Irish Folk Tales (15 page)

Add the idea of the Gaelic League to the idea of the historic-geographic school of folklore study, add nationalism 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.

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.

Let me tell you just what I have done to prepare the tales for you. I maintained my professional dedication to exact transcription unless it ran
athwart the obligations I owe to the tales and their tellers. They have the right to communicate. So, without adding a word or shifting any out of order, I edited the opening sentences of a few of the tales that I lifted out of long runs of prose. Then, to bring the stories I found in print a little closer to those I heard, I broke some long paragraphs into shorter ones. In addition, I regularized punctuation and spelling. That sounds easy, but it was not. Writers have done wild things with spelling to capture the English spoken in Ireland. In their own place and day, they might have been successful, but their efforts have erected barriers between the storyteller and the reader and dragged their tales toward oblivion, so, even in texts of my own, I have shifted spelling toward standard literary usage. The distinctive textures of the Irish dialects of English remain in syntax and word choice. Mere spelling should not stand between you and the people who spoke the stories. Not all of the tales came with titles, so I invented some of them, a small matter because it is my experience that most folktales, unlike folksongs, do not exist in the tradition with native titles. After the title for each tale you will find a little information, first the name of a teller and a county, then the name of a writer and a date. Sometimes these few facts eluded me—a sad commentary on past practice—and sometimes I guessed a bit, but I wished to make the big story of the Irish folktale and its subplots clearer by setting each story in place and time. Still more, I wished the repetition of names to remind you that these stories do not come to us from some mystical agency called tradition. We owe them to the collaborative efforts of real people. I held my editing to a minimum to honor both the storyteller and the writer, but every change I made came because my first responsibility is to the storyteller.

It is the storyteller’s culture I wish you to enter. To that end I clumped the texts into chapters, but the chapters do not follow scholastic convention. Academic categories serve academic needs, and they have tended to obscure whole classes of traditional narration. They rise from the values of scholars, but the values I wish you to understand are those of the tellers of tale, men like Hugh Nolan, women like Ellen Cutler, so my chapters represent neither old nor new schemes of classification. They are but hints to ease your entry into the Irish folk culture. Here is the course I recommend for your journey:

Three texts review the Introduction and form a prelude to the collection. Each represents one of the classes of tale that have most engaged Irish collectors: fairy legends, Fenian tales,
Märchen
. And in sequence they teach of the progress in the recording of stories, from T. Crofton Croker’s sketch of
1825, to Patrick Kennedy’s mid-nineteenth-century attempt to write down a story as he heard it, to Douglas Hyde’s exact translation of a tale taken down verbatim and published in the first truly modern Irish folktale collection,
Beside the Fire
of 1890.

At the dawn of human time, in the first mythic moment, the saints arrive and put the finishing touches on the Irish land, planting it with proof of God’s existence. They take control of nature, vanquish the Druids, convert the old warriors, and charge the people of the future to obey God’s law of love. Some do.

Intelligence balances power. Inbuilt wit enables the lawyer to win his case against Satan, the outlaw to escape the authorities, and the peasant to outfox the outlaw. The tenant of story is the master of the landlord. The victory of the humbler brother proves that poverty and weakness tell nothing of wisdom or courage. Even the toughest enemy—boredom—falls before the person who can command the language to yield poetry, who can conquer pain in comic hyperbole.