A Treasury Of Irish Folklore By Padraic Colum
The years that have passed since the first publication of A Treasury of Irish Folklore have been a time of transition that has affected the traditional lore, that is, the lore handed down from generation to generation in the Irish countryside, more than it has affected any other cultural activity or entertainment-the transition from countryside to towns, from talk by the fireside to oral and visual mass communication.
The century-old type of cottage, clay-built, whitewashed, thatched, is no longer the main feature of the landscape: tiles have taken the place of thatch, some other building material the place of clay; the houses are more convenient and more roomy than the houses we were used to seeing before. Within, the change for the one who has traditional lore in his mind is more significant.
The fire is still on the hearthstones, but the big sods of turf cut on the bog nearby no longer make it; the compressed turf is from the fac- tory that is exploiting the stretches of bog. Electric bulbs have taken the place of candlelight and firelight that gave the walls shadows and the interior a modicum of light. The change is all against neighborly dis- course. The younger folk go to the dance hall or the cinema; the older folk stay at home and listen to broadcasts. The isolation that fostered the tale, the song, the piece of local history, the transactions that took on a pattern by being repeated over and over again, have been mitigated. Yet the liveliness of speech, the imaginativeness of phrase, the accomplishment in shaping or relating an incident are still to be noted. It should be remarked that the epoch of change is also the epoch of gathering. One of the first things that the national government did in Ireland was to set up an Institute of Folklore under a director who is amongst the foremost in the field of European folklore.
Through this Institute a rewarding effort has been made to collect and record traditional material: for forty years this collecting and recording has been going on; the result is that the Folklore Institute in Dublin possesses a great collection of the traditional lore of Ireland that is part of the traditional lore of Europe. It has now become evident to scholars in this field that works of interpretation are now due. An example of what should follow on the work of collecting and recording is Maire Mac- Neill's monumental Feast of Lughnasa. Meanwhile, local collectors with a knowledge of the tradition are going through the countryside recording what is still current. I have sat with such collectors in cottages and public houses and have been charmed by their interest, their education in everything relating to the material, their ability to draw from a recipient an unflawed piece of traditional lore.
The century-old type of cottage, clay-built, whitewashed, thatched, is no longer the main feature of the landscape: tiles have taken the place of thatch, some other building material the place of clay; the houses are more convenient and more roomy than the houses we were used to seeing before. Within, the change for the one who has traditional lore in his mind is more significant.
The fire is still on the hearthstones, but the big sods of turf cut on the bog nearby no longer make it; the compressed turf is from the fac- tory that is exploiting the stretches of bog. Electric bulbs have taken the place of candlelight and firelight that gave the walls shadows and the interior a modicum of light. The change is all against neighborly dis- course. The younger folk go to the dance hall or the cinema; the older folk stay at home and listen to broadcasts. The isolation that fostered the tale, the song, the piece of local history, the transactions that took on a pattern by being repeated over and over again, have been mitigated. Yet the liveliness of speech, the imaginativeness of phrase, the accomplishment in shaping or relating an incident are still to be noted. It should be remarked that the epoch of change is also the epoch of gathering. One of the first things that the national government did in Ireland was to set up an Institute of Folklore under a director who is amongst the foremost in the field of European folklore.
Through this Institute a rewarding effort has been made to collect and record traditional material: for forty years this collecting and recording has been going on; the result is that the Folklore Institute in Dublin possesses a great collection of the traditional lore of Ireland that is part of the traditional lore of Europe. It has now become evident to scholars in this field that works of interpretation are now due. An example of what should follow on the work of collecting and recording is Maire Mac- Neill's monumental Feast of Lughnasa. Meanwhile, local collectors with a knowledge of the tradition are going through the countryside recording what is still current. I have sat with such collectors in cottages and public houses and have been charmed by their interest, their education in everything relating to the material, their ability to draw from a recipient an unflawed piece of traditional lore.
It has happened at different times to the editor of this collection that, being with a Greek friend when another person revealed himself as of the same nativity, his friend, not always the same one, would ask, "From what place do you come?" The query has the ancientness of the Odyssey-"Where do you come from, stranger?" In the modern instance, the editor, noting a reply that contained a memory-laden place- name-Mitylene, or Samos, or Argos, would be of the opinion that the question asked was less for information than to reach an identification that, recalling perennially beautiful place-names, uplifted the speaker and the hearer. But the query had an everyday significance. "We are separated from other communities in Greece," one friend told him. "We who live on the islands know little about the mainland, and those on the mainland know little of the places across the mountain." Well, even though it relates to practical matters, the query brings out a constituent of the Greek mind-something that arises out of what was important in the days of the epic and is important still-the geo- graphical scene. And even though the query is practical, it must evoke a sense of history as well as scene-the light-waved Mediterranean, the mountains, the divided plain. Here, then, is one stratum of Greek lore.
An Irish person, meeting outside his country one in whom the same nativity is recognized, does not ask, "From what part do you come?"
He or she asks, "What name have you?" (In Irish it would be, "What name is on you?") The name given reveals more often than not a stock that can be identified among other Irish stocks, a system of relationships, and very often a territory. On the threshold of identity there is not for Irish people a consideration of place, but of name, and with the name, local history with its monuments, the castles and keeps that mark conquest and resistance, the older earthen mounds in which abide the fairy folk, the places that have sanctity, notably the holy wells.
