“Is that a way to speak to me?” rebuked the god, still standing in his chariot, his white chargers like sea foam pawing the beach.
“You did not help me when I called out to you. I thought all the sons of Ellan Vannin were under your protection?”
“True enough. But do you not know that you must call my name three times before I can reply? Three times and then I can only help you once. So take the princess now and get to your boat and hoist your sail.”
Gilaspick glanced at the enraged Prince Imshee. “What of him?” he asked nervously.
“You may leave that little wizard to me. Quick, now, for in a moment this island will sink beneath the waves when I blow on it.”
Gilaspick grabbed the princess and leapt into his boat. It was already floating off-shore and he hoisted the sails. Immediately, the little vessel was speeding away across the sea and behind there was a terrible roaring and crashing as the island of the wizard was engulfed by the seas that Mannánan had brought on it.
“Well,” sighed Gilaspick, “that’s that. Let us hope we have a fair path home.”
But she didn’t reply. She opened her mouth but no sounds would come and tears were in her eyes.
“It cannot be that the wizard’s spell is still working, while he rots beneath the waves?”
Princess Ballakissak nodded sadly. She reached forth a smooth white hand and laid it against his face. The tears lay on her cheeks and Gilaspick found himself tearful as well, for he could not stand the sight of this beautiful maiden in this unhappy plight. He was about to call to the ocean god again for help, but he remembered that the ocean god could only help him once, and that time had already passed.
So they sailed on in silence, with Gilaspick not knowing what to do.
Finally, he spied a temperate shore and a shingle beach and thought that he would land there, to see what help he could get. He saw an old woman seated there as he brought his boat ashore. For a moment he thought it was the same old woman who had dogged his adventures at every step of the way, but he saw that her shawl was purple.
“Greetings, old woman,” he called as he helped the silent princess from the boat.
“I have been waiting for you, son of Ellan Vannin,” sniffed the old woman irritably.
“Waiting for me? How so?”
“Ask no questions. Bring the girl to my house.”
So Gilaspick and the Princess of Ballakissak followed her up the winding path to a white-washed old cottage on the cliff top and the sun was rising when they came to the door.
Three days they spent with the old woman and each day, at dawn, she prepared a strange potion and had the princess drink it down. Each time Gilaspick thought that there would be a cure, but each time the girl was unable to answer him when he questioned her, and the tears poured from her eyes.
It was then that Gilaspick Qualtrough realised that he had fallen deeply in love with the Princess of Ballakissak. Ah, if only she could speak.
The old woman, on the morning of the third day, as the sun was rising, came in with a herb and stripped it of its leaves and cut its stalk until a thick white juice came out of it. Then she put some water in a pot and laid the herb in and boiled the juice and gave it to the princess. A great sleep came over her and they had to carry her to her bed.
Gilaspick sat with her and, that evening, she awoke at last and looked up through the windows at the blue star-studded canopy. She yawned and stretched. Then she rubbed her eyes and said: “Where am I?”
Gilaspick was filled with joy. “I do not know, Princess. I know we are in a cottage of an old woman and that you are cured of the curse of the wizard.”
Memory came to her and she jumped up with joy and gave Gilaspick a big hug and a kiss.
Gilaspick felt he would die with satisfaction and delight at her embrace.
The old woman came in and smiled knowingly. “Tomorrow you can continue on your journey to Ellan Vannin,” she said.
That night, they feasted in the old woman’s cottage and Gilaspick Qualtrough showered her with thanks.
“No thanks are required,” said the old woman, whose name was Airmed. “I am a healer. But if you are grateful for what I have done, when you return to Ellan Vannin, you might meet an old woman selling herbs by the roadside. Do not pass her by with a curse but buy a cure from her.”
Gilaspick promised to do so.
So the next morning, they set out again, both talking away as if their lives depended on it. The Princess of Ballakissak declared her love for him and he declared his love for her. Happily, they came to Gob ny Garvain and sailed into the rocky bay of Port Mooar below Booilushag.
The people of the village turned out to greet him.
“Twenty-seven days have you been gone,” cried one of the fishermen of Booilushag, “and we had given you up for lost.”
“So had I,” cried Gilaspick, quite recovering his old spirits. And he proceeded to tell them his adventures, but no one would believe him.
“It’s old Gilaspick Qualtrough telling his tall stories again,” they said to one another. “However, it is a fine wife he has brought back to Booilushag. Maybe he has brought her from Onchan, or some other town in the south?”
No one quite knew where the princess could have come from, nor even that she was a princess, but as for the truth of it, well, they would not believe it.
For a few days, Gilaspick and Ballakissak were happy and then Gilaspick was reminded of his promise to go back to the Elfin Arms in Ramsey and meet the stranger. And the stranger had told him to bring the Princess of Ballakissak to him. When he explained what was troubling him to the girl, she grew unhappy.
“We must go to the Elfin Glen just as you promised, Gilaspick, otherwise you will have lost everything.”
“But what if I lose you? The stranger told me that I am to hand you over to him as proof, or he would take everything I owned on this island, including my reputation.”
“I will not love this stranger better than I loved the evil wizard, Prince Imshee. But your word has been given and there is an end to it.”
With heavy steps they set out from Booilushag up the path to Ballajora, to Dreesmjerry and when they were passing Sleiau Lewaigue they saw an old woman by the side of the road. At first, Gilaspick thought it was Airmed, or one of the other old women he had met on his travels, but her shawl was of parti-coloured cloth and bright.
“Buy a cure, sir,” she called.
Gilaspick sighed and was about to curse her. Then he shrugged. “There is no cure for the troubles that are on my shoulders,” he replied.
He was about to pass by when he remembered he had given his word to Airmed, the old healer, that he would buy a cure from an old woman he met by the side of the road. So he pulled out a coin and handed it to her. “You may give me what cure you like, for nothing I know will cure a heavy heart.”
The old woman gave him a bag. “That will do it. Keep it safe in your pocket until you need it.”
Then he and the Princess of Ballakissak walked on slowly until they came to the Elfin Glen.
The first person he spied was the stranger, sitting on a stone outside the inn with folded arms and a smile on his face. He was so familiar that Gilaspick wondered where he had seen him before.
“So you have returned?”
“I have,” agreed Gilaspick.
“Did you go to Fingal?”
“I did. But I had no time to cast my net into the waters.”
“That I know. But, importantly, did you bring me the Blessed Belle of Ballakissak?”
Gilaspick, with a heavy heart, drew the princess to his side. He said no word.
“Well,” said the stranger, “it seems that you are reluctant to part from her? Tell me why.”
“We love one another,” Gilaspick was forced to reply. “Though I promised you that I would bring her forth for you, though you force me to dishonour my pledge, I will fight you for her.”
The stranger laughed good-naturedly.
“Fight me? No. I will
take compensation though.”
Gilaspick groaned. “I am a poor fisherman.”
“Well, then, give me a bag of dried barragyn buighey and we will call it quits.”
Now barragyn buighey was sea poppy and Gilaspick had as much chance of obtaining some as becoming a rich man.
His face fell.
It was the Princess of Ballakissak who said: “Good sir, we have only a cure, a bag of herbs; perhaps you will accept this.”
She held out her hand to Gilaspick and he drew out the bag he had purchased from the old woman. They opened the bag and in it were the dried leaves of barragyn buighey.
“There, now, a bargain is a bargain,” smiled the stranger. “I will take this and be on my way. I am glad I picked you for this venture, Gilaspick Qualtrough.”
Gilaspick stared at him.
“Picked me?” he demanded. “What do you mean?”
But the stranger’s visage had suddenly changed and it was clear that he was a noble prince of the Otherworld and he was mounting into a great foaming chariot, drawn by white horses the colour of foam-capped waves. Without another glance, the stranger had raced away, heading straight into the sea.
Gilaspick and the princess tripped home very happily and lived together in Booilushag for many a long year. I do hear that their descendants might still be living there to this day, although I am told that no one believes the fabulous story that Gilaspick Qualtrough told about how he brought his beautiful wife to the shores of Ellan Vannin.
