Irish Folk Tales (14 page)

The Aran Islands
brings together Synge’s interests in evolution and socialism. That mix characterized the folklore scholarship of his period, when folk culture was defined as a survival from an earlier evolutionary stage, marked by a generous and happy collective spirit. But Synge’s book was not conventional folklore writing, which was one reason it took years to find its publisher. Nor was
The Aran Islands
anything like the old sketches of peasant life, though the sketching idea remained alive in hands like those of Seumas MacManus. And Synge’s book was not journalism. Its prose was clear and new and beautiful. John Synge observed like a naturalist, and like others of his time who belonged to naturalists’ clubs in Ireland, he was a pioneer photographer of rural life. He observed like a naturalist and wrote like a poet to invent a new genre of emotional ethnography.

While
The Aran Islands
was being rejected by a series of publishers, John Synge entered a state of white-hot creativity. In six years he wrote all of his plays, all but one influenced by his time on the Arans, two of them founded directly upon traditional narratives he heard there. Familiarity with the idea of the sketch breeds misunderstanding of Synge’s achievement. He does not depict Irish life as it is or was, but like the old teller of tales, he enters and enacts the Irish consciousness. Do not think of the country people he knew as playing upon the stage but as sitting beside him in the darkened theater, laughing and crying and twitching at his restatement of their ideas.

“All art,” John Synge said, “is a collaboration.” No mere association between like-minded artists, the collaboration that powered his movement unified the artist with the national tradition. This is the structure of collaboration: in order to locate deep truths and to gain wide appeal, to avoid the trivializing constraints of academic endeavor, the artist roots his work in the folk culture and then accepts two responsibilities: to preserve the old tradition intact for the future; to do battle with the tradition so as to answer the needs of the self while creating new works for new worlds. In
The Aran Islands
and its companion,
In Wicklow and West Kerry
, Synge recorded the old ways as Lady Gregory said the folklorist should, with patience and reverence. All of his plays bear a relation to the tradition and two of them at least,
Riders to the Sea
and
The Playboy of the Western World
, are among the first great works of modern drama.

John Synge’s oeuvre provides one pristine example of the perfection of Carleton’s solution. In
The Aran Islands
he quotes Pat Dirane’s folktale from which his play
In the Shadow of the Glen
was constructed. The story that inspired
The Playboy
is not presented as a text, and the rest of his plays are less specifically drawn from folk art. Scientist and artist, John Synge was an artist first, so we will relocate the center of his movement by balancing him with Douglas Hyde, who did write plays based on folktales, but who dedicated himself primarily to the collection and preservation of folklore.

Only Ireland could choose a folklorist for its first president. Douglas Hyde’s election in 1937 capped a career that commenced in serious linguistic study. The son of a Protestant minister from Roscommon, Hyde studied Hebrew and Greek and Irish at Trinity. To improve his Irish, he went into the countryside, listened to the aged speakers, and wrote down their stories and songs. To preserve Irish, he founded the Gaelic League in 1893. The League extended its mission from linguistic to national revival and provided the context in which the spirit of rebellion was nurtured until it broke forth in war in 1916. While others pressed toward armed action, Hyde withdrew to protect his culture by writing his monumental
Literary History of Ireland
and by publishing, between 1889 and 1939, a sequence of volumes filled with folk texts.

Douglas Hyde, wrote William Butler Yeats, “knows the people thoroughly.… His work is neither humorous nor mournful; it is simply life.” Accuracy was Hyde’s concern. He surveyed the works that preceded his own in a kindly mood, but still found their stories manipulated, padded, and cooked. “Attempts,” he wrote in
Beside the Fire
, published in 1890, “have been made from time to time during the present century to collect Irish folk-lore, but these attempts, though interesting from a literary point of view, are not always successes from a scientific one.” Art and science obey different rules. Before Hyde, some writers of folktales leaned more toward art, others more toward science, but all created imperfect blends. In Hyde’s day, his friends W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge separated science and art and performed differently in different contexts to meet different responsibilities. After Hyde, division became complete. Some devoted themselves to art, others to science.

