Copyright © 1985 by Henry Glassie
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1985, and in paperback by Pantheon Books in 1987.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Irish folktales.
(Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)
Bibliography: p.
I. Tales—Ireland 2. Legends—Ireland
I. Glassie, Henry H.
GR153.3.I75 1985 398.2′09415 85-42841
eISBN: 978-0-307-82824-8
Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all permissions acknowledgments, they appear on this page–this page.
v3.1
For Polly, Harry, Lydia, and Ellen Adair
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
AT THE END OF A SHORT WINTER’S DAY
CONNECTIONS
TRADITION
COMMUNICATION
A LAST WORD
THE TALES
THE OLD STORY
The Legend of Knockfierna
Finn and His Men Bewitched
The King of Ireland’s Son
FAITH
SAINTS
1 The Baptism of Conor MacNessa
2 Saint Patrick
3 Saint Patrick on Inishmore
4 Saint Patrick and Crom Dubh
5 Saint Brigit
6 Saint Columcille
7 Columcille’s Coffin
8 Saint Kevin
9 Saint Finbar
THE PRIEST AND HIS PEOPLE
10 James Murray and Saint Martin
11 The Best Road to Heaven
12 The Man from Kilmacoliver
13 The Pious Man
14 An Actual Saint
15 Old Thorns and Old Priests
16 Priests and Farming Men
17 Saved by the Priest
19 The Right Cure
20 Hell and Heaven
21 The Wolf’s Prophecy
WIT
THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH
22 The Three Questions
23 The Farmer’s Answers
24 Half a Blanket
25 The Shadow of the Glen
26 A Hungry Hired Boy
27 The First Mirror
28 Robin’s Escape
WITS AND POETS
29 Jonathan Swift, Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
30 Daniel O’Connell
31 Owen Roe O’Sullivan
32 Robert Burns
33 Terry the Grunter
34 Thomas Moore and the Tramp
TALL TALES
35 John Brodison and the Policeman
36 A Big Potato
37 The Fox and the Ranger
38 The Horse’s Last Drunk
39 Hare and Hound
40 Sleepy Pendoodle
41 A Medical Expert from Lisnaskea
42 George Armstrong’s Return
OUTWITTING THE DEVIL
43 The Lawyer and the Devil
44 Coals on the Devil’s Hearth
MYSTERY
DEATH AND TOKENS
45 No Man Goes Beyond His Day
46 A Light Tokens the Death of Mr. Corrigan
47 A Clock Token
48 The Banshee Cries for the O’Briens
49 The Banshee Cries for the Boyles
50 Experience of the Banshee
GHOSTS
51 Grandfather’s Ghost
52 Terrible Ghosts
53 The Soldier in the Haunted House
54 Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts
55 Ghosts Along the Arney
56 The Grave of His Fathers
AWAY
57 The Coffin
58 The Capture of Bridget Purcell
59 Taken
60 How the Shoemaker Saved His Wife
ENCOUNTERS WITH FAIRIES
61 The Mountain Elf
62 Inishkeen’s on Fire
63 The Blood of Adam
64 We Had One of Them in the House for a While
65 Fairy Property
66 The Blacksmith of Bedlam and the Fairy Host
FAIRY TRAITS AND TREASURE
67 Fairy Forths
68 Gortdonaghy Forth
69 The Fairies Ride from Gortdonaghy to Drumane
70 Lanty’s New House
71 Jack and the Cluricaune
72 Bridget and the Lurikeen
73 Fairy Tales
74 The Fairy Shilling
75 The Breaking of the Forth
76 Dreams of Gold
77 The Castle’s Treasure
ENCHANTED NATURE
78 The Air Is Full of Them
79 The Feet Water
80 The Fairy Rabbit and the Blessed Earth of Tory
81 The Cats’ Judgment
82 Never Ask a Cat a Question
83 Cats Are Queer Articles
84 Tom Moore and the Seal Woman
85 The Swine of the Gods
ILLNESS AND WITCHCRAFT
86 A Pig on the Road from Gort
87 The Crookened Back
88 Maurice Griffin the Fairy Doctor
89 Biddy Early
90 The Black Art
91 Magical Theft
92 Paudyeen O’Kelly and the Weasel
STRANGE SOUNDS AND VISIONS OF WAR
93 One Queer Experience
94 Many a One Saw What We Saw
HISTORY
ANCIENT DAYS
95 The Old Times in Ireland
96 The Bath of the White Cows
WAR
97 The Battle of the Ford of Biscuits
98 Cromwell
99 Cromwell’s Bible
100 Patrick Sarsfield
