Irish Folk Tales (11 page)

Beneath clouds of defeat, Irish scholars set to work. The Four Masters gathered in the North, assembled the old manuscripts, and compiled the Irish annals, filled with warfare and wonders and the misdeeds of kings. In the South, a solitary priest, banished for his denunciation of a high lady’s sin, traveled the chilly lanes with precious papers rolled in his breast, seeking warm hearths where he could write. The history Geoffrey Keating wrote on the road confuses historians who want only the facts, for Keating labored to save the whole of the past, its facts and its fancy. Both, he knew, contained the tale of Ireland.

As invasion consolidated in political rule and political rule tightened, Keating’s countrymen passed his manuscript along, the old people of Ireland continued to gather around their tellers of tale, and indomitable Ireland conquered her conquerors once more. Patrick, son of Britain, citizen of Rome, in his day, and Geoffrey Keating, descendant of the first English invaders, in his, had preserved the stories of Ireland. In the nineteenth century, people of the new faith, with names like Croker and Hyde, took up the old task and wrote down the Irish tale until a new nation, formed out of rebellion, could establish a commission for the preservation of the Irish tradition.

What right have I, an American folklorist, to break into this history by collecting the Irish tales recorded during the last century and a half into a new anthology? It is not because many of my ancestors abandoned Ireland, and it is certainly not because American scholars possess a special right to pillage the Irish cultural treasury. Indeed, I am embarrassed to be part of today’s invasion that sends stupid films and disrespectful social scientists out of America into Ireland. My right comes of my friendship with Hugh Nolan. Mr. Nolan was the great storyteller of the community in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, that I have visited regularly since 1972. He and Ellen Cutler, Peter and Joseph Flanagan, Michael Boyle, Rose and Joe Murphy, Hugh Patrick Owens, and their neighbors, opened their homes to me, gave me their tales, and drew me into their lives. My littlest daughter is named for Ellen Cutler. I have published three books about them. Our friendship remains unshaken. I add a fourth.

My right to create this book, I repeat, is owed to my love for Hugh Nolan, but without the support of others in Fermanagh—Joan Trimble, Helen Hickey, Jim Nawn, P. J. O’Hare, Bryan Gallagher—I would not continue, and without help from Ireland’s scholars I could not continue. In Dublin, Sean O’Sullivan and Kevin Danaher, Séamas Ó Catháin and Bo Almqvist, offered advice and aid. In Belfast, E. Estyn Evans, George Thompson, and Alan Gailey provided hospitality and direction. Fred Kniffen first introduced me to Estyn Evans when I was an undergraduate. Fred Kniffen remains my great teacher, and I am honored to call Professor Evans my master. His books attracted me to Ireland. His kind interest in my effort has restored me and kept me happily at work.

In America I have been fortunate to teach in two of my nation’s major folklore programs, the Folklore Institute of Indiana University and the Department of Folklore and Folklife of the University of Pennsylvania. Both schools blessed me with generous colleagues. From my American community of scholars I have drawn constant inspiration. These must be thanked: Roger Abrahams, Robert Plant Armstrong, Ilhan Başöz, Dan Ben-Amos, Sacvan Bercovitch, Tom Burns, Jan Brunvand, John Burrison,
Tristram Coffin, Cece Conway, Lewis Dabney, Jim Deetz, Linda Dégh, Richard M. Dorson, James Marston Fitch, Kenneth Goldstein, Bill Hansen, Lee Haring, Dell Hymes, Sandy Ives, Alan Jabbour, Chaz Joyner, Billy Lightfoot, John McGuigan, Rusty Marshall, Mick Moloney, Elliott Oring, Barry Lee Pearson, Phil Peek, Jerry Pocius, Ralph Rinzler, Warren Roberts, Peter Seitel, Brian Sutton-Smith, John Szwed, Dell Upton, John Vlach, Don Yoder, Wilbur Zelinsky, Terry Zug.

I could not have taken on this task were I not a collector of books about Ireland. This pleasant madness, which struck when I was a high school student and began with a copy of
Two Tales of Shem and Shaun
, has indebted me to antiquarian bookmen on both sides of the Atlantic. My thanks to my favorite shop, William H. Allen of Philadelphia, will stand for them all. This book would not be had I not received funds for my first trip to Ireland from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Eric Montgomery and Bob Oliver engineered subsequent trips. I would not have been able to finish this book had not my friends Thomas Ehrlich and Dell Hymes of the University of Pennsylvania conspired to find me a place to write in peace.

The writing of books, like any good craft, comes as much from friendship as it does from the monster that coils within. As I worked, the friendship that I gained with Dan Cullen of Pantheon Books made the whole project worth it. And as I worked, I relied on my father and mother and on the friends gathered around me: Dell and Ginny, Kenny and Rochelle, John and Nan, Barry and Missy, Tom and Inger, Agop, George and Christobel. My love, Kathleen, always forgave me the time I burned up in this obsession. She helped keep my prose clean and lifted my heart. The children helped by distracting me from my work to my life.

At last, I am grieved for the loss of friends, for Hugh Nolan, Ellen Cutler, Michael Boyle, Paddy and Mary McBrien, James Owens, and Rose Murphy, and for Dick Dorson, Erving Goffman, and Bob Armstrong. But I give this book in happiness to the next generation, to my children, Polly, Harry, Lydia, and Ellen Adair.

Night falls, winds rise. The door is shut, the curtain drawn. A lamp sputters, shooting shadows up the wall, and the houses of the hills close in upon themselves, abandoning the world to darkness. Pure darkness welcomes the winds that skim off the ocean, roll over the mountains, and fall upon the hills to pound the home. Roof timbers groan and hold. The winds crash among the trees.

Low clouds cover the moon, and the road before me runs swiftly into emptiness. Beyond the black hedges there are houses I know, but they send no warming sign of habitation, no hum, no glow. Only the feel of the road, hard beneath my feet, and the quick repetition of steps assure me that I am moving correctly. The road turns under me, and I comply, it turns again familiarly and, pressed eastward by the wind, I walk, nearly run, until a pale rectangle forms by the roadside. I feel into the darkness for the latch, turn once more, and am greeted with my name as I gain my seat by the hearth. “A bad night,” my host says, turning his face back into the small fire at our feet. I agree. “The worst,” he says.

Night holds the corners and rises to the roof. A candle in a brass stick shapes a small circle of faint light on the table beside us. The fire low in the throat of the chimney touches with pink the faces of the men packed around it. There is Young Tom, with the collar of his coat turned up to shelter his ears, hunched beside me. Johnny huddles across the fire from the old man who makes his home in these two cold rooms. Johnny has come tonight, as Tom and I have come, walking the black lanes because winter nights are long and the man of this house, Hugh Nolan, is brilliant.

When Hugh Nolan was a child, this house, built by his grandfather’s hands, was known as a ceili (kay-lee) house, a place for the neighbors to gather, and now they gather still, knowing that others will also seek a place at his hearth in hopes that his wit will help them pass the night safely. They call him eccentric, a bent old man in a long black coat who lives alone with his cats in his smoke-dark house, and they call him a saint. They have watched him pedal his bike to Mass, they speak of his plain blameless way and do not know that he sends the little money he gets to support a convent
in England. They name him “historian.” His memory is vast, the past is impeccably ordered within it, and he settles disputes among his neighbors over boundaries and rights of way across fields. His pleasure in youth, he says, came from listening to the old people talking, and his delight in old age, he says, is keeping the truth and telling the whole tale. In this small community, built upon damp hills in the North of Ireland, Hugh Nolan is the oldest man. He was born in 1896. For sixty-five years he served the earth, and now he works for the people who come to ceili with him. They call him a “star.” He is the man who can reach into a dreary conversation, find a thread of silver, and spin it into a yarn that deadens time and enlivens the senses.