In 1902, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce met for the first time on a street in Dublin. Joyce told the poet that his reliance on folklore was a sign of his deterioration. Yeats constructed a long counterargument, contending that art depends on the popular tradition to prevent the pursuit of individualism from ending in sterility. The twenty-year-old Joyce replied, or so Yeats tells it, that it was a pity Yeats was too old to receive his influence. The next year Joyce met Synge, read
Riders to the Sea
and did not like it, and reviewing Lady Gregory’s new
Poets and Dreamers
he described her storytellers as
senile, feeble, and sleepy. Then the next year, with a little gift from Lady Gregory in his pocket, Joyce flew by the nets of home and religion to lodge in exile. Early in
Ulysses
, when the clever college boys speak of Hyde and Synge and “that old hake Gregory,” they do so to divorce themselves from the dominant Irish literary movement of their day, but the adult Joyce incorporated the school of Yeats and about everything else into his unreadable masterpiece named after a folksong,
Finnegans Wake
. In it James Joyce makes the Irish land, its rivers and ancient murmurs, heroic to the modern world, and from Joyce on, profoundly in Samuel Beckett, contentiously in Patrick Kavanagh, hilariously in Flann O’Brien, sublimely in the verse of the major poetic school of our day, that of Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Murphy, the Irish land and its people and their art have continued to prove inspiring and worthy of defeat. But the work of preserving folklore has been taken up by others, committed first to science.

Three years after the rebels put down their guns and Ireland won a moment of peace, the Folklore of Ireland Society was founded and James Delargy, once assistant to Douglas Hyde, became editor of its journal,
Béaloideas
. Delargy argued that the preservation of folklore served more than the scientist’s curiosity and did more than supply raw materials to artists. It was essential to the maintenance of a distinct national culture. He appealed for state support, and when funds were granted to establish the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935, he was named director. Delargy brought to Dublin a schoolteacher from Kerry named Sean O’Sullivan, then sent him for training to Sweden so that he could become the Commission’s archivist, charged with the organization of the materials gathered by the Commission’s full-time collectors. None of the collectors were university men. They came out of the country, received Ediphone recorders and instruction in verbatim transcription, and returned into the countryside. New men were in command of the Irish tradition. They were not outsiders but people of the people. I have listened to Sean O’Sullivan tell the old story of the man who had no story, and I have caroused around Dublin with Michael J. Murphy, then followed him across Ulster by reading the superb diaries that he, like the other collectors, has deposited in the archive. Michael J. Murphy returned from the place of his birth, Liverpool, to the place of his people, south Armagh, where he invented the idea of folklore for himself and composed a fine book,
At Slieve Gullion’s Foot
. Immediately afterward, in 1941, Delargy invited him to become the Commission’s collector for Ulster east of Donegal. Murphy is a playwright and a novelist, but he shines most brightly in his account of his adventures in the field,
Tyrone Folk Quest
, and in his book of Northern folktales,
Now You’re Talking
 …, published in 1975. Men like Murphy, working and reworking their territories, have
made the Irish Folklore Commission—since 1971 the Department of Irish Folklore of the University of Dublin College at Belfield, and now headed by Bo Almqvist—the greatest repository of folklore in the world. From its million and a half pages, its archivists, Sean O’Sullivan and Séamas Ó Catháin, have extracted and published rich collections of folktale.

From Douglas Hyde to the present, from written dictation to the tape recorder, the progress of Irish folklore has been marked by steady improvement in the accuracy with which the words of the speakers of story have been preserved. Today, listening to the tale on tape over and over again, we can get all the words exactly right—and more. Listening again, while trying to capture on paper the stories I recorded during a decade in a small hilly place in County Fermanagh, in the southwestern corner of Northern Ireland, it became plain to me that transcriptions rendered as though they were prose distorted and muted the storyteller’s art. Using italics and capital letters to signal loudness helped some, and reading the new scholarship on American Indian myths helped more. Dell Hymes argues convincingly that Indian narratives are structured poetically. Now, the stories I have recorded in Ireland are not poetry, but they are not prose either. So, I have struggled to jettison literary conventions and learned to follow subtle signs in the teller’s presentation—repetitive words that start sections and sharp silences that close them—to produce transcriptions that not only include all the teller’s words but also indicate something about the rhythms of narration. The result is a text composed of short paragraphs, often of only one sentence, that break up occasionally for dramatic effect. In the future, as we follow in the direction Douglas Hyde pointed, we will discover still better ways to get onto the page the purest representation of what the storyteller said.

