Irish Fairies

WHEN Giraldus Cambrensis visited Ireland in the twelfth century, he found the people “a trifle paganish.” They believed in all sorts of fairies, banshees, witches, and changelings— “the gods of the earth,” as the ancient Book of Armagh calls them. Eight centuries have changed the Irish but little in this respect. The credit of “the little good people” is as good as ever amongst them. “Have you ever seen a fairy or such-like?” Mr. Yeats inquired of an old man in County Sligo. “Am n’t I annoyed with them?” was the answer. “Do the fishermen along here know anything of the mermaids?” he asked a County Dublin woman. “Indeed, they don’t like to see them at all,” said she, “for they always bring bad weather.” In County Cork, young maidens still wake up in the dead of night, and hear the fairies taking down pots and dishes and cooking themselves a fine supper by the fire. The Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, claim to have had a fairy for their ancestor.

The Irish cosmogony derives the fairies from a station between heaven and earth. They are a sort of inferior angels —

If we may trust Crofton Croker, they were “turned out of heaven” along with all Satan’s host, and “landed on their feet in this world, while the rest of their companions, having more sin to sink them, went down further to a worse place.” Some of them, at times, show a momentary anxiety about the state of their souls. A great gathering of fairies in Cork once sent a young man, whom they met by the riverside, to ask the priest what chance there was for them all to become good Christians at the last day?

It is soon seen that these Irish fairies are no mere nursery playmates. They attend earthly weddings and funerals, and at their own dances (in Donegal, at least) welcome handsome young mortals and frolic freely with them. They engage in airy battles among themselves, which seem in miniature not unlike the faction fights of their mortal countrymen at fairs and patron festivals. When the wind whirls the thatch off a peasant’s house, he knows it is a scrimmage of the fairies overhead. Indeed the only thoroughly childish trick which seems to be common amongst them is that of exchanging themselves for mortal babies, and hiding away in cradles. They share with all other Irishmen an exceeding love for little children, and steal them away for the pure pleasure of their company; some skylarking old fairy volunteering to impersonate the baby, and delude the sharp eyes of the mother. These undertakings, so far as I can discover, are always unsuccessful. The mother invariably suspects the wizened occupant of her cradle, and with the help of some wise woman of the neighborhood, wheedles it into declaring its real age. The cat being thus out of the bag, it becomes an easy matter to chase the fairy away with a red-hot poker or boiling teakettle, when the baby is miraculously restored. Irish babies are robust, and bear the change from fairy back to mortal climes better than did Bonnie Kilmeny in Hogg’s fine poem.

The greatest charm of the Irish fairy tales is their unparalleled realism —one might almost have said veracity. The mixture of dream and reality, thought so remarkable in Mr. Kipling’s Brushwood Boy and They, is surely outdone in this particular by the fairy stories of Croker, Lover, and Carleton. They invariably begin by assigning the actors in the story to a certain county of Ireland, and often name a village of that county. “ People may have heard of Daniel O’Rourke,” begins a wild tale by Crofton Croker. “I knew the man well. He lived at the bottom of Hungry Hill, just at the right-hand side of the road as you go toward Bantry.” Nor does the verisimilitude diminish as the tale proceeds. The air of careful fidelity to fact is kept up throughout; and often at the end one finds a grave speculation as to whether some trivial detail or other has been sufficiently verified.

Carleton has an engaging way of following some particularly tall statement about a fairy or witch with a cautious bit of hedging. “Now I won’t swear the leprecaun’s hat was red, for ’fraid I’d tell a lie.” The plausible scenery and geography of these stories having gone so far to beguile the reader, a liberal admixture of very human beings, all behaving quite naturally and cheerfully in the midst of the fairies’ pranks, completes the charm, and leaves the impression of a candid and conscientious narrative. Miss MacClintock conveys this illusion very readily. In her excellent story of Jamie Freel and the Young Lady, the fairies have long held their revels in the ruined castle, and Jamie has heard them singing and dancing there a dozen times before he ventures to join them; at which point his mother endeavors to dissuade him in much the same tone and manner as she might if he were bent on running away to sea, or joining thearmy. Carleton thus describes the talk of Frank Martin, the weaver of Tonagh Forth, who “maintained a great intimacy with the fairies”: —

“‘Well, Frank, when did you see them?’

