Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (2 page)

Only at the very end of “Far Darrig in Donegal” does the reader understand that the true subject of this sophisticated metafiction is the art of the story itself, the burden that, like the corpse in “Far Darrig in Donegal,” is carried by so many in their turn. The great strength of this anthology is the range of Irish storytelling it gathers in, including as it does representative pieces by William Allingham, Sir Jonah Barrington, William Carleton, Thomas Crofton Croker, Sir Samuel Ferguson, Alfred Percival Graves, Gerald Griffin, Douglas Hyde, Samuel Lover, James Clarence Mangan, John O’Donovan, and Lady Wilde, who, having established that “it is the custom amongst the people, when throwing away water at night, to cry out in a loud voice, Take care of the water,” continues with brilliant matter-of-factness:

This is all but a reverse angle shot of Yeats’s “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” the poem in which “a little silver trout” is transmogrified into “a glimmering girl” who disappears almost as quickly as she’s conjured up:

One source for the “glimmering girl” in “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” may be found here in Samuel Lover’s “The White Trout; A Legend of Cong,” while the “golden apples” at the end of the poem may be grafted from cuttings found in “The Story of Conn-eda; Or the Golden Apples of Lough Erne,” with its apple tree planted in the garden, a horse that “took whatever road he chose,” and a bird with a human head who speaks “in a loud, croaking human voice.” Conn-eda is sent into exile under a
geis
, or spell, from a prince:

I suspect that several of these images may have been drawn into the complex weave of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” a story in which, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, Joyce plays on the idea of the
geis
, including punning on the word “goose” in the “fat brown
goose
^*
” on the Miss Morkhans’ table, along with “a pyramid of oranges and American
apples
,” in ironic contrast to the admonition “to take neither food nor nourishment.” We know that this “goose” is a sly
reference to Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, whose family name, O’Cadhain, is the Gaelic term for a “barnacle goose.” Catholics were allowed to eat barnacle geese on Fridays since they were thought to be seafood rather than fowl, therefore not subject to the church’s own version of a
geis.
We might also remember that the name of the lover of Nora, the character upon whom Michael Furey is based, was Michael Bodkin, so that if Joyce read this story, as I suspect he did, he must have felt the “point of your
bodkin
” in a rather acute way. This may partly explain the positioning of Furey, “the boy from the
gas
works,” in the “garden,” a word used twice by Joyce within one sentence, thereby drawing to it particular attention:

The final sentence of “The Story of Conn-eda” reminds us that “It was after the name Conn-eda the province of Connaucht, or
Conneda
, or
Connacht
, was so called.” The “province of Connaucht” is the provenance of Gretta Conroy, and of Michael Furey, and is psychologically, as well as physically, central to the story. Other key images in “The Dead” that may be drawn from “The Story of Conn-eda” are Patrick Morkhan’s horse, which “took whatever road he chose” around the statue of King Billy; a cabman who is exhorted to “make like a bird for Trinity College”; and the “hoarse as a crow” Bartell D’Arcy, a human with a bird head—or is it a bird with a human head? The “trinity” referred to may be the trio of battle-deities, Badb, Macha, and the Morrigan, sometimes known collectively as the Morrigna. Badb is directly invoked in “The Story of Conn-eda”
in the place-name “Sleabh
Badhna
,” seat of the druid Fionn Dadhna. These battle-goddesses often appear in the guise of a crow (throwing its “hoarse” voice through Bartell D’Arcy, it seems) or looming large as the “Three Graces” of the Morkhans (itself a near version of
Morrigan
or
Morigna
). Indeed, I think the
mor
component here, meaning “big,” may have influenced the strange description by Mrs. Malins of “a fish, a beautiful
big big
fish, and the man in the hotel boiled it for their dinner.” The “big big fish” is no doubt a salmon, the fish associated with Finn MacCool, and it’s no accident that the notion of “Finn” and “hotel” are associated in Joyce’s mind, since it was in Finn’s Hotel that Nora Barnacle was working as a chambermaid when he met her in June 1904. The name of the druid of Sleabh Badhna, Fionn Dadhna, or “Fintan,” is the name often given to Finn’s salmon of knowledge, and is also associated with the power of self-transformation, so it should come as no surprise that, at the moment of Gretta Conroy’s transmogrification, when her husband watches her being stolen from her, the salmon leaps to mind:

There’s a theory, mentioned by James MacKillop in his
Dictionary of Celtic Mythology
, that the salmon’s “swimming between salt and fresh water may have suggested the capacity to pass between worlds,” and the fish appears at the interface between our world and the fairy realm in another story here, Thomas Crofton Croker’s “The Priest’s Supper,” in which the fairies who have withheld a salmon from
Father Horrigan ask Dermod Leary to ask the priest “if the souls of the good people are to be saved at the last day.” Father Horrigan sends Dermod back to them with the injunction that they come to him in person, the very thought of which banishes the fairy host. I use the word “host” advisedly here, since it’s used by Yeats himself in the titles of no less than three poems collected in
The Wind Among the Reeds
, the 1899 collection also includes “The Song of the Wandering Aengus.” These are “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “The Host of the Air,” and “The Unappeasable Host,” and they are carried over into “The Dead” in the penultimate paragraph:

The tone of these lines is oddly reminiscent of some of Yeats’s introductions to the sections of
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
, in which he is constantly pointing out that “many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains and chains of
conscious
beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent
form
but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them” or that “it has been held by many that somewhere out of the void there is a perpetual dribble of
souls
; that these souls pass through many shapes before they incarnate as men—hence the nature spirits. They are invisible—except at rare moments and times; they inhabit the interior elements, while
we live upon the outer and the gross.” The nature spirits include horses, no doubt, which is why the souls are “rearing” in that passage from the end of “The Dead.”

One of the most powerful effects of these Irish fairy and folk tales has been their influence on Joyce, as I’ve already been at pains to point out. William Allingham’s “A Dream,” which begins the “Ghosts” section, may be an additional influence on “The Dead”:

Yet another is William Carleton’s “The Fate of Frank McKenna,” the last in the “Ghosts” section, in which “one of the most terrible snow-storms ever remembered in that part of the country came on,” reminiscent of the observation that “snow was general all over Ireland” in “The Dead.” Frank McKenna is lost in the storm, then begins to appear in various guises, including that of a hare, a representation of the “other” that we also find in Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall’s “The Witch Hare,” and the anonymous account of “Bewitched Butter (Queen’s County),” and, indeed, in Yeats’s own great magic-poem, “The Collar-bone of a Hare.”

But the impact of these tales doesn’t stop with Yeats, or Joyce, or Oscar Wilde (whose own interest in fairy tales and everlasting youth was inspired by his mother), or Beckett (who’s thought to have transferred one of the hunches from the unfortunate Jack Madden in “The Legend of Knock-grafton” to the unfortunate Hunchy Hackett of
Watt
); for generations of readers in Ireland and throughout the world
have found them flourishing like those persistent fairy thorns.

——

P
AUL
M
ULDOON
is the Howard G.B. Clark University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His most recent books are
Poems 1968–1998
(2001) and
Moy Sand and Gravel
(2002), both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Dr. Corbett, Bishop of Oxford and Norwich, lamented long ago the departure of the English fairies. “In Queen Mary’s time,” he wrote:

But now, in the times of James, they had all gone, for “they were of the old profession,” and “their songs were Ave Maries.” In Ireland they are still extant, giving gifts to the kindly, and plaguing the surly. “Have you ever seen a fairy or such like?” I asked an old man in County Sligo. “Amn’t I annoyed with them,” was the answer. “Do the fishermen along here know anything of the mermaids?” I asked a woman of a village in County Dublin. “Indeed, they don’t like to see them at all,” she answered, “for they always bring bad weather.” “Here is a man who believes in ghosts,” said a foreign sea-captain, pointing to a pilot of my acquaintance.
“In every house over there,” said the pilot, pointing to his native village of Rosses, “there are several.” Certainly that now old and much respected dogmatist, the Spirit of the Age, has in no manner made his voice heard down there. In a little while, for he has gotten a consumptive appearance of late, he will be covered over decently in his grave, and another will grow, old and much respected, in his place, and never be heard of down there, and after him another and another and another. Indeed, it is a question whether any of these personages will ever be heard of outside the newspaper offices and lecture-rooms and drawing-rooms and eelpie houses of the cities, or if the Spirit of the Age is at any time more than a froth. At any rate, whole troops of their like will not change the Celt much. Giraldus Cambrensis found the people of the western islands a trifle paganish. “How many gods are there?” asked a priest, a little while ago, of a man from the Island of Innistor. “There is one on Innistor; but this seems a big place,” said the man, and the priest held up his hands in horror, as Giraldus had, just seven centuries before. Remember, I am not blaming the man; it is very much better to believe in a number of gods than in none at all, or to think there is only one, but that he is a little sentimental and impracticable, and not constructed for the nineteenth century. The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much—indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are averse to sitting down to dine thirteen at table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, or seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tail. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, though even a newspaper man, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms,
for every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching.