Irish Fairy and Folk Tales Read online

  2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Foreword copyright © 2003 by Paul Muldoon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Irish fairy and folk tales/edited by William Butler Yeats.—

  Modern Library ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918, in series:

  The Modern Library of the World’s Best Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82417-2

  1. Tales—Ireland. 2. Fairy tales—Ireland.

  I. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939.

  GR153.5.I7 1994

  398.21’09415—dc20 93–40494

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FOREWORD by Paul Muldoon

  INTRODUCTION by William Butler Yeats

  IRISH FAIRY AND FOLK TALES THE TROOPING FAIRIES The Fairies

  Frank Martin and the Fairies

  The Priest’s Supper

  The Fairy Well of Lagnanay

  Teig O’Kane and the Corpse

  Paddy Corcoran’s Wife

  Cusheen Loo

  The White Trout; A Legend of Cong

  The Fairy Thorn

  The Legend of Knockgrafton

  A Donegal Fairy

  CHANGELINGS The Brewery of Egg-shells

  The Fairy Nurse

  Jamie Freel and the Young Lady

  The Stolen Child

  THE MERROW The Soul Cages

  Flory Cantillon’s Funeral

  THE SOLITARY FAIRIES The Lepracaun; or, Fairy Shoemaker

  Master and Man

  Far Darrig in Donegal

  THE POOKA

  The Piper and the Puca

  Daniel O’Rourke

  The Kildare Pooka

  THE BANSHEE

  How Thomas Connolly met the Banshee

  A Lamentation for the Death of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald

  The Banshee of the Mac Carthys

  GHOSTS A Dream

  Grace Connor

  A Legend of Tyrone

  The Black Lamb

  Song of the Ghost

  The Radiant Boy

  The Fate of Frank M’Kenna

  WITCHES, FAIRY DOCTORS Bewitched Butter (Donegal)

  A Queen’s County Witch

  The Witch Hare

  Bewitched Butter (Queen’s County)

  The Horned Women

  The Witches’ Excursion

  The Confessions of Tom Bourke

  The Pudding Bewitched

  T’YEER-NA-N-OGE The Legend of O’Donoghue

  Rent Day

  Loughleagh (Lake of Healing)

  Hy-Brasail—The Isle of the Blest

  The Phantom Isle

  SAINTS, PRIESTS The Priest’s Soul

  The Priest of Coloony

  The Story of the Little Bird

  Conversion of King Laoghaire’s Daughters

  King O’Toole and His Goose

  THE DEVIL The Demon Cat

  The Long Spoon

  The Countess Kathleen O’Shea

  The Three Wishes

  GIANTS The Giant’s Stairs

  A Legend of Knockmany

  KINGS, QUEENS, PRINCESSES, EARLS, ROBBERS The Twelve Wild Geese

  The Lazy Beauty and Her Aunts

  The Haughty Princess

  The Enchantment of Gearoidh Iarla

  Munachar and Manachar

  Donald and His Neighbors

  The Jackdaw

  The Story of Conn-eda; Or the Golden Apples of Lough Erne

  NOTES

  FOREWORD

  Paul Muldoon

  Growing up in the 1950s in Northern Ireland, I had any number of opportunities to experience the fairy faith. My uncle Dinny McCool had a cure for ringworm, and would happily have come under Yeats’s category of “fairy doctors.” Our neighbor Maura McParland delighted in the story of a man who was passing the graveyard in College-lands when he was accosted, then pursued, by a ruddy poltergeist on a bicycle. After that the poor fellow would run by the graveyard shouting the following prayer: “May God Almighty and His Blessed Mother and all the angels and saints protect us from bad men and bogey men and wee red things on bicycles.” Maura’s husband, Jimmy McParland, would never have dreamed of cutting down a fairy thorn in his ploughing, for fear of upsetting the powers that be.

  These two surnames I mention, McCool and McParland, must be among the oldest in the country. We know that McCool is the family name of Finn, leader of the Fianna, and that it derives from cuil, the term for the magical hazel tree. McParland is supposedly a corruption of “Parthalon,” the name of the mythical Greek invader of Ireland, whose arrival in the country was followed in fairly quick succession by those of the Nemedians, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha De Danann, and the Milesians. The Tuatha De Danann are generally thought to correspond to the gods of pre-Christian Ireland, defeated by the Milesians, the ancestors of the modern Gaels, at the battles of Tailtiu and Druim Ligen. After those battles, popular belief has it, the Tuatha De Danann went underground, becoming the “powers that be” I mentioned earlier, living under that fairy thorn, or under a fairy mound.

