Celtic Fairy Tales (26 page)

III. FIELD OF BOLIAUNS.

Source
.—T. Crofton Croker's
Fairy Legends of the South of
Ireland
, ed. Wright, pp. 135-9. In the original the gnome is a
Cluricaune, but as a friend of Mr. Batten's has recently heard the
tale told of a Lepracaun, I have adopted the better known title.

Remarks
.—
Lepracaun
is from the Irish
leith
bhrogan
, the one-shoemaker (
cf
. brogue), according to Dr.
Hyde. He is generally seen (and to this day, too) working at a
single shoe,
cf.
Croker's story "Little Shoe,"
l.c.
pp. 142-4.
According to a writer in the
Revue Celtique
, i. 256, the true
etymology is
luchor pan
, "little man." Dr. Joyce also gives the same
etymology in
Irish Names and Places
, i. 183, where he mentions
several places named after them.

IV. HORNED WOMEN.

Source
.—Lady Wilde's
Ancient Legends
, the first
story.

Parallels
.—A similar version was given by Mr. D. Fitzgerald
in the
Revue Celtique
, iv. 181, but without the significant
and impressive horns. He refers to
Cornhill
for February
1877, and to Campbell's "Sauntraigh" No. xxii.
Pop. Tales
,
ii. 52 4, in which a "woman of peace" (a fairy) borrows a woman's
kettle and returns it with flesh in it, but at last the woman
refuses, and is persecuted by the fairy. I fail to see much analogy.
A much closer one is in Campbell, ii. p. 63, where fairies are got
rid of by shouting "Dunveilg is on fire." The familiar "lady-bird,
lady-bird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children at
home," will occur to English minds. Another version in Kennedy's
Legendary Fictions
, p. 164, "Black Stairs on Fire."

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

V. CONAL YELLOWCLAW.

Source
.—Campbell,
Pop. Tales of West Highlands
, No.
v. pp. 105-8, "Conall Cra Bhuidhe." I have softened the third
episode, which is somewhat too ghastly in the original. I have
translated "Cra Bhuide" Yellowclaw on the strength of Campbell's
etymology,
l.c.
p. 158.

Parallels
.—Campbell's vi. and vii. are two variants showing
how widespread the story is in Gaelic Scotland. It occurs in Ireland
where it has been printed in the chapbook,
Hibernian Tales
,
as the "Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen," the Black Thief
being Conall, and the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan
(it is given in Mr. Lang's
Red Fairy Book
). Here it attracted
the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his
Irish Sketch-Book
, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the
Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That
fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by
producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who
was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost"
(why "almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of
the giant's breath occurs in the story of Koisha Kayn, MacInnes'
Tales
, i. 241, as well as the Polyphemus one,
ibid.
265.
One-eyed giants are frequent in Celtic folk-tales (
e.g.
in
The
Pursuit of Diarmaid
and in the
Mabinogi
of Owen).

Remarks.
—Thackeray's reference to the "Arabian Nights" is
especially apt, as the tale of Conall is a framework story like
The 1001 Nights
, the three stories told by Conall being
framed, as it were, in a fourth which is nominally the real story.
This method employed by the Indian story-tellers and from them
adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all European literatures
(Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally thought to be peculiar
to the East, and to be ultimately derived from the Jatakas or Birth
Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in former
incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also in
"The Story-teller at Fault" in this collection, and the story
of
Koisha Kayn
in MacInnes'
Argyllshire Tales
, a variant
of which, collected but not published by Campbell, has no less than
nineteen tales enclosed in a framework. The question is whether the
method was adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign
influences. Confining ourselves to "Conal Yellowclaw," it seems not
unlikely that the whole story is an importation. For the second
episode is clearly the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which
was known in Ireland perhaps as early as the tenth century (see
Prof. K. Meyer's edition of
Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis
, Pref.
p. xii). It also crept into the voyages of Sindbad in the
Arabian
Nights
. And as told in the Highlands it bears comparison even
with the Homeric version. As Mr. Nutt remarks (
Celt. Mag.
xii.) the address of the giant to the buck is as effective as that
of Polyphemus to his ram. The narrator, James Wilson, was a blind
man who would naturally feel the pathos of the address; "it comes
from the heart of the narrator;" says Campbell (
l.c.
, 148),
"it is the ornament which his mind hangs on the frame of the story."

VI. HUDDEN AND DUDDEN.

Source.
—From oral tradition, by the late D. W. Logie, taken
down by Mr. Alfred Nutt.

Parallels.
—Lover has a tale, "Little Fairly," obviously
derived from this folk-tale; and there is another very similar,
"Darby Darly." Another version of our tale is given under the title
"Donald and his Neighbours," in the chapbook
Hibernian Tales
m
whence it was reprinted by Thackeray in his
Irish Sketch-
Book
, c. xvi. This has the incident of the "accidental matricide,"
on which see Prof. R. Köhler on Gonzenbach
Sicil. Mährchen
,
ii. 224. No less than four tales of Campbell are of this type
(
Pop. Tales
, ii. 218-31). M. Cosquin, in his "Contes populaires
de Lorraine," the storehouse of "storiology," has elaborate
excursuses in this class of tales attached to his Nos. x. and xx.
Mr. Clouston discusses it also in his
Pop. Tales
, ii. 229-88.
Both these writers are inclined to trace the chief incidents
to India. It is to be observed that one of the earliest popular
drolls in Europe,
Unibos
, a Latin poem of the eleventh, and
perhaps the tenth, century, has the main outlines of the story, the
fraudulent sale of worthless objects and the escape from the sack
trick. The same story occurs in Straparola, the European earliest
collection of folk-tales in the sixteenth century. On the other
hand, the gold sticking to the scales is familiar to us in
Ali
Baba
. (
Cf.
Cosquin,
l.c.
, i. 225-6, 229).

Remarks
.—It is indeed curious to find, as M. Cosquin points
out, a cunning fellow tied in a sack getting out by crying, "I won't
marry the princess," in countries so far apart as Ireland, Sicily
(Gonzenbach, No. 71), Afghanistan (Thorburn,
Bannu
, p. 184),
and Jamaica (
Folk-Lore Record
, iii. 53). It is indeed impossible
to think these are disconnected, and for drolls of this kind a good
case has been made out for the borrowing hypotheses by M. Cosquin
and Mr. Clouston. Who borrowed from whom is another and more
difficult question which has to be judged on its merits in each
individual case.

This is a type of Celtic folk-tales which are European in spread,
have analogies with the East, and can only be said to be Celtic by
adoption and by colouring. They form a distinct section of the tales
told by the Celts, and must be represented in any characteristic
selection. Other examples are xi., xv., xx., and perhaps xxii.

VII. SHEPHERD OF MYDDVAI.

Source
.—Preface to the edition of "The Physicians of
Myddvai"; their prescription-book, from the Red Book of Hergest,
published by the Welsh MS. Society in 1861. The legend is not
given in the Red Book, but from oral tradition by Mr. W. Rees, p. xxi.
As this is the first of the Welsh tales in this book it may be as well
to give the reader such guidance as I can afford him on the
intricacies of Welsh pronunciation, especially with regard to the
mysterious
w
's and
y
's of Welsh orthography. For
w
substitute
double
o
, as in "
fool
," and for
y
, the short
u
in b
u
t,
and as near approach to Cymric speech will be reached as is possible
for the outlander. It maybe added that double
d
equals
th
, and
double
l
is something like
Fl
, as Shakespeare knew in calling
his Welsh soldier Fluellen (Llewelyn). Thus "Meddygon Myddvai"
would be
Anglicè
"Methugon Muthvai."

Parallels.
—Other versions of the legend of the Van Pool are
given in
Cambro-Briton
, ii. 315; W. Sikes,
British Goblins
,
p. 40. Mr. E. Sidney Hartland has discussed these and others
in a set of papers contributed to the first volume of
The
Archaeological Review
(now incorporated into
Folk-Lore
),
the substance of which is now given in his
Science of Fairy
Tales
, 274-332. (See also the references given in
Revue
Celtique
, iv., 187 and 268). Mr. Hartland gives there an
ecumenical collection of parallels to the several incidents that go
to make up our story—(1) The bride-capture of the Swan-Maiden, (2)
the recognition of the bride, (3) the taboo against causeless blows,
(4) doomed to be broken, and (5) disappearance of the Swan-Maiden,
with (6) her return as Guardian Spirit to her descendants. In each
case Mr. Hartland gives what he considers to be the most primitive
form of the incident. With reference to our present tale, he comes
to the conclusion, if I understand him aright, that the lake-maiden
was once regarded as a local divinity. The physicians of Myddvai
were historic personages, renowned for their medical skill for some
six centuries, till the race died out with John Jones,
fl.
1743. To explain their skill and uncanny knowledge of herbs, the
folk traced them to a supernatural ancestress, who taught them their
craft in a place still called Pant-y-Meddygon ("Doctors' Dingle").
Their medical knowledge did not require any such remarkable origin,
as Mr. Hartland has shown in a paper "On Welsh Folk-Medicine,"
contributed to
Y Cymmrodor
, vol. xii. On the other hand, the
Swan-Maiden type of story is widespread through the Old World. Mr.
Morris' "Land East of the Moon and West of the Sun," in
The
Earthly Paradise
, is taken from the Norse version. Parallels are
accumulated by the Grimms, ii. 432; Köhler on Gonzenbach, ii. 20;
or Blade, 149; Stokes'
Indian Fairy Tales
, 243, 276; and
Messrs. Jones and Koopf,
Magyar Folk-Tales
, 362-5. It remains
to be proved that one of these versions did not travel to Wales, and
become there localised. We shall see other instances of such
localisation or specialisation of general legends.

VIII. THE SPRIGHTLY TAILOR.

Source.
—
Notes and Queries
for December 21, 1861; to
which it was communicated by "Cuthbert Bede," the author of
Verdant Green
, who collected it in Cantyre.

Parallels
.—Miss Dempster gives the same story in her
Sutherland Collection, No. vii. (referred to by Campbell in his
Gaelic list, at end of vol. iv.); Mrs. John Faed, I am informed by a
friend, knows the Gaelic version, as told by her nurse in her youth.
Chambers' "Strange Visitor,"
Pop. Rhymes of Scotland
, 64, of
which I gave an Anglicised version in my
English Fairy Tales
,
No. xxxii., is clearly a variant.

Remarks
.—The Macdonald of Saddell Castle was a very great
man indeed. Once, when dining with the Lord-Lieutenant, an apology
was made to him for placing him so far away from the head of the
table. "Where the Macdonald sits," was the proud response, "there is
the head of the table."

IX. DEIRDRE.

Source
.—
Celtic Magazine
, xiii. pp. 69,
seq
. I
have abridged somewhat, made the sons of Fergus all faithful instead
of two traitors, and omitted an incident in the house of the wild
men called here "strangers." The original Gaelic was given in the
Transactions of the Inverness Gaelic Society
for 1887, p.
241,
seq.
, by Mr. Carmichael. I have inserted Deirdre's
"Lament" from the
Book of Leinster
.

Parallels
.—This is one of the three most sorrowful Tales
of Erin, (the other two,
Children of Lir
and
Children of
Tureen
, are given in Dr. Joyce's
Old Celtic Romances
), and
is a specimen of the old heroic sagas of elopement, a list of
which is given in the
Book of Leinster
. The "outcast child"
is a frequent episode in folk and hero-tales: an instance occurs in
my
English Fairy Tales
, No. xxxv., and Prof. Köhler gives
many others in
Archiv. f. Slav. Philologie
, i. 288. Mr. Nutt
adds tenth century Celtic parallels in
Folk-Lore
, vol. ii.
The wooing of hero by heroine is a characteristic Celtic touch. See
"Connla" here, and other examples given by Mr. Nutt in his notes to
MacInnes'
Tales
. The trees growing from the lovers' graves
occurs in the English ballad of
Lord Lovel
and has been
studied in
Mélusine
.