Celtic Fairy Tales (24 page)

He said no more, but spit in his fist, and gave a flourish of his
club. It was all the poor divel of a wolf wanted: he put his tail
between his legs, and took to his pumps without looking at man or
mortal, and neither sun, moon, or stars ever saw him in sight of
Dublin again.

At dinner every one laughed but the foxy fellow; and sure enough he
was laying out how he'd settle poor Tom next day.

"Well, to be sure!" says he, "King of Dublin, you are in luck.
There's the Danes moidhering us to no end. Deuce run to Lusk wid
'em! and if any one can save us from 'em, it is this gentleman with
the goat-skin. There is a flail hangin' on the collar-beam, in hell,
and neither Dane nor devil can stand before it."

"So," says Tom to the king, "will you let me have the other half of
the princess if I bring you the flail?"

"No, no," says the princess; "I'd rather never be your wife than see
you in that danger."

But Redhead whispered and nudged Tom about how shabby it would look
to reneague the adventure. So he asked which way he was to go, and
Redhead directed him.

Well, he travelled and travelled, till he came in sight of the walls
of hell; and, bedad, before he knocked at the gates, he rubbed
himself over with the greenish ointment. When he knocked, a hundred
little imps popped their heads out through the bars, and axed him
what he wanted.

"I want to speak to the big divel of all," says Tom: "open the
gate."

It wasn't long till the gate was thrune open, and the Ould Boy
received Tom with bows and scrapes, and axed his business.

"My business isn't much," says Tom. "I only came for the loan of
that flail that I see hanging on the collar-beam, for the king of
Dublin to give a thrashing to the Danes."

"Well," says the other, "the Danes is much better customers to me;
but since you walked so far I won't refuse. Hand that flail," says
he to a young imp; and he winked the far-off eye at the same time.
So, while some were barring the gates, the young devil climbed up,
and took down the flail that had the handstaff and booltheen both
made out of red-hot iron. The little vagabond was grinning to think
how it would burn the hands o' Tom, but the dickens a burn it made
on him, no more nor if it was a good oak sapling.

"Thankee," says Tom. "Now would you open the gate for a body, and
I'll give you no more trouble."

"Oh, tramp!" says Ould Nick; "is that the way? It is easier getting
inside them gates than getting out again. Take that tool from him,
and give him a dose of the oil of stirrup."

So one fellow put out his claws to seize on the flail, but Tom gave
him such a welt of it on the side of the head that he broke off one
of his horns, and made him roar like a devil as he was. Well, they
rushed at Tom, but he gave them, little and big, such a thrashing as
they didn't forget for a while. At last says the ould thief of all,
rubbing his elbow, "Let the fool out; and woe to whoever lets him in
again, great or small."

So out marched Tom, and away with him, without minding the shouting
and cursing they kept up at him from the tops of the walls; and when
he got home to the big bawn of the palace, there never was such
running and racing as to see himself and the flail. When he had his
story told, he laid down the flail on the stone steps, and bid no
one for their lives to touch it. If the king, and queen, and
princess, made much of him before, they made ten times more of him
now; but Redhead, the mean scruff-hound, stole over, and thought to
catch hold of the flail to make an end of him. His fingers hardly
touched it, when he let a roar out of him as if heaven and earth
were coming together, and kept flinging his arms about and dancing,
that it was pitiful to look at him. Tom run at him as soon as he
could rise, caught his hands in his own two, and rubbed them this
way and that, and the burning pain left them before you could reckon
one. Well the poor fellow, between the pain that was only just gone,
and the comfort he was in, had the comicalest face that you ever
see, it was such a mixtherum-gatherum of laughing and crying.
Everybody burst out a laughing—the princess could not stop no more
than the rest; and then says Tom, "Now, ma'am, if there were fifty
halves of you, I hope you'll give me them all."

Well, the princess looked at her father, and by my word, she came
over to Tom, and put her two delicate hands into his two rough ones,
and I wish it was myself was in his shoes that day!

Tom would not bring the flail into the palace. You may be sure no
other body went near it; and when the early risers were passing next
morning, they found two long clefts in the stone, where it was after
burning itself an opening downwards, nobody could tell how far. But
a messenger came in at noon, and said that the Danes were so
frightened when they heard of the flail coming into Dublin, that
they got into their ships, and sailed away.

Well, I suppose, before they were married, Tom got some man, like
Pat Mara of Tomenine, to learn him the "principles of politeness,"
fluxions, gunnery, and fortification, decimal fractions, practice,
and the rule of three direct, the way he'd be able to keep up a
conversation with the royal family. Whether he ever lost his time
learning them sciences, I'm not sure, but it's as sure as fate that
his mother never more saw any want till the end of her days.

MAN OR WOMAN BOY OR GIRL THAT READS WHAT FOLLOWS 3 TIMES SHALL FALL
ASLEEP AN HUNDRED YEARS

JOHN D. BATTEN DREW THIS AUG. 20TH, 1801 GOOD-NIGHT

It may be as well to give the reader some account of the enormous
extent of the Celtic folk-tales in existence. I reckon these to
extend to 2000, though only about 250 are in print. The former
number exceeds that known in France, Italy, Germany, and Russia,
where collection has been most active, and is only exceeded by the
MS. collection of Finnish folk-tales at Helsingfors, said to exceed
12,000. As will be seen, this superiority of the Celts is due to the
phenomenal and patriotic activity of one man, the late J. F.
Campbell, of Islay, whose
Popular Tales
and MS. collections
(partly described by Mr. Alfred Nutt in
Folk-Lore
, i. 369-83)
contain references to no less than 1281 tales (many of them, of
course, variants and scraps). Celtic folk-tales, while more
numerous, are also the oldest of the tales of modern European races;
some of them—
e.g.
, "Connla," in the present selection,
occurring in the oldest Irish vellums. They include (1) fairy tales
properly so-called—
i.e.
, tales or anecdotes
about
fairies,
hobgoblins, &c., told as natural occurrences; (2) hero-tales, stories
of adventure told of national or mythical heroes; (3) folk-tales proper,
describing marvellous adventures of otherwise unknown heroes,
in which there is a defined plot and supernatural characters
(speaking animals, giants, dwarfs, &c.); and finally (4) drolls, comic
anecdotes of feats of stupidity or cunning.

The collection of Celtic folk-tales began in IRELAND as early as
1825, with T. Crofton Croker's
Fairy Legends and Traditions of
the South of Ireland
. This contained some 38 anecdotes of the
first class mentioned above, anecdotes showing the belief of the
Irish peasantry in the existence of fairies, gnomes, goblins, and
the like. The Grimms did Croker the honour of translating part of
his book, under the title of
Irische Elfenmärchen
. Among the
novelists and tale-writers of the schools of Miss Edgeworth and
Lever folk-tales were occasionally utilised, as by Carleton in his
Traits and Stories
, by S. Lover in his
Legends and Stories
,
and by G. Griffin in his
Tales of a Jury-Room
. These all tell their tales
in the manner of the stage Irishman. Chapbooks,
Royal Fairy Tales
and
Hibernian Tales
, also contained genuine folk-tales, and attracted
Thackeray's attention in his
Irish Sketch-Book
. The Irish Grimm,
however, was Patrick Kennedy, a Dublin bookseller, who believed in
fairies, and in five years (1866- 71) printed about 100 folk- and hero-
tales and drolls (classes 2, 3, and 4 above) in his
Legendary Fictions
of the Irish Celts
, 1866,
Fireside Stories of Ireland
, 1870, and
Bardic
Stories of Ireland
, 1871; all three are now unfortunately out of print. He
tells his stories neatly and with spirit, and retains much that is
volkstümlich
in his diction. He derived his materials from the
English-speaking peasantry of county Wexford, who changed from
Gaelic to English while story-telling was in full vigour, and therefore
carried over the stories with the change of language. Lady Wylde
has told many folk-tales very effectively in her
Ancient Legends of
Ireland
, 1887. More recently two collectors have published stories
gathered from peasants of the West and North who can only speak
Gaelic. These are by an American gentleman named Curtin,
Myths
and Folk-Tales of Ireland
, 1890; while Dr. Douglas Hyde has
published in
Beside the Fireside
, 1891, spirited English versions of
some of the stories he had published in the original Irish in his
Leabhar
Sgeulaighteachta
, Dublin, 1889. Miss Maclintoch has a large MS.
collection, part of which has appeared in various periodicals; and
Messrs. Larminie and D. Fitzgerald are known to have much story
material in their possession.

But beside these more modern collections there exist in old and
middle Irish a large number of hero-tales (class 2) which formed
the staple of the old
ollahms
or bards. Of these tales of
"cattle-liftings, elopements, battles, voyages, courtships, caves,
lakes, feasts, sieges, and eruptions," a bard of even the fourth
class had to know seven fifties, presumably one for each day of the
year. Sir William Temple knew of a north-country gentleman of
Ireland who was sent to sleep every evening with a fresh tale
from his bard. The
Book of Leinster
, an Irish vellum of the
twelfth century, contains a list of 189 of these hero-tales, many of
which are extant to this day; E. O'Curry gives the list in the
Appendix to his MS.
Materials of Irish History
. Another list
of about 70 is given in the preface to the third volume of the
Ossianic Society's publications. Dr. Joyce published a few of the
more celebrated of these in
Old Celtic Romances
; others
appeared in
Atlantis
(see notes on "Deirdre"), others in
Kennedy's
Bardic Stories
, mentioned above.

Turning to SCOTLAND, we must put aside Chambers'
Popular Rhymes
of Scotland
, 1842, which contains for the most part folk-tales
common with those of England rather than those peculiar to the
Gaelic-speaking Scots. The first name here in time as in importance
is that of J. F. Campbell, of Islay. His four volumes,
Popular
Tales of the West Highlands
(Edinburgh, 1860-2, recently
republished by the Islay Association), contain some 120 folk- and
hero-tales, told with strict adherence to the language of the
narrators, which is given with a literal, a rather too literal,
English version. This careful accuracy has given an un-English air
to his versions, and has prevented them attaining their due
popularity. What Campbell has published represents only a tithe of
what he collected. At the end of the fourth volume he gives a list
of 791 tales, &c., collected by him or his assistants in the two
years 1859-61; and in his MS. collections at Edinburgh are two other
lists containing 400 more tales. Only a portion of these are in the
Advocates' Library; the rest, if extant, must be in private hands,
though they are distinctly of national importance and interest.

Campbell's influence has been effective of recent years in Scotland.
The
Celtic Magazine
(vols. xii. and xiii.), while under the
editorship of Mr. MacBain, contained several folk- and hero-tales in
Gaelic, and so did the
Scotch Celtic Review
. These were from
the collections of Messrs. Campbell of Tiree, Carmichael, and K.
Mackenzie. Recently Lord Archibald Campbell has shown laudable
interest in the preservation of Gaelic folk- and hero-tales. Under
his auspices a whole series of handsome volumes, under the general
title of
Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition
, has been
recently published, four volumes having already appeared, each
accompanied by notes by Mr. Alfred Nutt, which form the most
important aid to the study of Celtic Folk-Tales since Campbell
himself. Those to the second volume in particular (Tales collected
by Rev. D. MacInnes) fill 100 pages, with condensed information on
all aspects of the subject dealt with in the light of the most
recent research in the European folk-tales as well as on Celtic
literature. Thanks to Mr. Nutt, Scotland is just now to the fore in
the collection and study of the British Folk-Tale.

WALES makes a poor show beside Ireland and Scotland. Sikes'
British Goblins
, and the tales collected by Prof. Rhys in
Y Cymrodor
, vols. ii.-vi., are mainly of our first-class
fairy anecdotes. Borrow, in his
Wild Wales
, refers to a
collection of fables in a journal called
The Greal
, while the
Cambrian Quarterly Magazine
for 1830 and 1831 contained a few
fairy anecdotes, including a curious version of the "Brewery of
Eggshells" from the Welsh. In the older literature, the
Iolo
MS.
, published by the Welsh MS. Society, has a few fables and
apologues, and the charming
Mabinogion
, translated by Lady
Guest, has tales that can trace back to the twelfth century and are
on the border-line between folk-tales and hero-tales.