Ireland is still a country of country people-farmers living on their acres in cottages built out of materials that are to be found at hand. The country people are not village-dwellers as are the people of the English and French countryside. The houses, apart from each
I am taking the old clan names, the Gaelic names. But it should be remembered that about a sixth of Irish names are of Norman origin-Fitzgerald, Burke, Butler. Power, Grace. But these, too, are of an old stock-the Sean-Ghaill-and they can be placed in a history and a territory. There is, of course, a considerable number of English names, some recent and some from far back. There are Scotch and Welsh and some French Huguenot names. In the northeast the bulk of the names are Scottish and English, but in the case of the Scottish, many are of Gaelic origin.
other, each with its own field or fields, give a sense of isolation. An English traveler, a recent one, notes a cottage that "was set in a little island in the bog: by it were two or three little paddock en- closures set about with high dyke banks on which grew willow trees. A little talking brook ran through green mosses by the wall and the shadows of the willow leaves patterned the pink wash of the house with soft blue shadows. The sound of spinning reached us down the sunlit air, rising up to a trembling wail and sinking low again..... We came silently to the door over the rushes, and stood as if a spell was over us."
An Irish person, meeting outside his country one in whom the same nativity is recognized, does not ask, "From what part do you come?"
He or she asks, "What name have you?" (In Irish it would be, "What name is on you?") The name given reveals more often than not a stock that can be identified among other Irish stocks, a system of relationships, and very often a territory. On the threshold of identity there is not for Irish people a consideration of place, but of name, and with the name, local history with its monuments, the castles and keeps that mark conquest and resistance, the older earthen mounds in which abide the fairy folk, the places that have sanctity, notably the holy wells.
Ireland is still a country of country people-farmers living on their acres in cottages built out of materials that are to be found at hand. The country people are not village-dwellers as are the people of the English and French countryside. The houses, apart from each
I am taking the old clan names, the Gaelic names. But it should be remembered that about a sixth of Irish names are of Norman origin-Fitzgerald, Burke, Butler. Power, Grace. But these, too, are of an old stock-the Sean-Ghaill-and they can be placed in a history and a territory. There is, of course, a considerable number of English names, some recent and some from far back. There are Scotch and Welsh and some French Huguenot names. In the northeast the bulk of the names are Scottish and English, but in the case of the Scottish, many are of Gaelic origin.
other, each with its own field or fields, give a sense of isolation. An English traveler, a recent one, notes a cottage that "was set in a little island in the bog: by it were two or three little paddock en- closures set about with high dyke banks on which grew willow trees. A little talking brook ran through green mosses by the wall and the shadows of the willow leaves patterned the pink wash of the house with soft blue shadows. The sound of spinning reached us down the sunlit air, rising up to a trembling wail and sinking low again..... We came silently to the door over the rushes, and stood as if a spell was over us."
The Irish landscape where it is most distinctive is stranger than that of any other part of Europe. Water is everywhere-"a land of lakes," as an Irish topographer describes it. There is green of the grass, and always near the grass is the grey of the stones: it is the ever-present greyness-the stones, the massed clouds above-that make people think of Ireland as having a verdure brighter than that of any other country in the world. There is another greyness present, the greyness of ruins that are everywhere-towers, keeps, castles, abbeys, ancient churches. "The whole speaking monuments of the troubled and insecure state of the country from the most remote periods to comparatively modern times," George Borrow noted. And another English traveller, Arthur Young, in the eighteenth century, impressed with the greenness of the country, wrote, "May we not recognize in this the hand of bounteous Providence which has given perhaps the most stony soil in Europe the moistest climate of it.... But the rocks are covered with verdure; those of limestone, with only a thin covering of mould, have the softest and most beautiful turf imaginable." The grey walls of the ruins are covered with heavy, wide-leaved ivy. And the sun bursting through the big clouds fills bog or green valley with a rare light-a vibrant, a living kind of light.
But Ireland is not altogether a country of water, grass, bogs and ruins. There is the well-farmed northeast with the industrial city of Belfast; there is the varied east with Ireland's capital city; there is the rich land of the middle south known as "the golden vein"; there are the pastures of Meath; there is the southwest which touched by the Gulf Stream produces some of the flora of the Mediterranean: there the arbutus becomes a great tree; and west and south one sees hedges that are rhododendrons mixed with fuchsias.
The houses that dot the countryside are whitewashed and thatched with straw. They are built of the stiff clay dug nearby; against the whiteness of their limewashed walls is the blackness of the stack of turf or peat, cut in the bog generally convenient to the cottage, the bog being owned or rented as is the land by the various families around. As regards firing, the bog is good to them, for the cut and dried peat makes the most heartening of fires. The fire regulates the culinary as it does the social activities of the house.
It is on the hearth- stone, level with the floor; over it is the wide chimney, and the glow of the burning peat is surrounded by deep ashes; in the morning the ashes are raked off, fresh peat put over the living coals and blown with a bellows, and so the fire is never quenched. Everything social in the ordinary way takes place around the fireside-on occasions one of the rooms becomes a reception room. The visitor is brought at once to the hearth. The neighbours who come in sit by it. When the con- versation becomes general, when there is song or story, the gathering becomes the celidh or seanchas. In the old days when there were many homeless men and women, a sack of leaves or heather-tops was laid within the nook and there the one seeking shelter for the night could sleep. Between the table and the kitchen-dresser couples could dance to the fiddle or the concertina. The year filled with the tilling of the fields and the rearing of stock is diversified by fairs and markets, pilgrimages, or the "pattern" which, much smaller and more local, corresponds to the Breton "pardon," the gathering in honor of a local patron or saint.
But Ireland is not altogether a country of water, grass, bogs and ruins. There is the well-farmed northeast with the industrial city of Belfast; there is the varied east with Ireland's capital city; there is the rich land of the middle south known as "the golden vein"; there are the pastures of Meath; there is the southwest which touched by the Gulf Stream produces some of the flora of the Mediterranean: there the arbutus becomes a great tree; and west and south one sees hedges that are rhododendrons mixed with fuchsias.
The houses that dot the countryside are whitewashed and thatched with straw. They are built of the stiff clay dug nearby; against the whiteness of their limewashed walls is the blackness of the stack of turf or peat, cut in the bog generally convenient to the cottage, the bog being owned or rented as is the land by the various families around. As regards firing, the bog is good to them, for the cut and dried peat makes the most heartening of fires. The fire regulates the culinary as it does the social activities of the house.
