Irish folklore

“ Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with magic.
These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death has cropped up unchanged for centuries: who have steeped everything in the heart: to whom everything is a symbol. They have the spade over which man has leant from the beginning. The people of the cities have the machine, which is prose and a parvenu. ”

“ Thus If materials for Irish and British mythology are copious, they must be used with caution, for we cannot be certain that any one story, however old, ever existed as such In the form of a pagan myth. As the mountain-peaks of Ireland or Wales or the Western Isles are often seen dimly through an enshrouding mist, which now Is dispersed in torn wisps, and now gathers again, lending a more fantastic appearance to the shattered crags, so the gods and their doings are half-recorded and halfhidden behind the mists of time and false history and romance. ”

“ A collection of fairy stories, legends, descriptions of superstitious practices, medicals cures and charms, robber stories, notes on holy wells, &c., taken down from the peasantry, some in Gaelic, some in English. The legends, &c., are preceded by a learned essay on the origin and history of legend, and the book concludes with chapters on Irish art and ethnology and a lecture by Sir W. Wilde on the ancient races of Ireland. Contains a vast amount of matter useful to the folk-lorist, to the general reader, and even to the historian. The stories are rather pathetic and tender than humorous. ”

“ It is recognized the world over that Irish art has a beauty and distinction all its own, in its own Irish setting unrivalled, throned in its own land, in its own natural surroundings. The shrines and gospels, the reliquaries and missals, the crosses and bells that are still existent, many in Ireland, others in every country in the world, attest beyond any dispute that Irish art-workers held a preëminent place in the early middle ages, and that works of Irish art are still treasured as unique in their day and time. No country has been plundered and desolated as Ireland has been. ”

“ The love for literature of a traditional type, in song, in poem, in saga, was, I think, more nearly universal in Ireland than in any country of western Europe, and hence that which appears to me to be of most value in ancient Irish literature is not that whose authorship is known, but rather the mass of traditional matter which seems to have grown up almost spontaneously, and slowly shaped itself into the literary possession of an entire nation. ”

“ We feel, as we read, how deep his sympathy has been with their intensity, their love of wild nature, their desire for beauty, their interest in humanity and in character, their savagery and their tenderness, their fairy magic and strange imaginations that suddenly surprise and charm. Whenever anything lovely emerges in the tale, he does not draw attention to it, but touches it with so artistic a pencil that its loveliness is enhanced. And he has put into English verse the Irish poems scattered through the tales with the skill and the temper of a poet. ”

“ Everywhere we meet with passages in which are noticed, with loving admiration, not only those features mentioned by Keats, but many others, such as the boom and clash of the waves, the cry of the sea-birds, the murmur of the wind among the trees, the howling of the storm, the sad desolation of the landscape in winter, the ever-varying beauty of Irish clouds, the cry of the hounds in full career among the glens, the beauty of the native music, tender, sad, or joyous, and so forth in endless variety. ”

“ It is through them alone that the voice of the Irish people of their day can be heard. All other forms of the expression of the oppressed race have perished. In the music and poetry of Ireland is made manifest, so that the dullest ear cannot mistake it, the sorrow of a nation in bondage, tinging all mirth, all hope, and all love with an indefinable cadence of melancholy as plainly as in the real outbursts of lamentation and despairing cries of woe. ”

“ Whatever may be the traces of a higher and more advanced mythology among the Irish, we can see from the questions of the king’s daughter that the objects of the popular belief were rather the personified powers of nature. Mysterious beings, who were supposed to dwell in the heavens or the earth, the sea, the river, the mountain, or the valley, were to be dreaded and conciliated. These they worshipped and invoked, as well as the natural objects themselves in which they were supposed to dwell; and this conception of them runs through the early history of Ireland during the pagan period. ”

“ The reader who does not know Ireland or know Gaelic, is ready to accept softness, the almost endless iteration of expressions conveying the sense of woman's beauty and of man's affection, in phrases that differ but little from each other; what he is not prepared for is the sudden break into matter-of-fact, the curt tone that cuts across much Irish poetry, revealing an unexpected side of life and character. Even the modern Irishman is tripped up by the swift intrusion of the grotesque ”

“ In the stories there is scarcely any part of Ireland which is not linked, almost geographically, with its scenery. Even the ancient gods have retired from the coast to live in the pleasant green hills or by the wooded shores of the great lakes or in hearing of the soft murmur of the rivers. This business of the sea, this varied aspect of the land, crept into the imagination of the Irish, and were used by them to embroider and adorn their poems and tales. They do not care as much for the doings of the sky. There does not seem to be any supreme god of the heaven in their mythology. ”

“ It is this very great fecundity of the very early Irish in the production of saga and romance, in poetry and prose, which best enables us to judge of their early-developed genius, and considerable primitive culture. The introduction of Christianity neither inspired these romances nor helped to produce them; they are nearly all anterior to it, and had they been preserved to us we should now have the most remarkable body of primitive myth and saga in the whole western world. ”

