Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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