It is on the hearth- stone, level with the floor; over it is the wide chimney, and the glow of the burning peat is surrounded by deep ashes; in the morning the ashes are raked off, fresh peat put over the living coals and blown with a bellows, and so the fire is never quenched. Everything social in the ordinary way takes place around the fireside-on occasions one of the rooms becomes a reception room. The visitor is brought at once to the hearth. The neighbours who come in sit by it. When the con- versation becomes general, when there is song or story, the gathering becomes the celidh or seanchas. In the old days when there were many homeless men and women, a sack of leaves or heather-tops was laid within the nook and there the one seeking shelter for the night could sleep. Between the table and the kitchen-dresser couples could dance to the fiddle or the concertina. The year filled with the tilling of the fields and the rearing of stock is diversified by fairs and markets, pilgrimages, or the "pattern" which, much smaller and more local, corresponds to the Breton "pardon," the gathering in honor of a local patron or saint.
A Swedish scholar, Professor Sydov, noting that the traditional culture of Ireland and Gaelic Scotland is amongst the richest and most outstanding in Europe, attributes its rich vitality partly to the fact that the people have been long in possession of their present territory, and partly that there used to be professional narrators-"there being nothing analogous to them in Teutonic territory." The narrator is the shanachie: definitely professional in Gaelic-speaking districts, and less professional as one moves away from such districts, he or she is not only the narrator of stories but the relator of local history which includes genealogies. At an earlier time the shanachie and his or her fireside audience received influences from men who came to the cottages from the outside. "In Ireland," writes the English scholar, Robin Flower, "where the ruin of the seventeenth century scattered the stu- dents of the schools among the common folk, the wandering scholar- schoolmaster, poet and musician-was a known figure wherever any- thing of the old life survived until only the other day.
" He tells us that "in the peoples' memories two figures of this kind stand out distinct-the witty, inspired, improvising poet, and the poor scholar, travelling from house to house with his bag of books, solving knotty problems with the aid of recondite learning, and often by a parade of scholarship getting the upper hand among a people unlearned, but passionate admirers of printed knowledge and strange tongues." This scholar got a great deal of material from a shanachie in the Blasket Islands off Kerry, a woman, Peg Sayers, and he has this to say of her:
"She has so clean and finished a style of speech that you can follow all the nicest articulations of the language on her lips without any effort; she is a natural orator, with so keen a sense of the turn of a phrase and the lifting rhythm appropriate to Irish that her words could be written down as they leave her lips, and they could have the effect of literature with no savor of artificiality of composition. She is wont to illustrate her talk with tales long and short which come so naturally along the flow of conversation, and lighten all her discourse with the wit and wisdom and folly and vivid incident of the past."*
Her language was Irish (the passage was written twenty years ago and there is no one now on the Blaskets). As a spoken language Irish is capable of being eloquent, poetic and witty in a high degree. "The Gaelic," say the Irish philosopher, Arland Ussher, "is a language of prodigious diversity of sound and expressiveness of phrase.... It has about twice the number of sounds that other European languages can boast. As for the expressiveness of the Gaelic folk-idiom, only the Irish-English' of Synge's plays can give strangers some idea of it; it is a language, if not of a race of poets... then at least of a race which has 'tired the sun with talking," a language of quips, hyper- boles, cajoleries, endearments, lamentations, blessings, curses, tirades- and all very often in the same breath."†
The shanachie, then, seated by the peat fire, receiving attention and respect, is a central figure in Irish social and cultural history. The gathering by the fireside makes a pattern for Irish narrative and discourse in general. Hugh de Blacam writes, "The domestic seanchas of today is the cell on which the living Irish culture is built, or the channel through which the past flows to inform the future. It may deal with deep things in the house of the scholar; in the cottage it is satisfied with legendary tales."
The Irish have remained an oral rather than a literate people. (It should be noted that culture does not depend upon reading and writing: the present editor knew an old man, technically an illiterate, who delighted in repeating passages from an Irish translation of part of the Iliad.) The schools the people formed without state or church aid, the "hedge schools," got on largely without books, and this meant that a great deal of instruction had to be carried in the pupil's memory.
The academic poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was confided to farmers and fishermen; one could hear a recital of the poems of O'Brudair, O'Rahilly, Merriman in thatched cottages a hundred years after the poets were dead and gone. And that oral memory held matter that went much further back than the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robin Flower on the road to Kerry was hailed by a man digging potatoes in a field. The man came over and talked to him. "Without further preamble or explanation he fell to reciting Ossianic lays. For half an hour I sat there while his firm voice went on. After a while he changed from poetry to prose.... I listened spell- bound, and as I listened, it came to me suddenly that here on the last inhabited piece of European land, looking out into the Atlantic horizon, I was hearing the oldest living tradition in the British Isles. So far as the record goes, this matter in one form or another is older than the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and yet it lives still on the lips of the peasantry, a real and vivid experience, while except for a few painful scholars, Beowulf has long passed out of memory." This is Gaelic-speaking Ireland. But although the midland and the eastern counties have ceased to be Gaelic-speaking, the celidh or seanchas with its lively discourse, its sharp delineations of character, its well-phrased speech keeping some of the Gaelic locutions, still stays. And the formative power of the fireside gathering is strong: books read or stories picked up are turned into familiar patterns. Let us take as an extravagant example of this the paradox of actual persons' ad- ventures reproducing the pattern of a folk-tale.
Three envoys go for conference with the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. They are under bonds not to take bite or sup nor sleep a night under a stranger's roof. When they encounter their man he has a salmon in his hands-the Salmon of Knowledge-and is recognizable as the enchanter.
" He tells us that "in the peoples' memories two figures of this kind stand out distinct-the witty, inspired, improvising poet, and the poor scholar, travelling from house to house with his bag of books, solving knotty problems with the aid of recondite learning, and often by a parade of scholarship getting the upper hand among a people unlearned, but passionate admirers of printed knowledge and strange tongues." This scholar got a great deal of material from a shanachie in the Blasket Islands off Kerry, a woman, Peg Sayers, and he has this to say of her:
"She has so clean and finished a style of speech that you can follow all the nicest articulations of the language on her lips without any effort; she is a natural orator, with so keen a sense of the turn of a phrase and the lifting rhythm appropriate to Irish that her words could be written down as they leave her lips, and they could have the effect of literature with no savor of artificiality of composition. She is wont to illustrate her talk with tales long and short which come so naturally along the flow of conversation, and lighten all her discourse with the wit and wisdom and folly and vivid incident of the past."*
Her language was Irish (the passage was written twenty years ago and there is no one now on the Blaskets). As a spoken language Irish is capable of being eloquent, poetic and witty in a high degree. "The Gaelic," say the Irish philosopher, Arland Ussher, "is a language of prodigious diversity of sound and expressiveness of phrase.... It has about twice the number of sounds that other European languages can boast. As for the expressiveness of the Gaelic folk-idiom, only the Irish-English' of Synge's plays can give strangers some idea of it; it is a language, if not of a race of poets... then at least of a race which has 'tired the sun with talking," a language of quips, hyper- boles, cajoleries, endearments, lamentations, blessings, curses, tirades- and all very often in the same breath."†
The shanachie, then, seated by the peat fire, receiving attention and respect, is a central figure in Irish social and cultural history. The gathering by the fireside makes a pattern for Irish narrative and discourse in general. Hugh de Blacam writes, "The domestic seanchas of today is the cell on which the living Irish culture is built, or the channel through which the past flows to inform the future. It may deal with deep things in the house of the scholar; in the cottage it is satisfied with legendary tales."
The Irish have remained an oral rather than a literate people. (It should be noted that culture does not depend upon reading and writing: the present editor knew an old man, technically an illiterate, who delighted in repeating passages from an Irish translation of part of the Iliad.) The schools the people formed without state or church aid, the "hedge schools," got on largely without books, and this meant that a great deal of instruction had to be carried in the pupil's memory.
The academic poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was confided to farmers and fishermen; one could hear a recital of the poems of O'Brudair, O'Rahilly, Merriman in thatched cottages a hundred years after the poets were dead and gone. And that oral memory held matter that went much further back than the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robin Flower on the road to Kerry was hailed by a man digging potatoes in a field. The man came over and talked to him. "Without further preamble or explanation he fell to reciting Ossianic lays. For half an hour I sat there while his firm voice went on. After a while he changed from poetry to prose.... I listened spell- bound, and as I listened, it came to me suddenly that here on the last inhabited piece of European land, looking out into the Atlantic horizon, I was hearing the oldest living tradition in the British Isles. So far as the record goes, this matter in one form or another is older than the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and yet it lives still on the lips of the peasantry, a real and vivid experience, while except for a few painful scholars, Beowulf has long passed out of memory." This is Gaelic-speaking Ireland. But although the midland and the eastern counties have ceased to be Gaelic-speaking, the celidh or seanchas with its lively discourse, its sharp delineations of character, its well-phrased speech keeping some of the Gaelic locutions, still stays. And the formative power of the fireside gathering is strong: books read or stories picked up are turned into familiar patterns. Let us take as an extravagant example of this the paradox of actual persons' ad- ventures reproducing the pattern of a folk-tale.
Three envoys go for conference with the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. They are under bonds not to take bite or sup nor sleep a night under a stranger's roof. When they encounter their man he has a salmon in his hands-the Salmon of Knowledge-and is recognizable as the enchanter.
The three youths from Erin deliver their message. It takes the heart out of the Enchanter. In the story his groans would split the chair he is seated on. The envoys let us know that they fill the Enchanter's castle.
The editor recalls a story told him in the County Cavan. Its hero was an Irish officer who served in the American Civil War and was subsequently made Governor of Montana, Thomas Francis Meagher. Through misadventure he was drowned in the river. The narrator of the story had read a newspaper account of his death probably forty years before. He knew that Thomas Francis Meagher had been a revolutionist who had, after banishment, found asylum in the United States. The throwing off a ship in the dead of night of a soldier who, according to the story teller's notion, was on his way home to carry on a war of liberation was the climax of the story. "Will they ever find out who did it?" The query was from one who believed that secret and cunning forces were directed against the champion. Later, in the capitol grounds, the editor saw the monument to the first governor of Montana a soldierly figure on horseback-and he contrasted the solidity of the historic figure with the vulnerability of the folk-hero. That stories from bookish sources enter the Irish storyteller's repertoire cannot be gainsaid.
A listener to a recital, a reader of a collection, often comes on a story out of The Arabian Nights or the Bible. Not infrequently in the Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, Béaloideas, the provenance of a story is given as "The Royal Hibernian Tales" which were in chapbooks distributed by peddlers in the eighteenth century. As these derived from traditional stories, their mere re-telling fitted them into the pattern. But popular books of more recent times also supply characters and incidents. Before the editor read Charles Kickham's Knocknagow, people in it were made present to him by a bookless man in County Longford.
All this is to say that there is an apparatus for transmitting tradi- tion, that, as we get it, the tradition has a particular, a pervasive style,
Robin Flower: The Irish Tradition. Oxford University Press. New York.
and, further, that that style can impose itself on matter coming from the outside. Irish expression is not exclusively of the countryside. But the culture of the countryside, the traditional culture, creates and fosters that which is most distinctive in Irish expression-the oral, the thing said rather than the thing written, the colorful, the extravagant, the dramatic.
