Irish Folk Tales (62 page)

There was a man named McBrien.

He lived somewhere in Rossdoney, in the Point of Rossdoney as they call it.

And he had a
wife

   and five children,

      five young children.

And they hadn’t a haet; there was no food,

   there was no food,

      and they were in a starving condition.

And he said he’d
fish
;

   he’d try and fish in the Arney River,

      that run along his land,

      that was convenient to his land.

He said he’d fish,

   try and fish to see would he get a few fish to eat

      that’d keep them from dying.

So he did; he went out this day,

   and he caught seven fish.

Well he went every day,

   well for a good many days.

And he caught seven fish every day.

And one of the children died anyway.

And he caught six then.

And he caught
six every day
.

The number went down to six.

Aye, I heard that too, about the time of the Famine. That happened in Rossdoney, the townland of Rossdoney, along the Arney River there.

Now that happened; it was told anyway.

It came down from the Famine days.

R
UINED BY POETRY

A good number of years ago a company set out from the capital of Ireland. They had made an arrangement to collect new poems and songs new-made throughout the land. They were a league with money put together and their intention was to start out through the country and give a reward to everyone who should come with three stanzas of a song put together by himself. There was one of them set up in County Kerry, a house like a college in the middle of the town, a great big round table on one leg, and a heap of papers and books in the middle of it, clerks sitting all round it, money scattered all over it, every kind in a box of wood, and the money was to be had by everyone who liked to draw upon it, at the rate of from half a crown to a crown for every three stanzas according to their character and value.

There were a score of tenants in this town in Kerry that they stopped in, and taken all round they had the grass of twenty cows, each one of them, and the town was quite close to the Great Lake of Killarney. Now when the business of the board was settled and everything shipshape, they set the people thinking. At first it was the children of the poor folk from beyond the limits of the town that carried off the money. Then the children of the strong farmers of the town saw how things were going, that more was to be made by putting together song stanzas and poems than to be laboring on the land as they were doing; and, thinking so, these children of the strong farmers gave up working the land and fell to making songs and poems. It didn’t take long for their land to run to waste as they let it go anyhow. They didn’t care, for the man that got least would have half a crown, another would get ten shillings, while any of them that had a ready wit would lift a pound every afternoon.

Now there was a gentleman living some way from this town, and, when he saw the passion driving the people of the town with the board in it, he saw at once that the town would soon go to ruin at this wild rate, and that the landlord wouldn’t let them get much into arrear when they wouldn’t
be able to pay the rent, for the landlords were mighty hard on the people in those days. The gentleman was right enough in his conjecture, for the board and the town didn’t last long, they went at it together so wildly. The old people said that, whatever trouble this board brought on the town, nobody believed that the board got anything out of it either for the people that set it up.

Not long after this the trouble came on the town, and they couldn’t pay rent or rate, and the landlord was particularly enraged, for he saw that it was through their own folly and carelessness in working the land that they couldn’t pay rent or rate. And the first visit he made to them was to throw them out pell-mell, leaving not a living soul of those twenty tenants in possession. Not long after their eviction, the gentleman on the other side came to the landlord with a purse of gold to pay the rent and rate, and he soon became a rich man. The others wandered off through the countryside with their children, and they were no matter of pity, for their own fault had brought about their ruin.

T
HE BIRTH OF FINN M
AC
CUMHAIL

Cumhal MacArt was a great champion in the West of Erin, and it was prophesied of him that if ever he married he would meet death in the next battle he fought.

For this reason he had no wife, and knew no woman for a long time; till one day he saw the king’s daughter, who was so beautiful that he forgot all fear and married her in secret.

Next day after the marriage, news came that a battle had to be fought.

Now a Druid had told the king that his daughter’s son would take the kingdom from him. So he made up his mind to look after the daughter, and not let any man come near her.

Before he went to the battle, Cumhal told his mother everything—told her of his relations with the king’s daughter.

He said: “I shall be killed in battle today, according to the prophecy of the Druid, and I’m afraid if his daughter has a son the king will kill the child, for the prophecy is that he will lose the kingdom by the son of his own daughter. Now, if the king’s daughter has a son do you hide and rear him, if you can. You will be his only hope and stay.”

Cumhal was killed in the battle, and within that year the king’s daughter had a son.

By command of his grandfather, the boy was thrown out of the castle window into a lough, to be drowned, on the day of his birth.

The boy sank from sight. But after remaining a while under the water, he rose again to the surface, and came to land holding a live salmon in his hand.

The grandmother of the boy, Cumhal’s mother, stood watching on the shore, and said to herself as she saw this: “He is my grandson, the true son of my own child,” and seizing the boy, she rushed away with him, and vanished, before the king’s people could stop her.
When the king heard that the old woman had escaped with his daughter’s son, he fell into a terrible rage, and ordered all the male children born that day in the kingdom to be put to death, hoping in this way to kill his own grandson, and save the crown for himself.

After she had disappeared from the bank of the lough, the old woman, Cumhal’s mother, made her way to a thick forest, where she spent that night as best she could. Next day she came to a great oak tree. Then she hired a man to cut out a chamber in the tree.

When all was finished, and there was a nice room in the oak for herself and her grandson, and a whelp of the same age as the boy, and which she had brought with her from the castle, she said to the man: “Give me the axe which you have in your hand, there is something here that I want to fix.”

The man gave the axe into her hand, and that minute she swept the head off him, saying: “You’ll never tell any man about this place now.”

One day the whelp ate some of the fine chippings (
bran
) left cut by the carpenter from the inside of the tree. The old woman said: “You’ll be called Bran from this out.”

All three lived in the tree together, and the old woman did not take her grandson out till the end of five years; and then he couldn’t walk, he had been sitting so long inside.

When the old grandmother had taught the boy to walk, she brought him one day to the brow of a hill from which there was a long slope. She took a switch and said: “Now, run down this place. I will follow and strike you with this switch, and coming up I will run ahead, and you strike me as often as you can.”

The first time they ran down, his grandmother struck him many times. In coming up the first time, he did not strike her at all. Every time they ran down she struck him less, and every time they ran up he struck her more.