“ ‘ Whist! There’s two dozen of them in the shop this minute. There’s a little ould fellow sittin’ on the top of the sleys, and all to be rocked while I’m weavin’. . . . Go out o’ that, you shingawn! Let the tallow alone, you little glutton. See, there’s a weeny thief o’ them aitin’ my tallow.’

“‘What size are they, Frank?’

“‘Oh, little wee fellows, with green coats, and the purtiest little shoes ever you seen. There’s two of them — both ould acquaintances of mine — runnin’ along the yarn-beam. That ould fellow with the bob-wig is called Jim Jam, and the other chap with the threecocked hat is called Nickey Nick. Nick plays the pipes. Nickey, give us a tune, or I’ll malivogue you. Whisht now, listen! ’

“It was well known,” continues Carleton, “that at night, whenever he woke out of sleep, the first thing that he did was to put out his hand, and push them, as it were, off his bed.

“ ‘ Go out o’ this, you thieves, you — go out o’ this now, and let me alone. Nickey, is this any time to be playin’ the pipes, and me wants to sleep? There now. Sure they’re all gone, barrin’ poor Red Cap, that does n’t like to lave me.’”

There is not much revengeful spirit in the Irish fairies. Teig O’Kane, in Mr. Douglas Hyde’s fine translation from the Gaelic, was indeed made to carry a corpse about, from parish to parish, through a long night of terror; but he afterwards reformed from his wild ways,“married Mary,” and led an industrious and prosperous life. The reader reared on Grimm and Andersen may tremble horribly for the fate of Billy MacDaniel in the fine rollicking story of Master and Man, when he spoils the old fairy’s plot for carrying off the young bride. Had MacDaniel but held his tongue, instead of shouting out “God bless us! ” when the young bride sneezed, the plot would have succeeded; and yet he escapes with a scolding and a slap or two, and is able to join the wedding-party and spend a jovial evening with them. Light-hearted, good-humored Irish fairies! They are so talkative and confidential that they often let mortals into the secret of their mischievous intentions. Their minds seem as transparent as their bodies. They have a share of the all-redeeming humor which in Carleton’s hands humanizes the murderous faction fight, and which Miss Lawless puts into the mouth of her revengeful exile from County Clare: —

Irish fairies are quite capable of enjoying a good joke upon themselves. Even Satan, in The Three Wishes, enters quite into the spirit of the clever blacksmith, who has got the best of him in a bargain, and in the midst of receiving a fearful drubbing with a sledge-hammer, calls out politely, —

“But if possible, Mr. Dawson, be a little more delicate.”

The fairies inhabit the whole of Ireland; but they have their favorite haunts and meeting-places. Their great fighting tournaments are held on May Eve on the Plain-a-Bawn, where they contend for the best ears of corn in the coming harvest. The little village of B—claims to be the most “gentle” (that is, fairy) place in County Sligo; but others claim that honor for Drumahair or Drumcliff. Miss MacClintock’s Ulster fairies speak a dialect partly Scotch, and Mr. Douglas Hyde’s belong to Roscommon and Galway. Black’s Guide to Ireland provides fairies and ghosts liberally for castles, promontories and lakes; the prettiest legend of all being assigned to Lough Leane, where fairies dance about the ghost of The O’Donoghue, as he returns every seven years to his old home. Mr. and Mrs. Hall devote many pages of their imposing three-volume work to fairy legends, and in particular to sunken towns and villages in the Irish lakes. The fairies are very fond of hawthorn trees, and indeed plant them for their own pleasure; and woe to the man who cuts down a fairy “ thorn.” It was under such a tree that Anna Grace, in Ferguson’s lovely ballad, met her fate.

It is easy to anger the fairies by throwing water out of windows after dusk or before dawn. Often they are trooping by, and are bespattered. One Mrs. Corcoran was bedridden for seven years for no other offense than this. Lady Wilde says that in some parts of Ireland it is customary, when throwing away water at night, to warn the fairies by shouting in Gaelic, “Away with yourselves from the water.” This shows that the trooping fairies have no penchant for woods and fields, but prefer the main-traveled roads.