  The fact that the Tuatha De Danann were gods may account in part for the description of the fairy faith given by Yeats in a lecture to the Belfast Naturalist and Field Club in November 1893, when he described the fairy faith as being “sent by Providence.” It’s as if the fairy faith was just another variety of religious experience, one that might easily have been mentioned by William James, whose Ulster forebears must have been exposed, if slightly, to the fairy faith. William James’s father, Henry, was a Swedenborgian. In his 1914 essay on “Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places,” Yeats draws parallels between Swedenborg’s otherworld and the Irish otherworld:

  It is the otherworld of the early races, of those whose dead are in the rath or the faery hill, of all who see no place of reward and punishment but a continuance of this life, with cattle and sheep, markets and war.… This earth-resembling life is the creation of the image-making power of the mind, plucked naked from the body, and mainly of the images of the memory.

  “Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places” was published in 1920 as an afterword to the second volume of Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, in which she records the following testimony from an old man in Aran:

  When I was in the State of Maine, I knew a woman from the County Cork, and she had a little girl sick. And one day she went out behind the house and there she saw the fields full of those—full of them. And the little girl died.

  What those fields in Maine were full of, it seems, were banshees, perhaps the most common class of fairy. The most striking aspect of Yeats’s work, in both his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), the original title of the book in hand, and Irish Fairy Tales (1892), is surely his impulse toward the classification of the fairy world, an impulse stemming from nineteenth-century developments in scientific codification and no doubt one of the reasons why Yeats was called upon to address the Belfast Naturalist and Field Club. Yeats’s most succinct “Classification of Irish Fairies” occurs in an essay of that
title that appeared as an appendix to Irish Fairy Tales:

  Irish Fairies divide themselves into two great classes; the sociable and the solitary. The first are in the main kindly, and the second full of uncharitableness.

  I feel somewhat uncharitable myself in commenting on the hauteur of the auteur, but it’s hard not to smile at the empty sweep of the word “great” in the phrase “two great classes.” Yeats goes on to count among the sociable fairies the “sheoques” and the “merrows” while the solitaries are the “lepraucaun,” the “cluricaun,” the “ganconer,” the “far darrig,” the “pooka,” the “dullahan,” the “leanhaun shee,” the “far gorta,” and the “banshee.” The fact that they are classified as solitaries seems to have been lost on the field full of banshees in Maine, though transplantation may have caused them to change their tune. It may also make them change their tune in a literal sense, given the discrepancy between the notation given by Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall (see notes this page), and the account given by the vain-vague Yeats in his appendix to Irish Fairy Tales:

  A distinguished writer on anthropology assures me that he has heard her on 1st December 1867, in Pital, near Libertad, Central America, as he rode through a deep forest. She was dressed in pale yellow, and raised a cry like the cry of a bat. She came to announce the death of his father. This is her cry, written down by him with the help of a Frenchman and a violin.

  The little ruddy fellow seen by my neighbour in County Armagh would doubtless have been classed by Yeats as a “far darrig,” from the Gaelic fear dearg, a “red man,” one a reader might decently expect to see described by Miss Letitia Maclintock in “Far Darrig in Donegal,” though the “four immensely tall men” at the heart of that story are neither solitary nor red. They do, however, conform to Yeats’s prescription that the far darrig “busies himself with practical joking, especially with gruesome joking.” The gruesome running gag in “Far Darrig in Donegal” has to do with the corpse that the tinker Pat Diver is called upon to take his turn in roasting over a fire, carrying on his back, and burying, all because he has disdained the art of storytelling. When Pat meets one of the tall men at Raphoe two months later, he doesn’t recognize him, but the tall man reminds him, “When you go back to Inishowen, you’ll have a story to tell.”

  Only at the very end of “Far Darrig in Donegal” does the reader understand that the true subject of this sophisticated metafiction is the art of the story itself, the burden that, like the corpse in “Far Darrig in Donegal,” is carried by so many in their turn. The great strength of this anthology is the range of Irish storytelling it gathers in, including as it does representative pieces by William Allingham, Sir Jonah Barrington, William Carleton, Thomas Crofton Croker, Sir Samuel Ferguson, Alfred Percival Graves, Gerald Griffin, Douglas Hyde, Samuel Lover, James Clarence Mangan, John O’Donovan, and Lady Wilde, who, having established that “it is the custom amongst the people, when throwing away water at night, to cry out in a loud voice, Take care of the water,” continues with brilliant matter-of-factness:

  One dark night a woman suddenly threw out a pail of boiling water without thinking of the warning words. Instantly a cry was heard, as of a person in pain, but no one was seen. However, the next night a black lamb entered the house, having the back all fresh scalded, and it lay down moaning by the hearth and died.

  This is all but a reverse angle shot of Yeats’s “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” the poem in which “a little silver trout” is transmogrified into “a glimmering girl” who disappears almost as quickly as she’s conjured up:

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.

