Irish Folk Tales (10 page)

112
Fair, Brown, and Trembling

113
The Corpse Watchers

114
A Widow’s Son

115
Jack and Bill

116
The Mule

117
The King of Ireland’s Son

118
Huddon and Duddon and Donald O’Leary

119
The Three Wishes

120
Willy the Wisp

121
The Buideach, the Tinker, and the Black Donkey

122
The Man Who Had No Story

P
REFACE

Good Patrick of Macha stood at the end of his mission. He had built seven hundred churches and ordained three thousand priests. Ireland was a Christian land, free of stone idols, specters, and snakes. Before him stood Oisin, the last of the Fenian warriors, bent, broken, old. Saint Patrick bade him relate the ancient tales, the tales of Ireland’s men and women, mountains and rivers. Brogan, Patrick’s scribe, took them down in the thousands. Then Patrick recoiled from the pleasure he took in pagan things. He poured forth his worry to his guardian angels. Fear not, they told him, listen to the tales, record them in the very words of their tellers, for they will prove a delight to good people until the end of time.

Then Vikings came upon the sea, tore at Ireland’s coasts, and ripped into the interior. But the monks kept to Patrick’s command, teaching the faith, spreading the Good News into foreign lands, and copying the elder tales into great hide-bound books. Perhaps they were the deceptions of demons, the figments of fools, but still the pious men wrote them down as they found them and added the epics of their own heroes, of Patrick and Brigit and Columcille.

In the twelfth century, the Norman Conquest crossed the Irish Sea. But soon the invaders were speaking the sweet Gaelic, and the work of the monks went on. The Fenian warriors still raged in ink, the legends of Patrick and Columcille found their final form. And then, the long invasion reached its end. The chiefs of Ulster tasted death, the last earls flew to Europe, and new men began to crowd the North. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Erin lay beaten. Her tradition drifted toward peril.