Part 3

Even in such an unpretending-looking story as “The King of Ireland’s Son” (the third in this volume), there are elements which must be vastly old. In a short Czech story, “George with the Goat,” we find some of the prince’s companions figuring, only slightly metamorphosed. We have the man with one foot over his shoulder, who jumps a hundred miles when he puts it down; while the gun-man of the Irish story who performs two parts—that of seeing and shooting—is replaced in the Bohemian tale by two different men, one of whom has such sight that he must keep a bandage over his eyes, for if he removed it he could see a hundred miles, and the other has, instead of a gun, a bottle with his thumb stuck into it for a stopper, because if he took it out it would squirt a hundred miles. George hires one after the other, just as the prince does in the Irish story. George goes to try to win the king’s daughter, as the Irish prince does, and, amongst other things, is desired to bring a goblet of water from a well a hundred miles off in a minute. “So,” says the story,[14] “George said to the man who had the foot on his shoulder, ‘You said that if you took the foot down you could jump a hundred miles.’ He replied: ‘I’ll easily do that.’ He took the foot down, jumped, and was there; but after this there was only a very little time to spare, and by this he ought to have been back. So George said to the second, ‘You said that if you removed the bandage from your eyes you could see a hundred miles; peep, and see what is going on.’ ‘Ah, sir, goodness gracious! he’s fallen asleep.’ ‘That will be a bad job,’ said George; ‘the time will be up. You third man, you said if you pulled your thumb out you could squirt a hundred miles. Be quick, and squirt thither, that he may get up; and you, look whether he is moving, or what.’ ‘Oh, sir, he’s getting up now; he’s knocking the dust off; he’s drawing the water.’ He then gave a jump, and was there exactly in time.” Now, this Bohemian story seems also to bear traces of a nature myth; for, as Mr. Wratislaw has remarked: “the man who jumps a hundred miles appears to be the rainbow, the man with bandaged eyes the lightning, and the man with the bottle the cloud.” The Irish story, while in every other way superior to the Bohemian, has quite obscured this point; and were it not for the striking Sclavonic parallel, people might be found to assert that the story was of recent origin. This discovery of the Czech tale, however, throws it at once three thousand years back; for the similarity of the Irish and Bohemian story can hardly be accounted for, except on the supposition, that both Slavs and Celts carried it from the original home of the Aryan race, in pre-historic times, or at least from some place where the two races were in contiguity with one another, and that it, too—little as it appears so now—was at one time in all probability a nature myth.

Such myth stories as these ought to be preserved, since they are about the last visible link connecting civilized with pre-historic man; for, of all the traces that man in his earliest period has left behind him, there is nothing except a few drilled stones or flint arrow-heads that approaches the antiquity of these tales, as told to-day by a half-starving peasant in a smoky Connacht cabin.

It is time to say a word about the narrators of these stories. The people who can recite them are, as far as my researches have gone, to be found only amongst the oldest, most neglected, and poorest of the Irish-speaking population. English-speaking people either do not know them at all, or else tell them in so bald and condensed a form as to be useless. Almost all the men from whom I used to hear stories in the County Roscommon are dead. Ten or fifteen years ago I used to hear a great many stories, but I did not understand their value. Now when I go back for them I cannot find them. They have died out, and will never again be heard on the hillsides, where they probably existed for a couple of thousand years; they will never be repeated there again, to use the Irish phrase, while grass grows or water runs. Several of these stories I got from an old man, one Shawn Cunningham, on the border of the County Roscommon, where it joins Mayo. He never spoke more than a few words of English till he was fifteen years old. He was taught by a hedge schoolmaster from the South of Ireland out of Irish MSS. As far as I could make out from him the teaching seemed to consist in making him learn Irish poems by heart. His next schoolmaster, however, tied a piece of stick round his neck, and when he came to school in the morning the schoolmaster used to inspect the piece of wood and pretend that it told him how often he had spoken Irish when at home. In some cases the schoolmasters made the parents put a notch in the stick every time the child failed to speak English. He was beaten then, and always beaten whenever he was heard speaking a word of Irish, even though at this time he could hardly speak a word of English. His son and daughter now speak Irish, though not fluently, his grandchildren do not even understand it. He had at one time, as he expressed it, “the full of a sack of stories,” but he had forgotten them. His grandchildren stood by his knee while he told me one or two, but it was evident they did not understand a word. His son and daughter laughed at them as nonsense. Even in Achill where, if anywhere, one ought to find folk-stories in their purity, a fine-looking dark man of about forty-five, who told me a number of them, and could repeat Ossian’s poems, assured me that now-a-days when he went into a house in the evening and the old people got him to recite, the boys would go out; “they wouldn’t understand me,” said he, “and when they wouldn’t, they’d sooner be listening to géimneaċ na mbó,” “the lowing of the cows.” This, too, in an island where many people cannot speak English. I do not know whether the Achill schoolmasters make use of the notch of wood to-day, but it is hardly wanted now. It is curious that this was the device universally employed all over Connacht and Munster to kill the language. This took place under the eye of O’Connell and the Parliamentarians, and, of course, under the eye and with the sanction of the Catholic priesthood and prelates, some of whom, according to Father Keegan, of St. Louis, distinguished themselves by driving the Irish teachers out of their dioceses and burning their books. At the present day, such is the irony of fate, if a stranger talks Irish he runs a good chance of being looked upon as an enemy, this because some attempts were made to proselytize “natives” by circulating Irish bibles, and sending some Irish scripture-readers amongst them. Surely nothing so exquisitely ludicrous ever took place outside of this island of anomalies, as that a stranger who tries to speak Irish in Ireland runs the serious risk of being looked upon as a proselytizing Englishman. As matters are still progressing gaily in this direction, let nobody be surprised if a pure Aryan language which, at the time of the famine, in ’47, was spoken by at least four million souls (more than the whole population of Switzerland), becomes in a few years as extinct as Cornish. Of course, there is not a shadow of necessity, either social or economical, for this. All the world knows that bi-linguists are superior to men who know only one language, yet in Ireland everyone pretends to believe the contrary. A few words from the influential leaders of the race when next they visit Achill, for instance, would help to keep Irish alive there in _sæcula sæculorum_, and with the Irish language, the old Aryan folk-lore, the Ossianic poems, numberless ballads, folk-songs, and proverbs, and a thousand and one other interesting things that survive when Irish is spoken, and die when it dies. But, from a complexity of causes which I am afraid to explain, the men who for the last sixty years have had the ear of the Irish race have persistently shown the cold shoulder to everything that was Irish and racial, and while protesting, or pretending to protest, against West Britonism, have helped, more than anyone else, by their example, to assimilate us to England and the English, thus running counter to the entire voice of modern Europe, which is in favour of extracting the best from the various races of men who inhabit it, by helping them to develop themselves on national and racial lines. The people are not the better for it either, for one would fancy it required little culture to see that the man who reads Irish MSS., and repeats Ossianic poetry, is a higher and more interesting type than the man whose mental training is confined to spelling through an article in _United Ireland_.[15]

I may mention here that it is not as easy a thing as might be imagined to collect Irish stories. One hears that tales are to be had from such and such a man, generally, alas! a very old one. With difficulty one manages to find him out, only to discover, probably, that he has some work on hand. If it happens to be harvest time it is nearly useless going to him at all, unless one is prepared to sit up with him all night, for his mind is sure to be so distraught with harvest operations that he can tell you nothing. If it is winter time, however, and you fortunately find him unoccupied, nevertheless it requires some management to get him to tell his stories. Half a glass of _ishka-baha_, a pipe of tobacco, and a story of one’s own are the best things to begin with. If, however, you start to take down the story _verbatim_ with pencil and paper, as an unwary collector might do, you destroy all, or your shanachie becomes irritable. He will not wait for you to write down your sentence, and if you call out, “Stop, stop, wait till I get this down,” he will forget what he was going to tell you, and you will not get a third of his story, though you may think you have it all. What you must generally do is to sit quietly smoking your pipe, without the slightest interruption, not even when he comes to words and phrases which you do not understand. He must be allowed his own way to the end, and then after judiciously praising him and discussing the story, you remark, as if the thought had suddenly struck you, “buḋ ṁaiṫ liom sin a ḃeiṫ agam air ṗáipeur,” “I’d like to have that on paper.” Then you can get it from him easily enough, and when he leaves out whole incidents, as he is sure to do, you who have just heard the story can put him right, and so get it from him nearly in its entirety. Still it is not always easy to write down these stories, for they are full of old or corrupted words, which neither you nor your narrator understand, and if you press him too much over the meaning of these he gets confused and irritable.

The present volume consists of about half the stories in the _Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta_, translated into English, together with some half dozen other stories given in the original together with a close English translation. It is not very easy to make a good translation from Irish into English, for there are no two Aryan languages more opposed to each other in spirit and idiom. Still, the English spoken by three-fourths of the people of Ireland is largely influenced by Gaelic idioms, for most of those expressions which surprise Englishmen are really translations from that Irish which was the language of the speaker’s father, grandfather, or great-grandfather—according to the part of the country you may be in—and there have perpetuated themselves, even in districts where you will scarce find a trace of an Irish word. There are, however, also hundreds of Gaelic idioms not reproduced in the English spoken by the people, and it is difficult to render these fitly. Campbell of Islay has run into rather an extreme in his translations, for in order to make them picturesque, he has rendered his Gaelic originals something too literally. Thus, he invariably translates _bhain se an ceann deth_, by “he reaped the head off him,” a form of speech which, I notice, a modern Irish poet and M.P. has adopted from him; but bain, though it certainly means “reap” amongst other things, is the word used for taking off a hat as well as a head. Again, he always translates _thu_ by “thou,” which gives his stories a strange antique air, which is partly artificial, for the Gaelic “thou” corresponds to the English “you,” the second person plural not being used except in speaking of more than one. In this way, Campbell has given his excellent and thoroughly reliable translations a scarcely legitimate colouring, which I have tried to avoid. For this reason, I have not always translated the Irish idioms quite literally, though I have used much unidiomatic English, but only of the kind used all over Ireland, the kind the people themselves use. I do not translate, for instance, the Irish for “he died,” by “he got death,” for this, though the literal translation, is not adopted into Hibernian English; but I do translate the Irish _ghnidheadh se sin_ by “he used to do that,” which is the ordinary Anglo-Irish attempt at making—what they have not got in English—a consuetudinal tense. I have scarcely used the pluperfect at all. No such tense exists in Irish, and the people who speak English do not seem to feel the want of it, and make no hesitation in saying, “I’d speak sooner if I knew that,” where they mean, “if I had known that I would have spoken sooner.” I do not translate (as Campbell would), “it rose with me to do it,” but “I succeeded in doing it,” for the first, though the literal translation of the Irish idiom, has not been adopted into English; but I do translate “he did it and he drunk,” instead of, “he did it while he was drunk;” for the first phrase (the literal translation of the Irish) is universally used throughout English-speaking Ireland. Where, as sometimes happens, the English language contains no exact equivalent for an Irish expression, I have rendered the original as well as I could, as one generally does render for linguistic purposes, from one language into another.

In conclusion, it only remains for me to thank Mr. Alfred Nutt for enriching this book as he has done, and for bearing with the dilatoriness of the Irish printers, who find so much difficulty in setting Irish type, that many good Irishmen have of late come round to the idea of printing our language in Roman characters; and to express my gratitude to Father Eugene O’Growney for the unwearying kindness with which he read and corrected my Irish proofs, and for the manifold aid which he has afforded me on this and other occasions.

POSTSCRIPT BY ALFRED NUTT.

I had hoped to accompany these tales with as full a commentary as that which I have affixed to the Argyllshire _Märchen_, collected and translated by the Rev. D. MacInnes. Considerations of business and health prevent me from carrying out this intention, and I have only been able to notice a passage here and there in the Tales; but I have gladly availed myself of my friend, Dr. Hyde’s permission, to touch upon a few points in his Introduction.

Of special interest are Dr. Hyde’s remarks upon the relations which obtain between the modern folk-tale current among the Gaelic-speaking populations of Ireland and Scotland, and the Irish mythic, heroic and romantic literature preserved in MSS., which range in date from the eleventh century to the present day.

In Ireland, more than elsewhere, the line of demarcation between the tale whose genesis is conscious, and that of which the reverse is true, is hard to draw, and students will, for a long while to come, differ concerning points of detail. I may thus be permitted to disagree at times with Dr. Hyde, although, as a rule, I am heartily at one with him.

Dr. Hyde distinguishes between an older stratum of folk-tale (the “old Aryan traditions,” of p. xix.) and the newer stratum of “bardic inventions.” He also establishes a yet younger class than these latter, the romances of the professional story-tellers of the eighteenth century, who “wrote them down as modern novelists do their stories.” Of these last he remarks (p. xxxiv.), that he has found no remnant of them among the peasantry of to-day; a valuable bit of evidence, although of course, subject to the inconclusiveness of all merely negative testimony. To revert to the second class, he looks upon the tales comprised in it as being rather the inventions of individual brains than as old Aryan folk-tales (p. xx.) It must at once be conceded, that a great number of the tales and ballads current in the Gaelic-speaking lands undoubtedly received the form under which they are now current, somewhere between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries; that the authors of that form were equally undoubtedly the professional bards and story-tellers attached to the court of every Gaelic chieftain; and that the method of their transmission was oral, it being the custom of the story-tellers both to teach their tales to pupils, and to travel about from district to district.

The style of these stories and ballads enables us to date them with sufficient precision. Dr. Hyde also notes historical allusions, such as the reference to O’Connor Sligo, in the story of the “Slim Swarthy Champion,” or to the Turks in the story of “Conall Gulban.” I cannot but think, however, that it is straining the evidence to assert that the one story was invented after 1362, or the other after the fall of Constantinople. The fact that “Bony” appears in some versions of the common English mumming play does not show that it originated in this century, merely that these particular versions have passed through the minds of nineteenth century peasants; and in like manner the Connaught fourteenth century chieftain may easily have taken the place of an earlier personage, the Turks in “Conall Gulban,” of an earlier wizard-giant race. If I cannot go as far as Dr. Hyde in this sense, I must equally demur to the assumption (p. xl.), that community of incident between an Irish and a Bohemian tale necessarily establishes the pre-historic antiquity of the incident. I believe that a great many folk-tales, as well as much else of folk-lore, has been developed _in situ_, rather than imported from the outside; but I, by no means, deny importation in principle, and I recognise that its agency has been clearly demonstrated in not a few cases.