In selecting the matter of this volume from a great concourse of tales, anecdotes and poems, of character and incident, the editor strives to invoke that figure that has such a salient place in Irish tradition-the seanchaidhe (shanachie). And he would keep in mind "the witty, inspired, improvising poet, and the poor scholar, travelling from house to house with his bag of books." He would try to keep the oral element dominant, giving a lilt of speech to the main portion of the collection. But there has to be a part that is not visited by the shanachie nor the poet and scholar of the fireside gathering. Irish lore-folklore or just popular lore-is not quite understandable with- out some knowledge of the development, frustration, and disaster of the community. To supply this knowledge, the editor has to draw from something outside the traditional sources-written history and written biography. He has also to include Irish character and Irish expression as it occurred in other countries. And talking of historians- there is one who is a shanachie among shanachies in the relation of historical episodes, Standish James O'Grady.
History and the perpetuation of an oral tradition may be cause and consequence. The present editor recollects (but he cannot set down the reference) a statement accounting for the fact that Germany pre- served into the nineteenth century such a great store of folklore: it was that the Thirty Years' War put Germany back into the heroic age. In Ireland there must have been not one but a few reversions to the heroic age. Tudor warfare in the country gives the impression of more personal kinds of combat than in the rest of Western Europe at the time. The state of the country prevented the Renaissance from affecting ancient modes of feeling and expression that once belonged to the whole of Christendom. Then, with the destruction, expropriation and emigration of the great families who patronized them, the men learned in the old tradition had to betake themselves among the poor and the unlearned to the enhancement, one must believe, of the speech, the poetry, the witty discourse of the peasants' firesides. The sixteenth century ended with the destruction of the Gaelic social system through the unaccountable disaster of Kinsale. But a more dire ruin lay ahead. After the eleven years' warfare that Cromwell put an end to, the population of the country was reduced to one-sixth of what it had been before that warfare started, a reputable historian tells us.
Wolf packs went through the length and breadth of the land, attacking debilitated people. How a heritage was passed on to following generations is something historians have left unexplained. Forty years after- wards armies were again engaged at the Boyne, Aughrim and Limerick. This war was followed by a continued emigration of young men to join the armed services on the Continent. Then came penalments through which Irish trade was destroyed and Catholics were outlawed-forbidden to give or receive education, to own land, or to enter any profession. This meant that all that was cultivated in "The Hidden Ireland" gathered round the turf fires and that learned poets confided work of an extraordinary mastery of language and verse- technique to schoolless men and women.
Music was part of the inheritance. Collectors got down this music that was composed for the harp and once played before an aristocratic audience. The assembly of tunes from fiddlers and pipers as well as from the last of the harpers made an immense collection. In quantity the unwritten literature, then uncollected, corresponded to the music. But for this material there were no enthusiasts. In the middle of the nineteenth century the whole of this traditional culture-music, un- written literature, unwritten history-suffered a terrible diminution. The Famine of 1846-47 depopulated whole districts and took the spirit out of the Irish countryside. Writing immediately after that disaster, Sir William Wilde, who was not only a medical practitioner but an antiquarian and an ethnologist, and who as an Irish speaker had access to the West of Ireland folklore, made this mournful statement.
The editor recalls a story told him in the County Cavan. Its hero was an Irish officer who served in the American Civil War and was subsequently made Governor of Montana, Thomas Francis Meagher. Through misadventure he was drowned in the river. The narrator of the story had read a newspaper account of his death probably forty years before. He knew that Thomas Francis Meagher had been a revolutionist who had, after banishment, found asylum in the United States. The throwing off a ship in the dead of night of a soldier who, according to the story teller's notion, was on his way home to carry on a war of liberation was the climax of the story. "Will they ever find out who did it?" The query was from one who believed that secret and cunning forces were directed against the champion. Later, in the capitol grounds, the editor saw the monument to the first governor of Montana a soldierly figure on horseback-and he contrasted the solidity of the historic figure with the vulnerability of the folk-hero. That stories from bookish sources enter the Irish storyteller's repertoire cannot be gainsaid.
A listener to a recital, a reader of a collection, often comes on a story out of The Arabian Nights or the Bible. Not infrequently in the Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, Béaloideas, the provenance of a story is given as "The Royal Hibernian Tales" which were in chapbooks distributed by peddlers in the eighteenth century. As these derived from traditional stories, their mere re-telling fitted them into the pattern. But popular books of more recent times also supply characters and incidents. Before the editor read Charles Kickham's Knocknagow, people in it were made present to him by a bookless man in County Longford.
All this is to say that there is an apparatus for transmitting tradi- tion, that, as we get it, the tradition has a particular, a pervasive style,
Robin Flower: The Irish Tradition. Oxford University Press. New York.
and, further, that that style can impose itself on matter coming from the outside. Irish expression is not exclusively of the countryside. But the culture of the countryside, the traditional culture, creates and fosters that which is most distinctive in Irish expression-the oral, the thing said rather than the thing written, the colorful, the extravagant, the dramatic.
In selecting the matter of this volume from a great concourse of tales, anecdotes and poems, of character and incident, the editor strives to invoke that figure that has such a salient place in Irish tradition-the seanchaidhe (shanachie). And he would keep in mind "the witty, inspired, improvising poet, and the poor scholar, travelling from house to house with his bag of books." He would try to keep the oral element dominant, giving a lilt of speech to the main portion of the collection. But there has to be a part that is not visited by the shanachie nor the poet and scholar of the fireside gathering. Irish lore-folklore or just popular lore-is not quite understandable with- out some knowledge of the development, frustration, and disaster of the community. To supply this knowledge, the editor has to draw from something outside the traditional sources-written history and written biography. He has also to include Irish character and Irish expression as it occurred in other countries. And talking of historians- there is one who is a shanachie among shanachies in the relation of historical episodes, Standish James O'Grady.
