Irish Folk Tales Read online

  Three years after the rebels put down their guns and Ireland won a moment of peace, the Folklore of Ireland Society was founded and James Delargy, once assistant to Douglas Hyde, became editor of its journal, Béaloideas. Delargy argued that the preservation of folklore served more than the scientist’s curiosity and did more than supply raw materials to artists. It was essential to the maintenance of a distinct national culture. He appealed for state support, and when funds were granted to establish the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935, he was named director. Delargy brought to Dublin a schoolteacher from Kerry named Sean O’Sullivan, then sent him for training to Sweden so that he could become the Commission’s archivist, charged with the organization of the materials gathered by the Commission’s full-time collectors. None of the collectors were university men. They came out of the country, received Ediphone recorders and instruction in verbatim transcription, and returned into the countryside. New men were in command of the Irish tradition. They were not outsiders but people of the people. I have listened to Sean O’Sullivan tell the old story of the man who had no story, and I have caroused around Dublin with Michael J. Murphy, then followed him across Ulster by reading the superb diaries that he, like the other collectors, has deposited in the archive. Michael J. Murphy returned from the place of his birth, Liverpool, to the place of his people, south Armagh, where he invented the idea of folklore for himself and composed a fine book, At Slieve Gullion’s Foot. Immediately afterward, in 1941, Delargy invited him to become the Commission’s collector for Ulster east of Donegal. Murphy is a playwright and a novelist, but he shines most brightly in his account of his adventures in the field, Tyrone Folk Quest, and in his book of Northern folktales, Now You’re Talking …, published in 1975. Men like Murphy, working and reworking their territories, have made the Irish Folklore Commission—since 1971 the Department of Irish Folklore of the University of Dublin College at Belfield, and now headed by Bo Almqvist—the greatest repository of folklore in the world. From its million and a half pages, its archivists, Sean O’Sullivan and Séamas Ó Catháin, have extracted and published rich collections of folktale.

  From Douglas Hyde to the present, from written dictation to the tape recorder, the progress of Irish folklore has been marked by steady improvement in the accuracy with which the words of the speakers of story have been preserved. Today, listening to the tale on tape over and over again, we can get all the words exactly right—and more. Listening again, while trying to capture on paper the stories I recorded during a decade in a small hilly place in County Fermanagh, in the southwestern corner of Northern Ireland, it became plain to me that transcriptions rendered as though they were prose distorted and muted the storyteller’s art. Using italics and capital letters to signal loudness helped some, and reading the new scholarship on American Indian myths helped more. Dell Hymes argues convincingly that Indian narratives are structured poetically. Now, the stories I have recorded in Ireland are not poetry, but they are not prose either. So, I have struggled to jettison literary conventions and learned to follow subtle signs in the teller’s presentation—repetitive words that start sections and sharp silences that close them—to produce transcriptions that not only include all the teller’s words but also indicate something about the rhythms of narration. The result is a text composed of short paragraphs, often of only one sentence, that break up occasionally for dramatic effect. In the future, as we follow in the direction Douglas Hyde pointed, we will discover still better ways to get onto the page the purest representation of what the storyteller said.

  We writers of folktale have decided that our basic obligation is to our sources. Our goal is to free ourselves from our own tradition so that we can approach other traditions directly. Our science exists to honor the storyteller’s art.

  COMMUNICATION

  Once we have determined that our duty is to record folktales exactly and lovingly in the words of their narrators, the question remains of which tales to record and present to the reader. Its answer depends upon our motives, and different motives have driven scholars out of the study and into the field and guided them while they wrote. Return again to the beginning, to T. Crofton Croker.

  Croker wished to amuse his readers, but sincere storytellers like Crofton Croker and Hugh Nolan enter the act of communication with motives deeper than amusement. Introducing the complete edition of the Fairy Legends that he compiled out of affection for his recently deceased friend, Thomas Wright wrote that “the real importance” of Croker’s stories lay in their “historical and ethnological” implications.

  With amazing speed during Croker’s era, scholars developed a theory encompassing history and ethnology that was to form the basis of folklore’s first major scheme for research, the historic-geographic method. The method’s goal is to read unwritten history out of spatial distributions. It commences in the recognition that stories told in distant places carry the same basic form. Comparison of these story types, alive in the minds of modern narrators, suggests connections between far-flung populations and leads toward the reconstruction of ancient histories.

  “It is curious to observe the similarity of legends, and of ideas concerning imaginary beings, among nations that for ages have had scarcely any communication,” Crofton Croker wrote, and in the notes that follow his tales, he not only connects new and old Irish stories and remarks similarities between Irish and Scottish, Welsh and English traditions, he ranges farther, finding parallels in Spain and Italy, in Germany and Denmark. At the end of one legend, in which a hill in Cork gains its name from a bottle out of which magical helpers popped, he calls attention to German and Eastern analogues and comments that “Mr. Pisani, formerly secretary to Lord Strangford and now in the embassy at Constantinople, relates a tale similar to the Legend of Bottle-hill, which was told him when a child by his nurse, who was a Greek woman.” Even Samuel Lover, who counseled serious persons—“your masters of art, your explorers of science, star-gazing philosophers, and moon-struck maidens”—to lay his book aside, for laughter was his purpose, still follows his sketch in which a man saves himself from his compact with the Devil with the note that the tale “is somewhat common to the legendary lore of other countries—at least, there is a German legend built on a similar foundation.” Despite his wish to amuse, Lover contributed to comparative study, and Croker was adamantly clear as to his purpose: “My aim has been to bring the twilight tales of the peasantry before the view of the philosopher.”