Scotland (Alba)
Scotland: Preface
I have always considered that James MacPherson (1736–96) of Kingussie has been unfairly treated in popular perception. He was a graduate of Aberdeen and Edinburgh universities and, in 1760, he produced his famous Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, which was followed by Fingal (1762) and then by Temora (1763). These were finally put together in a single volume as The Poems of Ossian in 1773.
Ossian made a tremendous impact on European literature and reawoke an interest in Celtic myth, legend and folklore. Translations were immediately made into German, French, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Polish and Russian. William Blake, Lord Byron and Lord Tennyson praised the work. The German poet, playwright and novelist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, admired it, as did Napoleon Bonaparte, who carried a copy of it with him on his military campaigns and took it with him into his final exile on St Helena. The English poet, Thomas Gray, was moved to comment: “Imagination dwelt many hundred years ago on the cold and barren mountains of Scotland.”
However, Dr Samuel Johnson denounced it as “a literary fraud”.
MacPherson had claimed the work to be translations of surviving Celtic epics. Johnson claimed that no such epics ever existed and MacPherson had made up the whole thing. Even today, you will find MacPherson denounced as a literary forger.
I feel this is unfair. When the Highland Society of Scotland set up a special committee to investigate the charges of MacPherson’s critics, and it reported back in 1805, the work was declared to represent a genuine tradition, even though MacPherson had probably not merely translated from oral tradition, rather than written sources, but embellished and retold the stories. To fill out the plots and adapt the text is the lot of anyone engaged in retelling folktales. Indeed, what was wrong with that?
Furthermore, it might well be that MacPherson had access to some genuine Gaelic manuscripts which became lost or destroyed. Both during the Scottish Reformation and certainly after the suppression of the various Scottish Jacobite uprisings, many manuscripts and books in Gaelic were destroyed. Edward Lhuyd (c.1660–1709), the Celtic scholar, in a research trip to Scotland in 1699 actually catalogued a library of books in Scottish Gaelic; the catalogue survived but the library was destroyed.
From the ninth century Book of Deer, with its Scottish Gaelic notations, and one eleventh-century poem, we have a surprising gap until we reach the Islay Charter of 1408. The Charter not only demonstrates a sophisticated literary medium, the obvious product of a long tradition of literary endeavour, but it also proves that Scottish Gaelic was being used as a medium of legal administration. Then we have the Book of the Dean of Lismore leading to the first printed Scottish Gaelic book, Bishop John Carswell’s Form na h-Ordaigh (1567).
There is no reason, therefore, why MacPherson’s source material could not have existed, as Dr Johnson maintained.
Nevertheless, the literary argument has continued to this day and poor MacPherson is branded with the unjustifiable label of being a forger. If he is a forger, I, too, am a forger, because I have adapted and retold these stories just as he apparently did.
The following stories appear in many variant versions in Scotland; indeed, some of them have Irish and Manx equivalents. The story Geal, Donn and Critheanach is also found in Donegal, with a shorter variant of the tale collected in Seamas MacManus’ Donegal Fairy Tales of 1900.
Perhaps the starting place for students of these tales is the work of John Francis Campbell (1822–95), a Gaelic folklorist who was known in his native Islay as “Iain Òg Ile”. His Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–2) and his work on Fingal (the Scottish Gaelic equivalent of Fionn Mac Cumhaill), which was published as Leabhar na Fèinne (1872), are the tip of the literary mountain he left. His huge collections of stories were deposited in the National Library of Scotland and in the Dewar MSS collection in Inverary Castle. In 1940 and 1960 further collections were published from this repository, but much still remains there.
Throughout the nineteenth century, there was much done by way of collecting folktales by industrious workers in both Scottish Gaelic and in English. Folklore of the Scottish Lochs and Springs by James M. MacKinlay (1893) was an important study, as well as George Henderson’s Survival in Belief among the Celts, Maclehose, Glasgow, 1911.
