Part 33 (1/2)

The pa.s.sage certainly seems to me to imply a different conception from the ordinary cla.s.sical views of the life after death, the dark and dismal plains of Erebus peopled with ghosts; and the pa.s.sage I have italicised would chime in well with the conception of a continuance of youth (_idem spiritus_) in Tir na n-Og (_orbe alio_).

One of the most pathetic, beautiful, and typical scenes in Irish legend is the return of Ossian from Tir na n-Og, and his interview with St. Patrick. The old faith and the new, the old order of things and that which replaced it, meet in two of the most characteristic products of the Irish imagination (for the Patrick of legend is as much a legendary figure as Oisin himself). Ossian had gone away to Tir na n-Og with the fairy Niamh under very much of the same circ.u.mstances as Condla Ruad; time flies in the land of eternal youth, and when Ossian returns, after a year, as he thinks, more than three centuries had pa.s.sed, and St. Patrick had just succeeded in introducing the new faith. The contrast of Past and Present has never been more vividly or beautifully represented.

II. GULEESH.

_Source._--From Dr. Douglas Hyde's _Beside the Fire_, 104-28, where it is a translation from the same author's _Leabhar Sgeulaighteachta_.

Dr. Hyde got it from one Shamus O'Hart, a game-keeper of French-park.

One is curious to know how far the very beautiful landscapes in the story are due to Dr. Hyde, who confesses to have only taken notes. I have omitted a journey to Rome, paralleled, as Mr. Nutt has pointed out, by the similar one of Michael Scott (_Waifs and Strays_, i., 46), and not bearing on the main lines of the story. I have also dropped a part of Guleesh's name; in the original he is ”Guleesh na guss dhu,”

Guleesh of the black feet, because he never washed them; nothing turns on this in the present form of the story, but one cannot but suspect it was of importance in the original form.

_Parallels._--Dr. Hyde refers to two short stories, ”Midnight Ride”

(to Rome) and ”Stolen Bride,” in Lady Wilde's _Ancient Legends_. But the closest parallel is given by Miss Maclintock's Donegal tale of ”Jamie Freel and the Young Lady,” reprinted in Mr. Yeats' _Irish Folk and Fairy Tales_, 52-9. In the _Hibernian Tales_, ”Mann o' Malaghan and the Fairies,” as reported by Thackeray in the _Irish Sketch-Book_, c., xvi., begins like ”Guleesh.”

III. FIELD OF BOLIAUNS.

_Source._--T. Crofton Croker's _Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland_, ed. Wright, pp. 135-9. In the original the gnome is a Cluricaune, but as a friend of Mr. Batten's has recently heard the tale told of a Lepracaun, I have adopted the better known t.i.tle.

_Remarks._--_Lepracaun_ is from the Irish _leith bhrogan_, the one shoemaker (_cf._ brogue), according to Dr. Hyde. He is generally seen (and to this day, too) working at a single shoe, _cf._ Croker's story, ”Little Shoe,” _l. c._ pp. 142-4. According to a writer in the _Revue Celtique_, i., 256, the true etymology is _luchor pan_, ”little man.”

Dr. Joyce also gives the same etymology in _Irish Names and Places_, i., 183, where he mentions several places named after them.

IV. HORNED WOMEN.

_Source._--Lady Wilde's _Ancient Legends_, the first story.

_Parallels._--A similar version was given by Mr. D. Fitzgerald in the _Revue Celtique_, iv., 181, but without the significant and impressive horns. He refers to _Cornhill_ for February, 1877, and to Campbell's ”Sauntraigh,” No. xxii., _Pop. Tales_, ii., 52-4, in which a ”woman of peace” (a fairy) borrows a woman's kettle and returns it with flesh in it, but at last the woman refuses, and is persecuted by the fairy. I fail to see much a.n.a.logy. A much closer one is in Campbell, ii., p.

63, where fairies are got rid of by shouting, ”Dunveilg is on fire.”

The familiar ”lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children at home,” will occur to English minds. Another version in Kennedy's _Legendary Fictions_, p. 164, ”Black Stairs on Fire.”

_Remarks._--Slievenamon is a famous fairy palace in Tipperary according to Dr. Joyce, _l. c._ i., 178. It was the hill on which Finn stood when he gave himself as the prize to the Irish maiden who should run up it quickest. Grainne won him with dire consequences, as all the world knows or ought to know (Kennedy, _Legend Fict._, 222, ”How Fion selected a Wife”).

V. CONALL YELLOWCLAW.

_Source._--Campbell, _Pop. Tales of West Highlands_, No. v. pp. 105-8.

”Conall Cra Bhuidhe.” I have softened the third episode, which is somewhat too ghastly in the original. I have translated ”Cra Bhuide”

Yellowclaw on the strength of Campbell's etymology, _l. c._ p. 158.

_Parallels._--Campbell's vi. and vii. are two variants showing how wide-spread the story is in Gaelic Scotland. It occurs in Ireland where it has been printed in the chapbook, _Hibernian Tales_, as the ”Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen,” the Black Thief being Conall, and the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr. Lang's _Red Fairy Book_). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his _Irish Sketch-Book_, ch. xvi. He thinks it ”worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale.” ”That fantastic way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost” (why ”almost,” Mr. Thackeray?) ”a stroke of genius.” The incident of the giant's breath occurs in the story of Koisha Kayn, MacInnes's _Tales_, p. 241, as well as the Polyphemus one, _ibid._ 265. One-eyed giants are frequent in Celtic folk-tales (_e. g._, in _The Pursuit of Diarmaid_ and in the _Mabinogi_ of Owen).

_Remarks._--Thackeray's reference to the ”Arabian Nights” is especially apt, as the tale of Conall is a framework story like _The 1001 Nights_, the three stories told by Conall being framed, as it were, in a fourth which is nominally the real story. This method employed by the Indian story-tellers and from them adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all European literatures (Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally thought to be peculiar to the East, and to be ultimately derived from the Jatakas or Birth Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in former incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also in ”The Story-teller at Fault” in this collection, and the story of _Koisha Kayn_ in MacInnes's _Argylls.h.i.+re Tales_, a variant of which, collected but not published by Campbell, has no less than nineteen tales enclosed in a framework.

The question is whether the method was adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign influences. Confining ourselves to ”Conall Yellowclaw,” it seems not unlikely that the whole story is an importation. For the second episode is clearly the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which was known in Ireland perhaps as early as the tenth century (see Prof. K. Meyer's edition of _Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis_, Pref. p. xii). It also crept into the voyages of Sindbad in the _Arabian Nights_. And as told in the Highlands it bears comparison even with the Homeric version. As Mr. Nutt remarks (_Celt. Mag._ xii.) the address of the giant to the buck is as effective as that of Polyphemus to his ram. The narrator, James Wilson, was a blind man who would naturally feel the pathos of the address; ”it comes from the heart of the narrator;” says Campbell (_l. c._, 148), ”it is the ornament which his mind hangs on the frame of the story.”

VI. HUDDEN AND DUDDEN.

_Source._--From oral tradition, by the late D. W. Logie, taken down by Mr. Alfred Nutt.

_Parallels._--Lover has a tale, ”Little Fairly,” obviously derived from this folk-tale; and there is another very similar, ”Darby Darly.”