  One source for the “glimmering girl” in “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” may be found here in Samuel Lover’s “The White Trout; A Legend of Cong,” while the “golden apples” at the end of the poem may be grafted from cuttings found in “The Story of Conn-eda; Or the Golden Apples of Lough Erne,” with its apple tree planted in the garden, a horse that “took whatever road he chose,” and a bird with a human head who speaks “in a loud, croaking human voice.” Conn-eda is sent into exile under a geis, or spell, from a prince:

  “Well then,” said the prince, “the geis which I bind you by, is to sit upon the pinnacle of yonder tower until my return, and to take neither food nor nourishment of any description, except what red-wheat you can pick up with the point of your bodkin; but if I do not return, you are at perfect liberty to come down at the expiration of the year and the day.”

  I suspect that several of these images may have been drawn into the complex weave of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” a story in which, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, Joyce plays on the idea of the geis, including punning on the word “goose” in the “fat brown goose*” on the Miss Morkhans’ table, along with “a pyramid of oranges and American apples,” in ironic contrast to the admonition “to take neither food nor nourishment.” We know that this “goose” is a sly reference to Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, whose family name, O’Cadhain, is the Gaelic term for a “barnacle goose.” Catholics were allowed to eat barnacle geese on Fridays since they were thought to be seafood rather than fowl, therefore not subject to the church’s own version of a geis. We might also remember that the name of the lover of Nora, the character upon whom Michael Furey is based, was Michael Bodkin, so that if Joyce read this story, as I suspect he did, he must have felt the “point of your bodkin” in a rather acute way. This may partly explain the positioning of Furey, “the boy from the gasworks,” in the “garden,” a word used twice by Joyce within one sentence, thereby drawing to it particular attention:

  The window was so wet I couldn’t see so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden.

  The final sentence of “The Story of Conn-eda” reminds us that “It was after the name Conn-eda the province of Connaucht, or Conneda, or Connacht, was so called.” The “province of Connaucht” is the provenance of Gretta Conroy, and of Michael Furey, and is psychologically, as well as physically, central to the story. Other key images in “The Dead” that may be drawn from “The Story of Conn-eda” are Patrick Morkhan’s horse, which “took whatever road he chose” around the statue of King Billy; a cabman who is exhorted to “make like a bird for Trinity College”; and the “hoarse as a crow” Bartell D’Arcy, a human with a bird head—or is it a bird with a human head? The “trinity” referred to may be the trio of battle-deities, Badb, Macha, and the Morrigan, sometimes known collectively as the Morrigna. Badb is directly invoked in “The Story of Conn-eda” in the place-name “Sleabh Badhna,” seat of the druid Fionn Dadhna. These battle-goddesses often appear in the guise of a crow (throwing its “hoarse” voice through Bartell D’Arcy, it seems) or looming large as the “Three Graces” of the Morkhans (itself a near version of Morrigan or Morigna). Indeed, I think the mor component here, meaning “big,” may have influenced the strange description by Mrs. Malins of “a fish, a beautiful big big fish, and the man in the hotel boiled it for their dinner.” The “big big fish” is no doubt a salmon, the fish associated with Finn MacCool, and it’s no accident that the notion of “Finn” and “hotel” are associated in Joyce’s mind, since it was in Finn’s Hotel that Nora Barnacle was working as a chambermaid when he met her in June 1904. The name of the druid of Sleabh Badhna, Fionn Dadhna, or “Fintan,” is the name often given to Finn’s salmon of knowledge, and is also associated with the power of self-transformation, so it should come as no surprise that, at the moment of Gretta Conroy’s transmogrification, when her husband watches her being stolen from her, the salmon leaps to mind:

  A woman was standing near the top of the f
irst flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife.

  There’s a theory, mentioned by James MacKillop in his Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, that the salmon’s “swimming between salt and fresh water may have suggested the capacity to pass between worlds,” and the fish appears at the interface between our world and the fairy realm in another story here, Thomas Crofton Croker’s “The Priest’s Supper,” in which the fairies who have withheld a salmon from Father Horrigan ask Dermod Leary to ask the priest “if the souls of the good people are to be saved at the last day.” Father Horrigan sends Dermod back to them with the injunction that they come to him in person, the very thought of which banishes the fairy host. I use the word “host” advisedly here, since it’s used by Yeats himself in the titles of no less than three poems collected in The Wind Among the Reeds, the 1899 collection also includes “The Song of the Wandering Aengus.” These are “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “The Host of the Air,” and “The Unappeasable Host,” and they are carried over into “The Dead” in the penultimate paragraph:

  Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world; the solid world which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

  The tone of these lines is oddly reminiscent of some of Yeats’s introductions to the sections of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, in which he is constantly pointing out that “many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains and chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them” or that “it has been held by many that somewhere out of the void there is a perpetual dribble of souls; that these souls pass through many shapes before they incarnate as men—hence the nature spirits. They are invisible—except at rare moments and times; they inhabit the interior elements, while we live upon the outer and the gross.” The nature spirits include horses, no doubt, which is why the souls are “rearing” in that passage from the end of “The Dead.”