There are many sorts of fairies in Ireland. These trooping clans, the friendliest, wear green jackets; the solitary fairies wear red. According to McAnally, a peasant once witnessed a battle between them; and when the trooping fairies began to win, he was so overjoyed “ to see the green above the red,” that he gave a loud hurrah! Immediately all vanished from view, and he found himself thrown headlong in the ditch. In Mr. Yeats’s classification, the weird, but not unkindly merrows (or sea-fairies) come next; then the changelings; then the fairy doctors, and witches, who inhabit puddings and pots, bewitch butter, steal milk, and the like; the banshees, not always harbingers of death; the leprecaun, or fairy shoemaker, “the only industrious person among them ” (for they dance their shoes away in a single night); the Pookas, first cousins of the Scotch Brownies, who for their sins are obliged to help the housewife with nightly elfin labors; the giants, the ghosts, and the Satanic race of demon-cats; and last, the “kings, queens, princesses, earls, and robbers.”

Fairy rings, alas, are explained on scientific grounds in all the encyclopædias. The enchanted raths, or forths, however, are left the fairies still. It is there that they play their lovely music, which leaves a wild craving forever in the heart of the unlucky child or maiden who hears it. Mortal men have sometimes listened and learned the fairy tunes, and may play them freely when not too near a rath, or on the dangerous eves of May, Midsummer, and November. “The Pretty Maid Milking the Cow ” is a tune stolen from the fairies, and so is “ Eileen Aroon,” the Irish original of “ Robin Adair.” A poor little hunchback of Connaught, who had an ear for sweet music, once heard the “good people”singing, and after listening for a long time, lifted up his voice in a happy variation of their tune. So well and so modestly was it done, that the fairies, delighted at the addition to their repertoire, took off his hump by a spell, and made him straight and strong.

Not every fairy-seeing man agrees with Frank Martin about the size of the fairies. Mr. Douglas Hyde makes them as large as midgets. The witches of Slievenamon are full-grown women. Shemus Rua saw two “red-headed fellows” of full adult size walking away with his cow. Their subsequent behavior, and the strange company to which they introduced him, showed them to be fairies. The good people are good linguists. They speak both Gaelic and English, as well as a tongue of their own, which puzzled Teig O’Kane when he met them on the lonely road.

“Oh wirra!” said he, beginning to repent of his sins. “It’s not English or Irish they speak — it can’t be that they ’re Frenchmen! ”

Improving on their melodies is not the only way of befriending the fairies. To leave a little new milk on the window-sill or door-step overnight is a thoughtful, neighborly act much appreciated by them. They prefer being called “good people” and “gentry” rather than fairies. A horseshoe over the door keeps them at arm’s length, even though invited to enter. Frank Martin declared that he was blessed at his birth with a special prayer against their power. They will not often face a priest, or speak with him, though they may pluck up courage to send him a message. And yet they are often allies of the priests in their parish work, for the salutary frights which they give to wild young men often send them back to church and honest living.

The trooping fairies are really only to be feared on Midsummer Eve. It is then that they steal away mortal maidens. In Donegal, in the forties, was living an old woman who declared that she had been carried off and kept for seven years in fairyland. “ We had fine white bread, and crudded cream,” said she, “and everything but the grace of heaven.” More tragic is the tone of Sir Samuel Ferguson’s fine ballads of the Fairy Thorn, and Well of Lagnanay.

Where is, or was, that fairyland to which Una Bawn and Anna Grace were snatched away? According to Mr. Baring-Gould, there is a legendary sunken island “seven days’ sail westward from the coast of Clare.” This is the fabled land of perpetual youth. Old Irish peasants say that “you can buy happiness there for a penny.” Perhaps this is the fairies’ paradise? But do fairies ever die? “ Blake,” as Mr. Yeats reminds us, “once saw a fairy’s funeral; but in Ireland,” he adds, “we think they are immortal.”