Irish Folk Tales (16 page)

This world and the other occasionally veer near collision. The witnesses speak sincerely. They have heard death announced in the earth and felt the ghost’s weight and seen the wizened changelings the fairies leave. It seems impossible, but if there are no ghosts, is there no immortal soul, no life after death? Fairies are the angels who fell with Lucifer after defeat at the War of Heaven. They seem, like cats, to have constructed an alternative social order in our midst. If fairies do not exist, then what of angels, what of Heaven? And what about people who foretell the future and cure ills with charms? The shape of reality remains at question, so serious investigators adhere to strict rules of evidence and argue earnestly over the facts, while sly people step into the space between terror and amusement to contrive little fictions.

The endless Irish chronicle of war, of invasion and resistance, expands and grows with detail during the long era of difficulty that begins with defeat
at Kinsale in 1601, that intensifies during the seventeenth-century campaigns of Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange, that sinks with the failure of the Rising of 1798, and ends in the terrible Famine of 1846. This period of pain displays Irish courage and Irish error, and it teaches that in the worst of times God protects those who struggle to endure.

Away from the serious mysteries of the world, storytellers have constructed an enchanted realm in which the heroes of a time before history wage beautiful, uproarious war and little children seek maturity. Child after child abandons the comforts of home and takes the strange road, learning to form proper alliances and act with courage in order to enter through marriage a new state of being. Now mature, they are left with their faith, which bids them to endure, and with their wit, out of which they learn to turn fear into laughter and life into a story.

These chapters are but a beginning. The stories I have set within them will disrupt and eradicate their boundaries. I do not want to slice tales up and box them apart. Instead, I want the tales to grope toward unity, so you will find tales that transform other tales, and tales that root up generic distinctions, and tales that interfere with each other, interpenetrating to raise the themes that hold power in the traditional consciousness and that have been molded into artful order by centuries of wise and brave Irish people.

T
HE
T
ALES

T
HE LEGEND OF KNOCKFIERNA

It is a very good thing not to be any way in dread of the fairies, for without doubt they have then less power over a person. But to make too free with them, or to disbelieve in them altogether, is as foolish a thing as man, woman, or child can do.

It has been truly said that “good manners are no burthen,” and that “civility costs nothing.” But there are some people foolhardy enough to disregard doing a civil thing, which, whatever they may think, can never harm themselves or anyone else, and who at the same time will go out of their way for a bit of mischief, which never can serve them. But sooner or later they will come to know better, as you shall hear of Carroll O’Daly, a strapping young fellow up out of Connacht, whom they used to call, in his own country, “Devil Daly.”

Carroll O’Daly used to go roving about from one place to another, and the fear of nothing stopped him. He would as soon pass an old churchyard, or a regular fairy ground, at any hour of the night, as go from one room into another, without ever making the sign of the cross, or saying, “Good luck attend you, gentlemen.”

It so happened that he was once journeying in the County of Limerick, towards “the Baalbek of Ireland,” the venerable town of Kilmallock, and just at the foot of Knockfierna he overtook a respectable-looking man jogging along upon a white pony. The night was coming on, and they rode side by side for some time, without much conversation passing between them, further than saluting each other very kindly. At last, Carroll O’Daly asked his companion how far he was going.

“Not far your way,” said the farmer, for such his appearance bespoke him. “I’m only going to the top of this hill here.”

“And what might take you there,” said O’Daly, “at this time of the night?”

“Why then,” replied the farmer, “if you want to know, ’tis the Good People.”

“The fairies, you mean,” said O’Daly.

“Whist! whist!” said his fellow-traveler, “or you may be sorry for it.” And he turned his pony off the road they were going towards a little path which led up the side of the mountain, wishing Carroll O’Daly good night and a safe journey.

“That fellow,” thought Carroll, “is about no good this blessed night, and I would have no fear of swearing wrong if I took my Bible oath, that it is something else beside the fairies, or the Good People, as he calls them, that is taking him up the mountain at this hour. The fairies!” he repeated. “Is it for a well-shaped man like him to be going after little chaps like the fairies? To be sure some say there are such things, and more say not. But I know this, that never afraid would I be of a dozen of them, aye, of two dozen, for that matter, if they are no bigger than what I hear tell of.”

Carroll O’Daly, whilst these thoughts were passing in his mind, had fixed his eyes steadfastly on the mountain, behind which the full moon was rising majestically. Upon an elevated point that appeared darkly against the moon’s disk, he beheld the figure of a man leading a pony, and he had no doubt it was that of the farmer with whom he had just parted company.

A sudden resolve to follow flashed across the mind of O’Daly with the speed of lightning. Both his courage and curiosity had been worked up by his cogitations to a pitch of chivalry, and muttering, “Here’s after you, old boy,” he dismounted from his horse, bound him to an old thorn tree, and then commenced vigorously ascending the mountain.

Following as well as he could the direction taken by the figures of the man and pony, he pursued his way, occasionally guided by their partial appearance, and after toiling nearly three hours over a rugged and sometimes swampy path, came to a green spot on the top of the mountain, where he saw the white pony at full liberty, grazing as quietly as may be. O’Daly looked around for the rider, but he was nowhere to be seen; he however soon discovered close to where the pony stood an opening in the mountain like the mouth of a pit, and he remembered having heard, when a child, many a tale about the “Poul-duve,” or Black Hole, of Knockfierna; how it was the entrance to the fairy castle which was within the mountain; and how a man whose name was Ahern, a land surveyor in that part of the country, had once attempted to fathom it with a line, and had been drawn down into it and was never again heard of; with many other tales of the like nature.

“But,” thought O’Daly, “these are old women’s stories. And since I’ve come up so far I’ll just knock at the castle door, and see if the fairies are at home.”

No sooner said than done; for seizing a large stone as big, aye, bigger than his two hands, he flung it with all his strength down into the Poul-duve of Knockfierna. He heard it bounding and tumbling about from one rock to another with a terrible noise, and he leant his head over to try and hear if it would reach the bottom—when what should the very stone he had thrown in do but come up again with as much force as it had gone down, and gave him such a blow full in the face, that it sent him rolling down the side of Knockfierna, head over heels, tumbling from one crag to another, much faster than he came up. And in the morning Carroll O’Daly was found lying beside his horse; the bridge of his nose broken, which disfigured him for life; his head all cut and bruised, and both his eyes closed up, and as black as if Sir Daniel Donnelly had painted them for him.

Carroll O’Daly was never bold again in riding alone near the haunts of the fairies after dusk. But small blame to him for that. And if ever he happened to be benighted in a lonesome place he would make the best of his way to his journey’s end, without asking questions, or turning to the right or to the left, to seek after the Good People, or any who kept company with them.

F
INN AND HIS MEN BEWITCHED