  The international nature of Croker’s stories immediately attracted the brothers Grimm, whose translation of his work appeared within a year of the publication of the first edition in 1825. A French translation followed, and when in 1828 Croker’s second series of Irish legends arrived, it came in company with a third volume containing Welsh legends and a lengthy essay by Wilhelm Grimm analyzing the Irish tales and setting them into a broad European context. Croker was no longer alone. He was part of a wide scholarly movement within which the international comparative perspective was dominant.

  Folklore’s comparative method was achieving its first mature formulation in Finland while Douglas Hyde was at work on the first scientific collections of Irish tale. In 1890, in the preface to Beside the Fire, Hyde grouped the stories of Ireland into two classes. One contained the wonder tales that folklorists, in homage to the Grimms, term Märchen, and it contained fairy legends. The other consisted of the poetic and marvelous adventures of Finn and the Fianna. The tales of the first class, Irish by adoption, deserved study for what they told about “our old Aryan heritage.” The tales of the second class, the Fenian tales, were shared with Scotland as a result of ancient Irish colonization, but they were Irish distinctly and profoundly. They were important for the Gaelic language in which they were spoken and for the old culture of which they were part, the culture that was not English and could provide inspiration for the formation of a new Irish nation.

  Add the idea of the Gaelic League to the idea of the historic-geographic school of folklore study, add nati
onalism to internationalism, and you have the twin motives that powered the great work of the Irish Folklore Commission. As the Commission’s archivist, Sean O’Sullivan struggled manfully and successfully to bring the massive collection into usable order. In his guide for fieldworkers, A Handbook of Irish Folklore, he listed the tales of Ireland in accordance with the international index developed by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, and he added a typology of the Fenian tale. Then, working with Reidar Christiansen of Norway, he classified 43,000 tales into the Aarne-Thompson system, so you can find, for instance, that over 650 versions have been reported from Ireland of type 300, in which a hero slays three giants and then a sea monster to win the hand of a princess. When Sean O’Sullivan mobilized his unrivaled knowledge of the Irish folktale to pull from the archive his collection Folktales of Ireland, published in 1966, he emphasized the same classes of story that Hyde did: tales that connected Ireland to the world and tales in which Ireland’s most ancient tradition glistens. But those are not the only tales told in Ireland, so at the end of his book O’Sullivan adds others, and in two other collections he stresses stories that are not to be found in the indexes or in the Fenian tradition, tales of kinds that claimed the attention of Hyde’s friend Lady Gregory.

  Lady Gregory was recently widowed and teaching herself Irish when she encountered two new books on Irish folklore, one by W. B. Yeats, the other by Douglas Hyde. Suddenly an old interest of hers took form and purpose. She invited them to her home, Coole in Galway; the collaboration that would produce the Abbey Theatre was about to begin. Yeats came first. It was the same year in which Yeats met John Synge and sent him to the Arans. Soon after, Lady Gregory was out in the field “collecting fairy lore.” In the next year, 1897, she was distracting Yeats from work he could not do by taking him from house to house to record old stories. They went together and both wore black, but their motives were not the same.

  Yeats, inspired by William Morris, was full of hatred for the cheap materialistic side of the modern age, and he sought the fairy faith as part of his diverse, desperate quest for the spiritual. He called in the countryside for witnesses to the reality of the other world. Lady Gregory joined him and when her “big book of folklore,” Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, was at last published in 1920 with essays by Yeats at the back, it stood, as it continues to stand, as the greatest work produced out of the Irish interest in mystery that began in Croker’s Researches in the South of Ireland, that embraced Oscar’s parents, Sir William and Lady Wilde, in the days before Yeats, and that continues to call serious students of folklore.

  W. B. Yeats desired proof of the limited vision of factual man, but when Lady Gregory heard stories, she “cared less for the evidence given in them than for the beautiful rhythmic sentences in which they were told.” The words and cadences that she recorded taught her the language she would use in her own plays and in her translations of the old Irish epics. That language, praised by Yeats for being as beautiful as Morris and as true as Burns, inspired John Synge, helping him to shape his dramatic diction. Lady Gregory’s fine ear provided the art of her movement with a voice and it made her one of the first great modern folklorists. On collecting trips with Yeats or with Hyde, and more often alone in her Kiltartan district of Galway, she listened closely and recorded with precision “because folklorists in these days are expected to be as exact as workers at any other science.” Committed first to language, Lady Gregory was not confined by scholarly conventions of story type. Though she produced a collection of Märchen in her Kiltartan Wonder Book, she was receptive to new kinds of tale. Before her, the Dublin bookseller Patrick Kennedy, working to preserve the folk traditions of his native Wexford, had expanded his collections of international tale to include a few religious and historical texts. Out of each of these neglected varieties, Lady Gregory would construct a major collection. Protestant scholars tended to treat Irish faith as a pagan survival, but Lady Gregory faced the Catholicism of her people directly. In A Book of Saints and Wonders, published in 1906, she tells legends of the Irish saints and preserves testimony of Irish religiosity. Aristocratic scholars shied away from Irish folk history, in which an alternative view of the past, rife with hostility toward the invader and the landlord, implied a rebellious future. But gently nationalistic Lady Gregory gathered a sampling of historical legends, of “myths in the making,” into her Kiltartan History Book, published in 1909, expanded in 1926. Later Sean O’Sullivan would feature these kinds of tale, the religious and the historical, in two major collections, one in the journal Béaloideas, one formed as a book, Legends from Ireland, published in 1977.