The main interest of Irish folk-literature (if the expression be allowed) centres in the bardic stories. I think that Dr. Hyde lays too much stress upon such external secondary matters as the names of heroes, or allusions to historical events; and, indeed, he himself, in the case of Murachaidh MacBrian, states what I believe to be the correct theory, namely, that the Irish bardic story, from which he derives the Scotch Gaelic one, is, as far as many of its incidents go, not the invention of the writer, but genuine folk-lore thrown by him into a new form (p. xxii.)

Had we all the materials necessary for forming a judgment, such is, I believe, the conclusion that would in every case be reached. But I furthermore hold it likely that in many cases the recast story gradually reverted to a primitive folk-type in the course of passing down from the court story-teller to the humbler peasant reciters, that it sloughed off the embellishments of the _ollamhs_, and reintroduced the older, wilder conceptions with which the folk remained in fuller sympathy than the more cultured bard. Compare, for instance, as I compared ten years ago, “Maghach Colgar,” in Campbell’s version (No. 36), with the “Fairy Palace of the Quicken Trees.” The one tale has all the incidents in the wildest and most fantastic form possible; in the other they are rationalised to the utmost possible extent and made to appear like a piece of genuine history. I do not think that if this later version was _invented_ right out by a thirteenth or fourteenth century _ollamh_, it could have given rise to the former one. Either “Maghach Colgar” descends from the folk-tale which served as the basis of the Irish story, or, what is more likely, the folk, whilst appreciating and preserving the new arrangement of certain well-known incidents, retained the earlier form of the incidents themselves, as being more consonant with the totality of its conceptions, both moral and æsthetic. This I hold to be the vital lesson the folk-lorist may learn from considering the relations of Gaelic folk-tale and Gaelic romance (using the latter term in the sense of story with a conscious genesis): that romance, to live and propagate itself among the folk, must follow certain rules, satisfy certain conceptions of life, conform to certain conventions. The Irish bards and story-tellers had little difficulty, I take it, in doing this; they had not outgrown the creed of their countrymen, they were in substantial touch with the intellectual and artistic laws that govern their subject-matter. Re-arrange, rationalise somewhat, deck out with the questionable adornment of their scanty and ill-digested book-learning—to this extent, but to this extent only, I believe, reached their influence upon the mass of folk-conceptions and presentments which they inherited from their fathers, and which, with these modifications and additions, they handed on to their children.

But romance must not only conform to the conventions, it must also fit in with the _ensemble_ of conditions, material, mental and spiritual, which constitute the culture (taking this much-abused word in its widest sense) of a race. An example will make this clear.

Of all modern, consciously-invented fairy tales I know but one which conforms fully to the folk-tale convention—“The Shaving of Shagpat.” It follows the formula as closely and accurately as the best of Grimm’s or of Campbell’s tales. To divine the nature of a convention, and to use its capabilities to the utmost, is a special mark of genius, and in this, as in other instances, whatever else be absent from Mr. Meredith’s work, genius is indubitably present. But I do not think that “The Shaving of Shagpat” could ever be acclimatised as a folk-tale in this country. Scenery, conduct of story, characterisation of personages, are all too distinctively Oriental. But let an Eastern admirer of Mr. Meredith translate his work into Arabic or Hindi, and let the book fall into the hands of a Cairene or Delhi story-teller (if such still exist), I can well imagine that, with judicious cuts, it should win praise for its reciter in market-place or bazaar. Did this happen, it would surely be due to the fact that the story is strictly constructed upon traditional lines, rather than to the brilliant invention and fancy displayed on every page. Strip from it the wit and philosophy of the author, and there remains a fairy tale to charm the East; but it would need to be reduced to a skeleton, and reclothed with new flesh before it could charm the folk of the West.

To bring home yet more clearly to our minds this necessity for romance to conform to convention, let us ask ourselves, what would have happened if one of the Irish story-tellers who perambulated the Western Isles as late as the seventeenth century, had carried with him a volume of Hakluyt or Purchas, or, supposing one to have lingered enough, Defoe or Gil Blas? Would he have been welcomed when he substituted the new fare for the old tales of “Finn and the Fians?” and even if welcomed, would he have gained currency for it? Would the seed thus planted have thriven, or would it not rather, fallen upon rocky places, have withered away?