“ Then again, as to history, all the world knows that since the Flood the Irish have never done any thing else than make love, illicit whiskey, and beat each other. What nonsense, then, to talk about the ancient cultivation of the land, of its high rank in literature, and its excellence in art. A stone bishop, with a nose like a negro, and a crosier like a garden-rake, are the only evidences of our ancestors' taste in sculpture; and some doggrel verses in Irish, explaining how King Phelim O'Toole cheated a brother monarch out of his smallclothes, are about the extent of our historic treasures. ”

“ The little tarn at the foot of the lowest crags was black and still, waiting for the first star-glimpse, and from its marge came the wild notes of a harp fitfully swelling and waning; and then arose the still wilder and more melancholy tones of a man's voice chanting what seemed like a weird dirge to the fading twilight, and the language was the Irish Celtic—that language every song of which sounds like a dirge sung over its own death:—
Why art thou gone from us, White Dove of the Irish
woods?
Why art thou gone who made all the leaves tremulous with
the low voice of love? ”

“ On the other hand, Irish qualities of temperament and mind bear such fair fruit in literature and art as might be imagined springing from the Gallic stem but for the Roman graft. [148]
No trustworthy story can be put together from the myth, tradition, and conscious fiction which record the unprogressive [Pg 128] turbulence of pre-Christian Ireland. But the Irish character and capacities are clearly mirrored in this enormous Gaelic literature. Truculence and vanity pervade it, and a passion for hyperbole. A weak sense of fact and a lack of steady rational purpose are also conspicuous. ”

“ In more senses than one Irish folk-lore is Irish history. At least the traditions that have been handed down from one generation to another contain not only the sometimes authentic record of events, but a revelation of the Milesian temperament, with its mirth and its melancholy, its exuberant fancy and its passion. So in these weird tales there is plenty of history, and plenty of poetry, to one who will listen to it; but the high and tragic story of Ireland has been cherished mainly in the sorrowful traditions of a defeated race, and the legends have not yet been wrought into undying verse. ”

“ A flower, like a flag, might be little more than a ghost; but a fruit has that sacramental solidity which in all mythologies belongs not to a ghost but to a god. This sight of things sustaining, and a beauty that nourishes and does not merely charm, is the premonition of practicality in the miracle of modern Ireland. It is a miracle more marvellous than the resurrection of the dead. ”

“ The bias and ignorance of English historians and of many professed students of Irish history, who continue to write without a first-hand knowledge of its sources, have also reacted unfavourably upon the study of Irish literature. Slowly, however, the fact is becoming recognised in ever wider circles that the vernacular literature of ancient Ireland is the most primitive and original among the literatures of Western Europe, and that in its origins and development it affords a most fascinating study. ”

“ There were tunes that every man and woman in Ireland knows—tunes that you know—old airs that every Irish fiddler or piper or singer learns from the older ones, that the oldest ones of all learned, they say, from the fairies. And under all the music, whether grave or gay, there went a strain of grief, sometimes almost harsh and sometimes scarcely heard, and as the fairies listened to it they grew pale at the thought that now they were to go away from all that they had known, to find something which they did not know. ”

“ But outside these, great numbers have been lost: destroyed during the Danish and Anglo-Norman wars.
Most of the Irish tales fall under four main cycles or periods of history and legend, which, in all the Irish poetical and romantic literature, were kept quite distinct.
First:—The Mythological Period, the stories of which are concerned with the mythical colonies preceding the Milesians, especially the Dedannans. The heroes of the tales belonging to this cycle, who are assigned to periods long before the Christian era, are gods, namely, the gods of the pagan Irish. ”

“ From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolater, what a strange sight must be that still mountain peak on the wild west Irish shore, where for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long ago there of the Irish apostle; and in the sharp crystals of the trap rock a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless the "Lives of the Saints" are full of lies. ”

“ Of course the supernatural element often takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible ”

“ Throughout Ireland there are many ancient, often prehistoric, earthworks or tumuli, which are popularly called forts, raths, or dúns, and in folk-belief these are considered fairy hills or the abodes of various orders of fairies. In this belief we see at work a definite anthropomorphism which attributes dwellings here on earth to an invisible spirit-race, as though this race were actually the spirits of the ancient Irish who built the forts. ”

“ Ireland, whose head is ever turned over her shoulder, looking to the past, has, in her folk song, at least, reason and justification for her preoccupation with what has been in her music, rather than with what is, or is to come. It is difficult to reconcile the eternal beauty of traditional Irish melody with the lack of musical interest and feeling that distinguishes the mass of modern Irish life. ”

“ The literary aspect of the ancient literature of Ireland has not indeed been altogether neglected. It has been used to furnish themes on which modern poems can be written; ancient authority has been found in it for what is essentially modern thought: modern English and Irish poets have claimed the old Irish romances as inspirers, but the romances themselves have been left to the scholars and the antiquarians. ”

“ It is absolutely impossible to convey the lusciousness of sound, richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony, in another language. Scores upon scores of new and brilliant metres made their appearance, and the common Irish of the four provinces deprived of almost everything else, clung all the closer to the Muse. ”

“ It is only the mythological element in the belief in metempsychosis which has come down to us, and from which we ascertain that the pagan Irish believed that supernatural beings could become clothed in flesh and blood, could enter into women and be born again, could take different shapes and pass through different stages of existence, as fowls, animals, or men. ”