We writers of folktale have decided that our basic obligation is to our sources. Our goal is to free ourselves from our own tradition so that we can approach other traditions directly. Our science exists to honor the storyteller’s art.

Once we have determined that our duty is to record folktales exactly and lovingly in the words of their narrators, the question remains of which tales to record and present to the reader. Its answer depends upon our motives, and different motives have driven scholars out of the study and into the field and guided them while they wrote. Return again to the beginning, to T. Crofton Croker.

Croker wished to amuse his readers, but sincere storytellers like Crofton
Croker and Hugh Nolan enter the act of communication with motives deeper than amusement. Introducing the complete edition of the
Fairy Legends
that he compiled out of affection for his recently deceased friend, Thomas Wright wrote that “the real importance” of Croker’s stories lay in their “historical and ethnological” implications.

With amazing speed during Croker’s era, scholars developed a theory encompassing history and ethnology that was to form the basis of folklore’s first major scheme for research, the historic-geographic method. The method’s goal is to read unwritten history out of spatial distributions. It commences in the recognition that stories told in distant places carry the same basic form. Comparison of these story types, alive in the minds of modern narrators, suggests connections between far-flung populations and leads toward the reconstruction of ancient histories.

“It is curious to observe the similarity of legends, and of ideas concerning imaginary beings, among nations that for ages have had scarcely any communication,” Crofton Croker wrote, and in the notes that follow his tales, he not only connects new and old Irish stories and remarks similarities between Irish and Scottish, Welsh and English traditions, he ranges farther, finding parallels in Spain and Italy, in Germany and Denmark. At the end of one legend, in which a hill in Cork gains its name from a bottle out of which magical helpers popped, he calls attention to German and Eastern analogues and comments that “Mr. Pisani, formerly secretary to Lord Strangford and now in the embassy at Constantinople, relates a tale similar to the Legend of Bottle-hill, which was told him when a child by his nurse, who was a Greek woman.” Even Samuel Lover, who counseled serious persons—“your masters of art, your explorers of science, star-gazing philosophers, and moon-struck maidens”—to lay his book aside, for laughter was his purpose, still follows his sketch in which a man saves himself from his compact with the Devil with the note that the tale “is somewhat common to the legendary lore of other countries—at least, there is a German legend built on a similar foundation.” Despite his wish to amuse, Lover contributed to comparative study, and Croker was adamantly clear as to his purpose: “My aim has been to bring the twilight tales of the peasantry before the view of the philosopher.”

The international nature of Croker’s stories immediately attracted the brothers Grimm, whose translation of his work appeared within a year of the publication of the first edition in 1825. A French translation followed, and when in 1828 Croker’s second series of Irish legends arrived, it came in company with a third volume containing Welsh legends and a lengthy essay by Wilhelm Grimm analyzing the Irish tales and setting them into a broad European context. Croker was no longer alone. He was part of a wide
scholarly movement within which the international comparative perspective was dominant.

Folklore’s comparative method was achieving its first mature formulation in Finland while Douglas Hyde was at work on the first scientific collections of Irish tale. In 1890, in the preface to
Beside the Fire
, Hyde grouped the stories of Ireland into two classes. One contained the wonder tales that folklorists, in homage to the Grimms, term
Märchen
, and it contained fairy legends. The other consisted of the poetic and marvelous adventures of Finn and the Fianna. The tales of the first class, Irish by adoption, deserved study for what they told about “our old Aryan heritage.” The tales of the second class, the Fenian tales, were shared with Scotland as a result of ancient Irish colonization, but they were Irish distinctly and profoundly. They were important for the Gaelic language in which they were spoken and for the old culture of which they were part, the culture that was not English and could provide inspiration for the formation of a new Irish nation.