History and the perpetuation of an oral tradition may be cause and consequence. The present editor recollects (but he cannot set down the reference) a statement accounting for the fact that Germany pre- served into the nineteenth century such a great store of folklore: it was that the Thirty Years' War put Germany back into the heroic age. In Ireland there must have been not one but a few reversions to the heroic age. Tudor warfare in the country gives the impression of more personal kinds of combat than in the rest of Western Europe at the time. The state of the country prevented the Renaissance from affecting ancient modes of feeling and expression that once belonged to the whole of Christendom. Then, with the destruction, expropriation and emigration of the great families who patronized them, the men learned in the old tradition had to betake themselves among the poor and the unlearned to the enhancement, one must believe, of the speech, the poetry, the witty discourse of the peasants' firesides. The sixteenth century ended with the destruction of the Gaelic social system through the unaccountable disaster of Kinsale. But a more dire ruin lay ahead. After the eleven years' warfare that Cromwell put an end to, the population of the country was reduced to one-sixth of what it had been before that warfare started, a reputable historian tells us.
Wolf packs went through the length and breadth of the land, attacking debilitated people. How a heritage was passed on to following generations is something historians have left unexplained. Forty years after- wards armies were again engaged at the Boyne, Aughrim and Limerick. This war was followed by a continued emigration of young men to join the armed services on the Continent. Then came penalments through which Irish trade was destroyed and Catholics were outlawed-forbidden to give or receive education, to own land, or to enter any profession. This meant that all that was cultivated in "The Hidden Ireland" gathered round the turf fires and that learned poets confided work of an extraordinary mastery of language and verse- technique to schoolless men and women.
Music was part of the inheritance. Collectors got down this music that was composed for the harp and once played before an aristocratic audience. The assembly of tunes from fiddlers and pipers as well as from the last of the harpers made an immense collection. In quantity the unwritten literature, then uncollected, corresponded to the music. But for this material there were no enthusiasts. In the middle of the nineteenth century the whole of this traditional culture-music, un- written literature, unwritten history-suffered a terrible diminution. The Famine of 1846-47 depopulated whole districts and took the spirit out of the Irish countryside. Writing immediately after that disaster, Sir William Wilde, who was not only a medical practitioner but an antiquarian and an ethnologist, and who as an Irish speaker had access to the West of Ireland folklore, made this mournful statement.
"With depopulation the most terrific which any country has ever experienced on the one hand, and the introduction of railroads, colleges, industrial and other educational schools on the other- together with the rapid decay of the Irish vernacular, in which the most of our legends, romantic tales, ballads and bardic annals, and vestiges of Pagan rites, and relics of fairy charms were pre- served can superstitious practice continue to exist? But these matters of popular belief and folklore, these rites and legends and superstitions, were, after all, the poetry of the people, the bond that knit the peasant to the soil, and cheered and solaced many a cottier's fireside...."
Forty years after the Famine, scholars began to move into districts where Gaelic was still a vernacular, and to set down the stories, poems, proverbs and charms that were current. An example was given to Ireland by a collector in the other Gaelic territory, by John Francis Campbell (Campbell of Islay), a true Gael whose heart was with the people of the Scottish Highlands and the Islands. His Popular Tales of the West Highlands is in every respect the most magnificent assembly of Gaelic folklore accessible in book form. An Irish-American scholar, Jeremiah Curtin, was commissioned by the editor of the New York Sun to collect the stories of the Gaelic-speaking districts in Ireland.
He did this and published a voluminous collection.† Curtin Lady Wilde made English versions of some of the stories and proverbs he wrote down in Irish. Sir William and Lady Wilde were the parents of Oscar. †The stories appeared originally in the Sunday Supplement of the Sun, 1892- 1893. They were later published in two books: Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland and Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World. was one of those terrific Lavengros who can pick up a language by ear and use it extensively in a couple of weeks. He wrote down and translated the Zuni Indian chants; he translated long works from Polish and Russian; it would seem that Irish was just homework for him. Curtin has been blamed by Irish scholars for his inexact renderings of some terms. These are not of frequent occurrence, however.
The rea! defect of his translations comes from his inability to get colloquial charm into his English. Another collector was William Larminie, a poet with a remarkable scholarly equipment: he wrote down in Irish and translated into English stories told in Donegal and Mayo. And then there was that poet and scholar who, when asked at his entrance into Dublin University what languages he knew, replied, "Latin, Greek, Hebrew" and added, "but I dream in Irish." This was Douglas Hyde. He loved and admired the people who held to the unwritten literature, and to him more than to any other person is due the fact that so much of the traditional culture has been saved and that a modern literature in Irish has come into existence. In his translations of folk poetry, particularly in his Love Songs of Connacht, he is unrivalled.
By the time a national government had come into being, people were awake to the necessity of getting down all that was left of the narratives, poems, proverbs, charms and histories that were still related orally in Irish and English. It was recognized that the work should be systematic and comprehensive, with headquarters, archives, publications. To serve these ends a Folklore Commission was set up with Professor Delargy as its head; its headquarters is the Folklore Institute in Dublin; a quarterly, Béaloideas, is published by The Folklore of Ireland Society in Irish and English, containing oral material as taken down by collectors and reviews of publications dealing with folklore. This backing of the enterprise of a dozen scholars, this assembling of the lore of the people of the countryside with its enormous number of variants, might seem to be one of the state's less serious undertakings, but as the collection grows and as scholars interpret it, a new conception of the history of the Irish people begins to take shape: one can go beyond this and say that light is thrown on the history of the West European people. For the tradition so tenaciously held in the last outpost of Europe is not merely parochial. It is national, as Professor Delargy says. And this unwritten literature of Ireland once be- longed to the whole of Western Europe: it is an international literature, the pre-Renaissance literature of Europe animated by the Gaelic spirit-"a survival of the ancient and mediaeval world of which men read in books, but which we in Ireland have the amazing advantage and privilege of studying at first hand from the living speech of the Irish countryside," to quote Professor Delargy once more.
