Beside the Fire : a Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
m®MMm.®M®Mmm!&Mkía-íwmM ¥. f%tíéMiUi;s. O'í ^.mfs?M:'- \lvJ/W^ t^iit Uít ii-xt. r WORKS BY DR. HYDE. LEABHAR SGEULAIGHTEACHTA, Folk Stories in Irish, with Notes by Dr. Hyde, LL.D. Crown Svo, viiii. 261 pp. wrapper, 5s. WORKS BY ALFRED NUTT. STUDIES ON THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY GRAIL, with Especial Reference to the Hypothesis of its Celtic Origin. Demy Svo. XV., 281 pages. Cloth, los. 6d. nett. Alons. Gaston Paris in '^ Romania — " Une des contributions les plus précieuses et les plus méritoires qu'on ait encore apportées a l'éclaircissement de ces questions difficiles et compliquées." The Athenaiini.—"These charming studies of the Grail legend." Tlie Scots Observer.— " An achievement of jjrofound erudition and masterly argument to be hailed as redeeming English scholarship from a long- standing reproach." WAIFS AND STRAYS OF CELTIC TRADITION. Series initiated and directed by Lord Archibald Campbell, Demy Svo, cloth. Vol. II. Folk and Hero Tales. Collected, edited (in Gaelic), and translated by the Rev. D. JNIac Innes ; with a Study on the Develop- ment of the Ossianic Saga, and copious Notes by Alfred Nutt. xxiv. 497 pages. Portrait of Campbell of Islay, and Two Illustrations by E. Griset. 1890. 15s. Highland Monthly— "The most important work on Highland Folk-lore and Tales since Campbell's world-renowned Popular Tales." Hecior Maclean— " Never before has the development of the Ossianic Saga been so scientifically dealt with." Scots Obsei-ver. — " ^Ir. Alfred Nutt's excursus and notes are lucid and scholarly. They add immensely to the value of the book, and afford abun- dant evidence of their author's extensive reading and sound erudition." Ohan Telegraph. —The Gaelic text is colloquial and eminently idiomatic. ^Ir. Nutt desei^ves especial mention and much credit for the pains- taking and careful research evidenced by his notes to the tales." JP'cstmoreland Gazette. — " We cannot refrain from placing on record our a])preciation for the remarkable masteiy of the subject which Mr. Alfred Nutt lias brought to the execution of his task. BESIDE THE EIEE A COLLECTION OF IRISH GAELIC FOLK STORIES. EDITED, TBANSLATET), ANT) ANNOTATED DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D., M.R.I.A., (ANCHRAOIBHIN AOIBHINN.) MKMBER OK TICK COr.Vrtr, OF TIIK fiARI.TC T-NION; MinrP.EP. OF TIIE PAN-rKr.TIC SOriETY. ETC-. U7TH ADDITIONAL NOTES AL"FPvED NUTT. bliei-pceAjA Af le j;aL be.vj; jAOiro.—SeAII 'OAn. 'They are like a mist on the coming of night That is scattered away l)y a light breath of wind."—Oi.n Foe.m. L N D X : DAVID :XUTT, 270, 271 STRAND. 1890 PRINTED A' K E M A N S J O V R S I. I M IT E NTi:<U S; E.>OKBlNI)l WORKS DVBI.IN. 1-30 ^oiv'' DEDICATION To the memory of those truly cultured and unselfish men, the poet-scribes and hedge-schoolmasters of the last century and the beginning of this—men who may well be called the last of the Milesians—I dedicate this effort to preserve even a scrap of that native lore which in their day they loved so passionately, and for the preservation of which they worked so nobly, but in vain CONTENTS Preface : Previous collections of Irish folk-lore ; ignorance of the language on the part of collectors. Relation between Irish and Scotch Gaelic tales ; the Irish bardic tales ; the runs in Irish and Scotch. Date of Irish versions. Two classes of Irish stories ; native myths. Narrators of the stories. Discouragement of Irish by schoolmasters, clergy, and politicians. Proper mode of collecting. System of translation ac- cepted. Page, ix-1 Postscript (by Alfred Nutt) : Dr. Hyde's theories discussed ; folk-lore and romance ; necessity for romance to conform to convention ; characteristics of folk-fancy ; classification of the products of folk-fancy ; myth, saga, Miirchen and ballad ; romance and folk-lore among the Gael ; folli-con- ception of the Universe ... ... ... Page, li-lviii Tales. I. The Tailor and the Three Beasts 2-14 II. Bran 14.18 III. The King of Ireland's Son, 18-46 IV. The Alp-Luachra 46-72 V. Paudyeen O'Kelly and the Weasel 72-90 VI. Leeam O'Rooney's Burial 90-103 VII. Guleesh na Guss Dhu 104-128 VIII. The Well of D'Yerree-in-Dowan 129-141 IX. The Court of Crinnawn 142-148 X. Neil O'Carre 148-153 XI. Trunk-without-Head ... 154-161 XII. The Hags of the Long Teeth ... 161-166 XIII. William of the Tree ... 