The body is beaten with work. The soul is numb. The company is the same. They have given all they have on nights long in the past. There is no worthwhile news, so Johnny tries again, repeating Hugh Nolan’s words. The night is a bad one. Aye, the worst. We are in agreement. “Well, we have to take what comes,” Johnny says. “We can’t change it.” Wearily Mr. Nolan replies, “Oh, aye.” There is the trouble. They know each other too well. Three decades separate Tom and Johnny, and nearly three more separate Johnny and Hugh, but their experience has been too similar. They cut turf in the spring, dig spuds in the fall. They have followed the cows into the sloughs and gotten drunk together in the town. Conversations too quickly find the old ruts and sail too swiftly to first principles so perfectly framed in words that there is no knowing whether they erupt from the depths or ride on the surface. So the ceiliers come and they sit and they wait, crying inwardly for someone gifted with wit to build a story in the place that lies between inescapable daily realities and inescapable philosophical propositions.

Young Tom takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers them around. Johnny reaches out to light us. Mr. Nolan cracks a match and sucks its flame into the remains at the bottom of his pipe. Smoking together, we watch the fire. A turf fire does not flare and snap. It smolders, rolling into itself, providing a spectacle that is only about as engaging as a television set. For a while the mind follows the eye through the transformations of color into the red-gold heart of the fire, discovering tiny flecks of blue and green and curls of rosy smoke that rise past black iron pothooks and crooks into the soot-choked gullet of the chimney. The mind needs more, and it wanders, and when it wanders here, among farmers poor in the things of the world, they worry because, they say, if you think you will become sad, for life is short and death is long, and if sadness grips you it will drag you toward despair, a state in which you are of no use to your neighbor or yourself, in which you forget God’s special love for you. In silent contemplation, in brooding, you drop toward damnation. You must, at all costs, avoid thinking.
Your hard life has already taught you the truths philosophers seek, so you rise and go upon the roads, no matter the cold and the dark, and you gather someplace where others will help you keep your mind off the pains in your joints and the damned old cows and the muck and the winds and the rains and the terrors that visit in silence, someplace where you can help others remain alive to life. We watch the fire and we are not silent. It is just that the topics we try, the usual topics of the health of the neighbors and the prices of cattle and the bombs in the towns, all fail. None is collectively lifted toward entertainment. “Entertainment” is their word for good conversation, for music and dance, for food, for all that brings immediate pleasure and carries one forward.

A clock ticks out of the darkness behind us. Hugh Nolan shoves his chair back and makes his way along old routes over the clay of the floor, between the sharp edges of furniture, and returns, dropping turf on the fire and splashing it with oil. For an instant it blazes, bathing our faces in heat, then it settles again into its slow consuming of itself. Mr. Nolan tells us that the radio predicted frost, but, he reminds us, it has been a good year. The crop was bountiful, the cattle are fat. We agree.

A click of the latch announces another ceilier. “Well, men,” a voice says. “How’s Packie?” Hugh Nolan asks. “The best,” replies Johnny’s brother, squeezing between Tom and me on the wooden thing Mr. Nolan uses for a bed. He bends forward, opening his palms to the fire, and tells us that the radio predicted frost. This news raises its chorus of agreement, then the chat sinks and shreds. The clock ticks. Shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, we crowd around the fire. The white cat is purring in my lap. Packie is whistling snatches of old reels under his breath. Outside the winds creak in the hedges and rattle the bones of the trees, while we hold to the topic of weather, not a trite topic for farming people whose well-being depends on the climate, whose work is conducted outdoors, whose houses do not allow them to forget. Inside and outside, it is cold and dark. The wind pops the tin of the roof, demanding that we speak of the weather. “There would not be weather the like of this now in America,” Johnny says, asking. The question is courteously indirect. I am not made to perform, and months ago I would not have been forced, however obliquely, to entertain the company, but I am no longer a stranger, so I describe cold weather in America and am led to tell what I know of Iceland, drawn from the sagas and William Morris’ diary of his travels. A little time passes, and the hearth’s small flame shows Hugh Nolan to be at work in the enormity of his memory. A light gleams in the shadows beneath his cap.