Forty years after the Famine, scholars began to move into districts where Gaelic was still a vernacular, and to set down the stories, poems, proverbs and charms that were current. An example was given to Ireland by a collector in the other Gaelic territory, by John Francis Campbell (Campbell of Islay), a true Gael whose heart was with the people of the Scottish Highlands and the Islands. His Popular Tales of the West Highlands is in every respect the most magnificent assembly of Gaelic folklore accessible in book form. An Irish-American scholar, Jeremiah Curtin, was commissioned by the editor of the New York Sun to collect the stories of the Gaelic-speaking districts in Ireland.
He did this and published a voluminous collection.† Curtin Lady Wilde made English versions of some of the stories and proverbs he wrote down in Irish. Sir William and Lady Wilde were the parents of Oscar. †The stories appeared originally in the Sunday Supplement of the Sun, 1892- 1893. They were later published in two books: Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland and Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World. was one of those terrific Lavengros who can pick up a language by ear and use it extensively in a couple of weeks. He wrote down and translated the Zuni Indian chants; he translated long works from Polish and Russian; it would seem that Irish was just homework for him. Curtin has been blamed by Irish scholars for his inexact renderings of some terms. These are not of frequent occurrence, however.
The rea! defect of his translations comes from his inability to get colloquial charm into his English. Another collector was William Larminie, a poet with a remarkable scholarly equipment: he wrote down in Irish and translated into English stories told in Donegal and Mayo. And then there was that poet and scholar who, when asked at his entrance into Dublin University what languages he knew, replied, "Latin, Greek, Hebrew" and added, "but I dream in Irish." This was Douglas Hyde. He loved and admired the people who held to the unwritten literature, and to him more than to any other person is due the fact that so much of the traditional culture has been saved and that a modern literature in Irish has come into existence. In his translations of folk poetry, particularly in his Love Songs of Connacht, he is unrivalled.
By the time a national government had come into being, people were awake to the necessity of getting down all that was left of the narratives, poems, proverbs, charms and histories that were still related orally in Irish and English. It was recognized that the work should be systematic and comprehensive, with headquarters, archives, publications. To serve these ends a Folklore Commission was set up with Professor Delargy as its head; its headquarters is the Folklore Institute in Dublin; a quarterly, Béaloideas, is published by The Folklore of Ireland Society in Irish and English, containing oral material as taken down by collectors and reviews of publications dealing with folklore. This backing of the enterprise of a dozen scholars, this assembling of the lore of the people of the countryside with its enormous number of variants, might seem to be one of the state's less serious undertakings, but as the collection grows and as scholars interpret it, a new conception of the history of the Irish people begins to take shape: one can go beyond this and say that light is thrown on the history of the West European people. For the tradition so tenaciously held in the last outpost of Europe is not merely parochial. It is national, as Professor Delargy says. And this unwritten literature of Ireland once be- longed to the whole of Western Europe: it is an international literature, the pre-Renaissance literature of Europe animated by the Gaelic spirit-"a survival of the ancient and mediaeval world of which men read in books, but which we in Ireland have the amazing advantage and privilege of studying at first hand from the living speech of the Irish countryside," to quote Professor Delargy once more.
As a great deal in this book has another origin, a reader may wonder why so much space has been given in this introduction to the matter of countryside. The reason is-and the repetition may be needed to give the statement its due importance-that to the mind of the editor,Irish lore when distinctive has the oral style that has been formed or perpetuated in the countryside. This applies to northeast Ulster also. Only a few examples of this lore are given here, not because it is not extensive but because in general it merges with the lore of the rest of the country. Selections which the editor judged to be most distinctive are at the end of the section "The Face of the Land."
When an editor at Crown Publishers invited me to compile for its Folklore series A Treasury of Irish Folklore. I was hesitant. "I am not a folklorist," I told the editor, "I am a poet and a teller of stories." "But you are a man of the Irish countryside," he said, "and have an acquaintance with the traditional way of life out of which the folklore came." "But there is the discipline the special discipline of the folklorist," I told him. "Do you know any- one with that discipline who will compile a treasury of Irish folklore for us?" he asked. I had that privilege. But it was then disclosed that the scholars in that field had commitments that prevented their taking up such a work. Meanwhile the idea of a treasury of Irish Folklore had been put into my mind. It was seen, however, as a difficult undertaking. The folklore of Ireland-the stories, songs, jests, riddles, usages, charms that make the body of this unwritten literature-is very voluminous.
And besides the unwritten literature there is matter that has influenced generations of Irish people that would have to be included in such a treasury- characters, occurrences, anecdotes, speeches, literary creations that have been absorbed into common discourse. And in compiling such a work for an American public, all these matters would have to be put into a perspective, and this would mean the insertion of passages of relevant history.
These difficulties made the assignment so challenging that I decided to take it up. I had had encounters with Irish folklore that gave me insights into the subject; these insights, though coming early in life, had never been lost, and had really never been neglected. I will here refer to their occasions.
Along the main roads of Ireland, ten or twenty miles from each other, are very solid buildings which are now County Homes but before the formation of the Irish State were Workhouses. Originally they were places of shelter for the destitute survivors of the great disaster of the Famine, and afterwards for families evicted from their farms through the operation of bad land laws. My father was master of a Workhouse on the road between Leinster and Connacht.
I was born and lived the years of my childhood there. And I came to know as characters the "casuals" who took a night's shelter in the Workhouse. Many of them, men and women, had survived from a time when the folk tradition was pervasive-tinkers, ballad-singers, basket-makers, pipers, fiddlers, men and women itinerants. I must have heard their discourse as I loitered by the gate through which they entered or departed. In this way I be- came acquainted with ways of living and a fashion of speech and with some of the occupations that belonged to old-time Ireland.