  Attending more to what the people have to say than to academic convention, Lady Gregory and Sean O’Sullivan, she because of her ear for speech, he because of his responsibility to the Irish nation, suggest a different motive for the presentation of folktale texts. Stories not only carry ancient and unwritten history, they manifest the living culture of the people.

  Discovering the culture in the story as a motive for reporting folklore had been there from the beginning. Both Crofton Croker and Samuel Lover explain stories of fairy pots of gold and demons that guard hidden treasure as exhibitions of the deep Irish ambivalence over material wealth. But the ethnographic concern was brushed aside during the excited scholarly search for international tales that led outward away from Ireland and backward away from the people who tell the tales. Interest in tales as evidence of contemporary culture became largely the province of travelers who, like Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall in the nineteenth century, or Sean O’Faolain and Brendan Behan in the twentieth, encountered folktales as features of the places they went and retold them as emblems of the people they met.

  One special traveler was the American Jeremiah Curtin. He was the son of Irish immigrant parents, a staff member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, and an expert on American Indian mythology. In 1887 and again in 1892, he visited the West of Ireland to record Märchen, Fenian tales, and legends of ghosts and fairies. His knowledge of Irish was not deep, but guided by the principles in the new science of anthropology, Curtin, according to Douglas Hyde, “approached the fountainhead more nearly than any other.”

  Anthropology makes traveling into a profession and travel literature into scientific discourse. Modern Ireland has welcomed many anthropologists, most of them Americans, who have come to analyze the living culture. This they have done to suit the presuppositions of their science, and the tales in which the people bring their own culture into order have been left to folklorists like myself. But the American discipline of folklore within which I was trained springs from the same source as anthropology. So, like Douglas Hyde, I strive to record tales exactly, but what interests me is not the rare survival from times past; it is the culture of the people who share my times, my predicament. If a story interests the people I wish to understand, then I must learn to make it interest me too, whether or not it fits academic typologies, whether or not it preserves echoes of ancient thunder.

  To bring you toward an understanding of Irish traditional culture, I have composed this book. Some of its stories are astoundingly old, some are found scattered widely across the globe, but I chose them for what they teach about the contours of the Irish consciousness.

  The stories will guide you. I have arranged them so that they speak among themselves, each providing context for the other, all bodying forth pieces of a noble culture, a culture unlike our own, against which we must test ourselves during our effort to shape a mature and reasonable way of life.

  A LAST WORD

  I have brought into this anthology stories from forty different books, and from Ireland’s pair of fine journals, Béaloideas and Ulster Folklife. In partial fulfillment of an old promise to provide comic and mysterious tales to complement the historical stories I published from Ballymenone, the place I know in Ulster, I have added new texts from my dear friends Michael Boyle, Ellen Cutler, Hugh Nolan, and Joseph and Peter Flanagan. Mr. Boyle died in 1974,
Joe Flanagan in 1979, Mrs. Cutler in 1980, Mr. Nolan in 1981. Peter Flanagan, God bless him, is with us yet. We had some drinks together and shared some nostalgic chat in his house on the hill at Christmas in 1983 while this book was beginning to form.

  The one book I did not plunder for texts is the best of them all, Sean O’Sullivan’s Folktales of Ireland. I left it undisturbed in hopes that our collections might be read together, that mine might serve as an appendage to his. They are quite different. All of the stories in Sean O’Sullivan’s book were recorded between 1930 and 1948 by trained collectors of folklore. This book gathers stories from the long stretch of Irish folktale writing, from 1825 to the present, and its authors include the people I have introduced to you, novelists and poets and playwrights, writers of sketches and travel accounts, professional folklorists. Sean O’Sullivan’s stories come from only six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties, none from Northern Ireland. Well over half come from Galway or Kerry, and Kerry supplies the most. Sean O’Sullivan’s collection begins in his own experience. He is a Kerry man. His training and commitment lead him, as I think they should, to focus upon the Irish-speaking West. My collection begins in my experience, which has been in the North, and which has suggested kinds of stories and modes of organization and has led me to emphasize Ireland’s dominant English-speaking population. What I believe to be most important for understanding Ireland are not the survivals of ancient tale that abound most beautifully in the rocky West, but the tales of all sorts through which the people of Ireland present to themselves that which is of enduring significance.