’s four volumes
in which the word _fathach_ occurs is in the “Lay of the Great Omadawn,”
which is a distinctly Irish piece, and of which MacLean remarks, “some of
the phraseology is considered Irish.”
Page 11. This incident appears to be a version of that in “Jack the
Giant-Killer.” It seems quite impossible to say whether it was always
told in Ireland, or whether it may not have been borrowed from some
English source. If it does come from an English source it is probably the
only thing in these stories that does.
Page 13, line 6. “To take his wife off (pronounced _ov_) him again.” The
preposition “from” is not often used with take, etc., in Connacht English.
Page 15, line 12. These nonsense-endings are very common in Irish stories
It is remarkable that there seems little trace of them in Campbell. The
only story in his volumes which ends with a piece of nonsense is the
“Slender Grey Kerne,” and it, as I tried to show in my Preface, is Irish.
It ends thus: “I parted with them, and they gave me butter on a coal,
and kail brose in a creel, and paper shoes, and they sent me away with
a cannon-ball on a highroad of glass, till they left me sitting here.”
Why such endings seem to be stereotyped with some stories, and not used
at all with others, I cannot guess. It seems to be the same amongst
Slavonic Märchen, of which perhaps one in twenty has a nonsense-ending;
but the proportion is much larger in Ireland. Why the Highland tales, so
excellent in themselves, and so closely related to the Irish ones, have
lost this distinctive feature I cannot even conjecture, but certain it is
that this is so.
[The incident of the king’s court being destroyed at night is in the
fourteenth-fifteenth century _Agallamh na Senorach_, where it is Finn who
guards Tara against the wizard enemies.
I know nothing like the way in which the hero deals with the animals
he meets, and cannot help thinking that the narrator forgot or mistold
his story. Folk-tales are, as a rule, perfectly logical and sensible if
their conditions be once accepted; but here the conduct of the hero is
inexplicable, or at all events unexplained.—A.N.]