167-169 XIV. The Old Crow and the Young Crow 169 XV. Riddles 170-172 Where the Stories came from 173-174 Notes 175-195 Notes on the Irish Text 197-200 Index of Incidents 201-203 PREFACE "yRISH and Scotch Gaelic folk-stories are, as a living form of literature, by this time pretty nearly a thing of the past. They have been trampled in the common ruin under the feet of the Zeitgeist, happily not before a large harvest has been reaped in Scotland, but, unfor- tunately, before anything worth mentioning has been done in Ireland to gather in the crop which grew luxu- riantly a few years ago. Until quite recently there existed in our midst millions of men and women who, when their day's work was over, sought and found mental recreation in a domain to which few indeed of us who read books are permitted to enter. Man, all the world over, when he is tired of the actualities of life, seeks to unbend his mind with the creations of fancy. We who can read betake ourselves to our favourite novelist, and as we peruse his fictions, we can almost see our author erasing this, heightening that, and laying on such-and-such a touch for effect. His book is the product of his individual brain, and some of us or of our contemporaries have been present at its genesis. h X PREFACE. But no one can tell us with certainty of the genesis of the folk-tale, no one has been consciously present at its inception, and no one has marked its growth. It is in many ways a mystery, part of the flotsam and jetsam of the ages, still beating feebly against the shore of the nineteenth century, swallowed up at last in England by the waves of materialism and civilization combined ; but still surviving unengulfed on the western coasts of Ire- land, where I gathered together some bundles of it, of which the present volume is one. The folk-lore of Ireland, like its folk-songs and native literature, remains practically unexploited and un- gathered. Attempts have been made from time to time during the present century to collect Irish folk-lore, but these attempts, though interesting from a literary point of view, are not always successes from a scientific one. Crofton Croker's delightful book, "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland," first published anonymously in 1825, led the way. All the other books which have been published on the subject have but fol- lowed in the footsteps of his ; but all have not had the merit of his light style, his pleasant parallels from classic and foreign literature, and his delightful annotations, which touch, after a fascinating manner peculiarly his own, upon all that is of interest in his text. I have written the word " text," but that word conveys the idea of an original to be annotated upon ; and Crofton Croker PREFACE. XÍ is, alas ! too often his own original. There lies his weak point, and there, too, is the defect of all who have fol- lowed him. The form in which the stories are told is, of course, Croker's own; but no one who knows any- thing of fairy lore will suppose that his manipulation of the originals is confined to the form merely. The fact is that he learned the ground-work of his tales from con- versations with the Southern peasantry, whom he knew well, and then elaborated this over the midnight oil with great skill and delicacy of touch, in order to give a saleable book, thus spiced, to the English public. Setting aside the novelists Carleton and Lover, who only published some incidental and largely-manipulated Irish stories, the next person to collect Irish folk-lore in a volume was Patrick Kennedy, a native of the County Wexford, who published " Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts," and in 1870 a good book, entitled, "The Fireside Stories of Ireland," which he had himself heard in Wexford when a boy. Many of the stories which he gives appear to be the detritus of genuine Gaelic folk- stories, filtered through an English idiom and much im- paired and stunted in the process. He appears, how- ever, not to have adulterated them very much. Two of the best stories in the book, '* Jack, the Cunning Thief and " Shawn an Omadawn," I heard myself in the ad- joining county Wicklow, and the versions of them that I heard did not differ very widely from Kennedy's. It Xii PREFACE. is interesting to note that these counties, close to the Pale as they are, and under English influence for so long, nevertheless seem to have preserved a consider- able share of the old Gaelic folk-tales in English dress, while in Leitrim, Longford, Meath, and those counties where Irish died out only a generation or two ago, there has been made as clean a sweep of folk-lore and Gaelic " traditions as the most uncompromising " West Briton could desire. Thereason why some of thefolk-stories sur- vive in the eastern counties is probably because the Irish language was there exchanged for English at a time when, ior want of education and printed books, folk- stories (the only mental recreation of the people) had to transfer themselves rightly or wrongly into English.