101 Sarsfield Surrenders and Rory Takes to the Hills
RAPPAREES
102 Black Francis
104 Willie Brennan
LATER DAYS
105 Wicklow in the Rising of 1798
106 The Famine
107 Victory in the Time of Famine
108 Ruined by Poetry
FIRESIDE TALES
FENIAN TALES
109 The Birth of Finn MacCumhail
110 The High King of Lochlann and the Fenians of Erin
111 Usheen’s Return to Ireland
MATURITY
112 Fair, Brown, and Trembling
113 The Corpse Watchers
114 A Widow’s Son
115 Jack and Bill
116 The Mule
117 The King of Ireland’s Son
WIT AND FAITH
118 Huddon and Duddon and Donald O’Leary
119 The Three Wishes
120 Willy the Wisp
121 The Buideach, the Tinker, and the Black Donkey
122 The Man Who Had No Story
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
Good Patrick of Macha stood at the end of his mission. He had built seven hundred churches and ordained three thousand priests. Ireland was a Christian land, free of stone idols, specters, and snakes. Before him stood Oisin, the last of the Fenian warriors, bent, broken, old. Saint Patrick bade him relate the ancient tales, the tales of Ireland’s men and women, mountains and rivers. Brogan, Patrick’s scribe, took them down in the thousands. Then Patrick recoil
ed from the pleasure he took in pagan things. He poured forth his worry to his guardian angels. Fear not, they told him, listen to the tales, record them in the very words of their tellers, for they will prove a delight to good people until the end of time.
Then Vikings came upon the sea, tore at Ireland’s coasts, and ripped into the interior. But the monks kept to Patrick’s command, teaching the faith, spreading the Good News into foreign lands, and copying the elder tales into great hide-bound books. Perhaps they were the deceptions of demons, the figments of fools, but still the pious men wrote them down as they found them and added the epics of their own heroes, of Patrick and Brigit and Columcille.
In the twelfth century, the Norman Conquest crossed the Irish Sea. But soon the invaders were speaking the sweet Gaelic, and the work of the monks went on. The Fenian warriors still raged in ink, the legends of Patrick and Columcille found their final form. And then, the long invasion reached its end. The chiefs of Ulster tasted death, the last earls flew to Europe, and new men began to crowd the North. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Erin lay beaten. Her tradition drifted toward peril.
Beneath clouds of defeat, Irish scholars set to work. The Four Masters gathered in the North, assembled the old manuscripts, and compiled the Irish annals, filled with warfare and wonders and the misdeeds of kings. In the South, a solitary priest, banished for his denunciation of a high lady’s sin, traveled the chilly lanes with precious papers rolled in his breast, seeking warm hearths where he could write. The history Geoffrey Keating wrote on the road confuses historians who want only the facts, for Keating labored to save the whole of the past, its facts and its fancy. Both, he knew, contained the tale of Ireland.
As invasion consolidated in political rule and political rule tightened, Keating’s countrymen passed his manuscript along, the old people of Ireland continued to gather around their tellers of tale, and indomitable Ireland conquered her conquerors once more. Patrick, son of Britain, citizen of Rome, in his day, and Geoffrey Keating, descendant of the first English invaders, in his, had preserved the stories of Ireland. In the nineteenth century, people of the new faith, with names like Croker and Hyde, took up the old task and wrote down the Irish tale until a new nation, formed out of rebellion, could establish a commission for the preservation of the Irish tradition.