However, the most important worker in recording Celtic Scotland was William Forbes Skene (1809–1892), who emerged into the field editing what was then the oldest source of Scottish history as Chronicles of the Picts and Scots (1867). In 1868 he published Four Ancient Books of Wales, a two-volume study of Middle Welsh poetry. He then produced his chief work, and a most important one for Scotland – the three-volume Celtic Scotland: A History of Ancient Alban (1876–1880). Next to this stands another classic, which is Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica (Vols I and II, 1928; Vol III, 1940; Vol IV, 1941 and Vol V, 1954). There is still unpublished Carmichael material in Edinburgh University.
It is from these sources that I have drawn on the basis of the following retellings. Sometimes, one has had to cross-reference the stories with Middle Irish texts. For example The Shadowy One, a story of Scáthach of Skye, borrows from references to her in the ninth-century text Aided Oenfir Aife (Death of Aoife’s Only Son), given in A.G. van Hamel’s Compert Con Culainn, Dublin, 1933.
I would, however, like to pay a tribute to my friend as well as colleague, the late Seumas Mac a’ Ghobhainn (1930–87), the historian and author, whose work on behalf of the Scottish Gaelic language, its culture and history is well known. Seumas and I went on one highly interesting trip through Scotland in 1970 and it was then that I began to make some notes on the Scottish variations of Gaelic legend and folklore. Seumas often advised me on my material. His guiding hand is sadly missed. He had an uncanny ability to make the stories leap out of the printed sources into a modern reality. A chuid de fhlaitheannas dha!
14 The Shadowy One
“A young boy is approaching the gate, Scáthach,” announced Cochar Croibhe, the gatekeeper of Dún Scaith, whose great fortifications rose on the Island of Shadows in Alba, an island which today is still called the Island of Scáthach or Skye.
“A boy?” Scáthach was a tall woman, of pleasing figure and long fiery red hair. A closer look at her form showed her well-toned muscles. The easiness of her gait belied a body so well trained that, in a moment the great sword, which hung from her slender waist, would be in her hand – and that sword was not for ornament. Indeed, Scáthac
h was acclaimed one of the greatest warriors in all the world. No one had ever bested her in combat, which was why all the warriors who had ambition to be champions were sent to her academy, where she taught them the martial arts. Her school was famous in every land.
Cochar Croibhe, the gatekeeper, was himself a warrior of no mean abilities, for such he had to be in order to guard the gates of Dún Scaith. He shrugged.
“A boy,” he confirmed, “but accoutred as a warrior.”
“Does he come alone?”
“He is quite alone, Scáthach.”
“A talented boy, then,” mused Scáthach, “for such he would have to be, to reach this place by himself.”
Cochar Croibhe conceded the fact after some thought. After all, Scáthach’s military academy lay on the Island of Shadows; to reach it, one had to pass through black forests and desert plains. There was the Plain of Ill-Luck, for example, which could not be crossed without sinking into bottomless bogs, for it was one great quagmire. There was the Perilous Glen, which was filled with countless ravenous beasts.
It was with curiosity that Scáthach mounted the battlements of her fortress to view the approach of the boy. She decided that Cochar Croibhe did not lie, but the youth was more than a mere boy. He was short, muscular and handsome, and he carried his weapons as a veteran used to arms.
“He may have crossed the Plain of Ill-Luck and the Perilous Glen,” sneered Cochar Croibhe, at her side, “but he still has to cross the Bridge of Leaps.”
Now Scáthach’s island, the Island of Shadows, was separated from the mainland by a deep gorge through which tempestuous, boiling seas flooded. And the sea was filled with ravenous creatures of the sea. The only way across was by a high bridge, which led to the gate of her fortress.
The point of this bridge was that it had been constructed by a god in a time before time. When one man stepped upon one end of this bridge, the middle would rise up and throw him off, and if he leapt into the centre, then it would do likewise, so that he might be flung into the forge to the waiting creatures of the deep. Only Scáthach knew the secret of the safe crossing, and only when her pupils had graduated from her academy and sworn a sacred oath of friendship did she reveal the secret to them.
The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends Page 24