Soon after this initiation I went to live in my grandmother's house on a small farm in County Cavan. The place had ceased to be Irish-speaking, but enough of the past remained to create a familiarity with the old tradition. The entertainment of the evening was the celidh, the group round the peat fire made up of visitors who relished conversation and had some pride in their ability to express themselves and to recall interesting personages, interesting episodes in local history. My grandmother knew traditional stories-some that I heard from her were beautiful-but she did not relate them in a professional way. However, her house had one visitor who could do just that, one who was the last shanachie of the district, the last professional storyteller and historian. In his house-it was a tumbledown cabin lighted only by a candle but more often by just the peat on the hearth-I heard stories told in the professional way, with the timing, the gestures, the stresses that belong to an ancient popular art.
And this side of my education was carried on by another person- my uncle-in-law whose business it was to attend the markets in towns around and buy fowl from farmers' wives and daughters, sending them to bigger markets for export. On days when I did not have to go to school, the fowl-buyer would let me come with him to this or that market-town. Such a place would never be without a ballad-singer singing or rather bawling across the street a "come-all-ye" (so called because the opening was generally "Come all ye tender Christians" or "Come all ye true-born Irishman"-one would be pathetic and the other rousing). In these matters the uncle-in-law was a real mentor; jogging home in his cart he would sing a dozen or so ballads out of his own repertoire. Such encounters gave me knowledge of some of the unwritten literature of the people with a good deal of relish for it. My education in these matters was put on another level when I learned what Irish I know through sitting by firesides in Connemara and having the old folk lesson me with the aid of the books I brought to them-mainly Douglas Hyde's collections of the folk songs of Connacht. Here I realized the truth that is in the simple utterance quoted by him on a page of The Love Songs of Connacht:
A tune is more lasting than the voice of the birds,
A word is more lasting than the riches of the world.
Is buaine port ná glor na h-éun,
Is buaine jocal na toice an t-saeghail.
Padraic Colum
When an editor at Crown Publishers invited me to compile for its Folklore series A Treasury of Irish Folklore. I was hesitant. "I am not a folklorist," I told the editor, "I am a poet and a teller of stories." "But you are a man of the Irish countryside," he said, "and have an acquaintance with the traditional way of life out of which the folklore came." "But there is the discipline the special discipline of the folklorist," I told him. "Do you know any- one with that discipline who will compile a treasury of Irish folklore for us?" he asked. I had that privilege. But it was then disclosed that the scholars in that field had commitments that prevented their taking up such a work. Meanwhile the idea of a treasury of Irish Folklore had been put into my mind. It was seen, however, as a difficult undertaking. The folklore of Ireland-the stories, songs, jests, riddles, usages, charms that make the body of this unwritten literature-is very voluminous.
And besides the unwritten literature there is matter that has influenced generations of Irish people that would have to be included in such a treasury- characters, occurrences, anecdotes, speeches, literary creations that have been absorbed into common discourse. And in compiling such a work for an American public, all these matters would have to be put into a perspective, and this would mean the insertion of passages of relevant history.
These difficulties made the assignment so challenging that I decided to take it up. I had had encounters with Irish folklore that gave me insights into the subject; these insights, though coming early in life, had never been lost, and had really never been neglected. I will here refer to their occasions.
Along the main roads of Ireland, ten or twenty miles from each other, are very solid buildings which are now County Homes but before the formation of the Irish State were Workhouses. Originally they were places of shelter for the destitute survivors of the great disaster of the Famine, and afterwards for families evicted from their farms through the operation of bad land laws. My father was master of a Workhouse on the road between Leinster and Connacht.
I was born and lived the years of my childhood there. And I came to know as characters the "casuals" who took a night's shelter in the Workhouse. Many of them, men and women, had survived from a time when the folk tradition was pervasive-tinkers, ballad-singers, basket-makers, pipers, fiddlers, men and women itinerants. I must have heard their discourse as I loitered by the gate through which they entered or departed. In this way I be- came acquainted with ways of living and a fashion of speech and with some of the occupations that belonged to old-time Ireland.
Soon after this initiation I went to live in my grandmother's house on a small farm in County Cavan. The place had ceased to be Irish-speaking, but enough of the past remained to create a familiarity with the old tradition. The entertainment of the evening was the celidh, the group round the peat fire made up of visitors who relished conversation and had some pride in their ability to express themselves and to recall interesting personages, interesting episodes in local history. My grandmother knew traditional stories-some that I heard from her were beautiful-but she did not relate them in a professional way. However, her house had one visitor who could do just that, one who was the last shanachie of the district, the last professional storyteller and historian. In his house-it was a tumbledown cabin lighted only by a candle but more often by just the peat on the hearth-I heard stories told in the professional way, with the timing, the gestures, the stresses that belong to an ancient popular art.
And this side of my education was carried on by another person- my uncle-in-law whose business it was to attend the markets in towns around and buy fowl from farmers' wives and daughters, sending them to bigger markets for export. On days when I did not have to go to school, the fowl-buyer would let me come with him to this or that market-town. Such a place would never be without a ballad-singer singing or rather bawling across the street a "come-all-ye" (so called because the opening was generally "Come all ye tender Christians" or "Come all ye true-born Irishman"-one would be pathetic and the other rousing). In these matters the uncle-in-law was a real mentor; jogging home in his cart he would sing a dozen or so ballads out of his own repertoire. Such encounters gave me knowledge of some of the unwritten literature of the people with a good deal of relish for it. My education in these matters was put on another level when I learned what Irish I know through sitting by firesides in Connemara and having the old folk lesson me with the aid of the books I brought to them-mainly Douglas Hyde's collections of the folk songs of Connacht. Here I realized the truth that is in the simple utterance quoted by him on a page of The Love Songs of Connacht:
A tune is more lasting than the voice of the birds,
A word is more lasting than the riches of the world.
Is buaine port ná glor na h-éun,
Is buaine jocal na toice an t-saeghail.
Padraic Colum