What right have I, an American folklorist, to break into this history by collecting the Irish tales recorded during the last century and a half into a new anthology? It is not because many of my ancestors abandoned Ireland, and it is certainly not because American scholars possess a special right to pillage the Irish cultural treasury. Indeed, I am embarrassed to be part of today’s invasion that sends stupid films and disrespectful social scientists out of America into Ireland. My right comes of my friendship with Hugh Nolan. Mr. Nolan was the great storyteller of the community in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, that I have visited regularly since 1972. He and Ellen Cutler, Peter and Joseph Flanagan, Michael Boyle, Rose and Joe Murphy, Hugh Patrick Owens, and their neighbors, opened their homes to me, gave me their tales, and drew me into their lives. My littlest daughter is named for Ellen Cutler. I have published three books about them. Our friendship remains unshaken. I add a fourth.
My right to create this book, I repeat, is owed to my love for Hugh Nolan, but without the support of others in Fermanagh—Joan Trimble, Helen Hickey, Jim Nawn, P. J. O’Hare, Bryan Gallagher—I would not continue, and without help from Ireland’s scholars I could not continue. In Dublin, Sean O’Sullivan and Kevin Danaher, Séamas Ó Catháin and Bo Almqvist, offered advice and aid. In Belfast, E. Estyn Evans, George Thompson, and Alan Gailey provided hospitality and direction. Fred Kniffen first introduced me to Estyn Evans when I was an undergraduate. Fred Kniffen remains my great teacher, and I am honored to call Professor Evans my master. His books attracted me to Ireland. His kind interest in my effort has restored me and kept me happily at work.
In America I have been fortunate to teach in two of my nation’s major folklore programs, the Folklore Institute of Indiana University and the Department of Folklore and Folklife of the University of Pennsylvania. Both schools blessed me with generous colleagues. From my American community of scholars I have drawn constant inspiration. These must be thanked: Roger Abrahams, Robert Plant Armstrong, Ilhan Başöz, Dan Ben-Amos, Sacvan Bercovitch, Tom Burns, Jan Brunvand, John Burrison, Tristram Coffin, Cece Conway, Lewis Dabney, Jim Deetz, Linda Dégh, Richard M. Dorson, James Marston Fitch, Kenneth Goldstein, Bill Hansen, Lee Haring, Dell Hymes, Sandy Ives, Alan Jabbour, Chaz Joyner, Billy Lightfoot, John McGuigan, Rusty Marshall, Mick Moloney, Elliott Oring, Barry Lee Pearson, Phil Peek, Jerry Pocius, Ralph Rinzler, Warren Roberts, Peter Seitel, Brian Sutton-Smith, John Szwed, Dell Upton, John Vlach, Don Yoder, Wilbur Zelinsky, Terry Zug.
I could not have taken on this task were I not a collector of books about Ireland. This pleasant madness, which struck when I was a high school student and began with a copy of Two Tales of Shem and Shaun, has indebted me to antiquarian bookmen on both sides of the Atlantic. My thanks to my favorite shop, William H. Allen of Philadelphia, will stand for them all. This book would not be had I not received funds for my first trip to Ireland from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Eric Montgomery and Bob Oliver engineered subsequent trips. I would not have been able to finish this book had not my friends Thomas Ehrlich and Dell Hymes of the University of Pennsylvania conspired to find me a place to write in peace.
The writing of books, like any good craft, comes as much from friendship as it does from the monster that coils within. As I worked, the friendship that I gained with Dan Cullen of Pantheon Books made the whole project worth it. And as I worked, I relied on my father and mother and on the friends gathered around me: Dell and Ginny, Kenny and Rochelle, John and Nan, Barry and Missy, Tom and Inger, Agop, George and Christobel. My love, Kathleen, always forgave me the time I burned up in this obsession. She helped keep my prose clean and lifted my heart. The children helped by distracting me from my work to my life.
At last, I am grieved for the loss of friends, for Hugh Nolan, Ellen Cutler, Michael Boyle, Paddy and Mary McBrien, James Owens, and Rose Murphy, and for Dick Dorson, Erving Goffman, and Bob Armstrong. But I give this book in happiness to the next generation, to my children, Polly, Harry, Lydia, and Ellen Adair.
DEVENISH ISLAND, LOWER LOUGH ERNE, COUNTY FERMANAGH
Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Ireland, 1850
AT THE END OF A SHORT WINTER’S DAY
Night falls, winds rise. The door is shut, the curtain drawn. A lamp sputters, shooting shadows up the wall, and the houses of the hills close in upon themselves, abandoning the world to darkness. Pure darkness welcomes the winds that skim off the ocean, roll over the mountains, and fall upon the hills to pound the home. Roof timbers groan and hold. The winds crash among the trees.
Low clouds cover the moon, and the road before me runs swiftly into emptiness. Beyond the black hedges there are houses I know, but they send no warming sign of habitation, no hum, no glow. Only the feel of the road, hard beneath my feet, and the quick repetition of steps assure me that I am moving correctly. The road turns under me, and I comply, it turns again familiarly and, pressed eastward by the wind, I walk, nearly run, until a pale rectangle forms by the roadside. I feel into the darkness for the latch, turn once more, and am greeted with my name as I gain my seat by the hearth. “A bad night,” my host says, turning his face back into the small fire at our feet. I agree. “The worst,” he says.
Night holds the corners and rises to the roof. A candle in a brass stick shapes a small circle of faint light on the table beside us. The fire low in the throat of the chimney touches with pink the faces of the men packed around it. There is Young Tom, with the collar of his coat turned up to shelter his ears, hunched beside me. Johnny huddles across the fire from the old man who makes his home in these two cold rooms. Johnny has come tonight, as Tom and I have come, walking the black lanes because winter nights are long and the man
of this house, Hugh Nolan, is brilliant.
When Hugh Nolan was a child, this house, built by his grandfather’s hands, was known as a ceili (kay-lee) house, a place for the neighbors to gather, and now they gather still, knowing that others will also seek a place at his hearth in hopes that his wit will help them pass the night safely. They call him eccentric, a bent old man in a long black coat who lives alone with his cats in his smoke-dark house, and they call him a saint. They have watched him pedal his bike to Mass, they speak of his plain blameless way and do not know that he sends the little money he gets to support a convent in England. They name him “historian.” His memory is vast, the past is impeccably ordered within it, and he settles disputes among his neighbors over boundaries and rights of way across fields. His pleasure in youth, he says, came from listening to the old people talking, and his delight in old age, he says, is keeping the truth and telling the whole tale. In this small community, built upon damp hills in the North of Ireland, Hugh Nolan is the oldest man. He was born in 1896. For sixty-five years he served the earth, and now he works for the people who come to ceili with him. They call him a “star.” He is the man who can reach into a dreary conversation, find a thread of silver, and spin it into a yarn that deadens time and enlivens the senses.
The body is beaten with work. The soul is numb. The company is the same. They have given all they have on nights long in the past. There is no worthwhile news, so Johnny tries again, repeating Hugh Nolan’s words. The night is a bad one. Aye, the worst. We are in agreement. “Well, we have to take what comes,” Johnny says. “We can’t change it.” Wearily Mr. Nolan replies, “Oh, aye.” There is the trouble. They know each other too well. Three decades separate Tom and Johnny, and nearly three more separate Johnny and Hugh, but their experience has been too similar. They cut turf in the spring, dig spuds in the fall. They have followed the cows into the sloughs and gotten drunk together in the town. Conversations too quickly find the old ruts and sail too swiftly to first principles so perfectly framed in words that there is no knowing whether they erupt from the depths or ride on the surface. So the ceiliers come and they sit and they wait, crying inwardly for someone gifted with wit to build a story in the place that lies between inescapable daily realities and inescapable philosophical propositions.