The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland

by Blackwell, Amy Hackney

  The Irish love of poetic language mixed with humor and tragedy to produce the beautiful Irish ballad. The ability to compose and perform a beautiful ballad has been highly prized in Ireland for centuries. The ballad is generally sung by a single person, who may or may not be accompanied by instruments. Ballads range from a handful of lines to many hundreds of lines in length. They can tell stories of lost love, injustice and revenge, or what happened when the singer went to get a beer.

  65 { Before There Was Riverdance . . .

  Dancing has been an important form of artistic expression and social interaction in Ireland for thousands of years. The Celts and the druids had their own forms of folk dancing. Some say that the prevalence of ring structures in modern Irish dancing has to do with the way the ancient druids danced around sacred oak trees — either that, or it’s just easier to dance in a circle.

  The Vikings, the Normans, and the English all probably contributed to the development of dance in Ireland. By the sixteenth century, three dances were spoken of as distinctively Irish: the Irish Hey, the Rinnce Fada, and the Trenchmore. Sir Henry Sidney, Queen Elizabeth’s lieutenant in Ireland, saw some comely Irish lasses dancing Irish jigs in Galway. He wrote, “They are very beautiful, magnificently dressed and first class dancers.” Whenever royalty or important guests visited Ireland, it was customary to meet them with fancy dancers.

  The steps toward the development of contemporary Irish dance are unclear. It is known, however, that dancing was an important part of the social lives of the native Irish population. Festivals, weddings, and wakes were all occasions for dancing. Towns would have dance competitions, and wandering dance masters would go from town to town, teaching all the latest steps. It was through the influence of these itinerant masters that the Irish forms of the jig, reel, hornpie, and polka developed.

  Today, thanks in part to Riverdance, Irish step-dancing is the most recognizable form of Irish dance. In this style, dancers hold a rigid posture, keep their arms mostly by their sides, and step and kick about for all they’re worth. Many Irish dancers maintain that their ancestors developed this rigid-armed style of dancing so that if English people looked in through a window they wouldn’t be able to tell that the Irish were dancing. There may be a grain of truth to this, but most dance scholars think that the style was adapted from French dances imported in the eighteenth century.

  The most authentically Irish form of dance is the céilí, or ceilidh (kaylee), which is similar in form to folk dancing in many other parts of the world. A céilí is essentially a dance party in which everyone dances to traditional Irish music, spinning, exchanging partners, waltzing around, and generally having a good time. Céilí dance arrangements generally involve four or more dancers at a time. Irish-American organizations throughout the United States host céilís from time to time.

  66 { Death and the Supernatural

  For the Irish, a funeral isn’t just an occasion for mourning. It is also an opportunity to get together with friends, meet members of the opposite sex, and play wild games. This both honors the dead person and allowed the living to rejoice in their continuing life.

  Traditionally the corpse and his or her family would be separated from the party by a screen so that the mourners could grieve and weep without distraction. Meanwhile, all the guests would drink whiskey, sing, smoke, and play various party games. These games involved mock marriages and some games that the clergy condemned as downright obscene — not unlike the games played at some teenage parties today. Flirtation was allowed but fornication was not; the Irish did not approve of sex outside of marriage.

  The Irish people have maintained a set of unique beliefs and superstitions that have lived on until the modern day. There is an abundance of stories and superstitions about the mischief of the fairies. The Irish term for the fairies is sídhe (shee); in English they are called by a number of terms, such as “wee folk” or the “good people.” Irish legends suggest that there is an extraordinary diversity of charming and terrifying fairies frolicking in the countryside:

  Changelings — fairy children left in place of stolen mortal babies; the fairies were said to leave sickly babies after stealing healthy ones.

  Bean sídhe (banshee) — a female spirit associated with the ancestors of old Irish families, who wails terribly whenever someone in the family dies.

  Gruagach — a female spirit that guards livestock but requires an offering of milk.

  Selkies — gentle spirits that are seals by day but humans by night; they sometimes marry human fishermen.

  Lianhan shee — a sort of love goddess who invites men for trysts in Tír na nÓg (the home of the fairies); loving the Lianhan shee almost invariably results in disaster.

  Leprechauns — short, mischievous creatures known for their skills in making shoes and hiding gold; if a mortal traps one at the end of a rainbow, he can take his pot of gold.

  Cluricauns — similar to leprechauns, except they don’t make shoes and they like to steal shepherds’ dogs and goats for impromptu midnight races.

  Pooka — a spooky spirit who appears as a black eagle, goat, or horse; he has the irritating habit of picking up unwary travelers for terrifying midnight rides, sometimes into the sea.

  It is widely suspected that the fairies came from one of the races that inhabited Ireland before the Celts arrived. There is an abundance of rings of stones throughout the Irish countryside. Local legend generally attributes these “fairy rings” to Ireland’s mystical inhabitants from the past. Superstitious locals have avoided the rings for centuries. Less superstitious archaeologists usually attribute the rings to Ireland’s Stone Age inhabitants.

  The beauty of Irish superstitions is that the Irish adopted all the superstitions of Christian culture without giving up their old Celtic beliefs. The result was a whole cornucopia of beliefs about how to avert disaster, placate the fairies, or attain wealth and love.

  A great many superstitions dealt with relations with the spirit world. The wee folk were notoriously mischievous, so a wise person kept a number of practices in mind — only calling them “the good people,” for example. People called out a warning whenever they threw water out of the house, for fear of hitting an unsuspecting fairy. To stay on the fairies’ good side, sensible housewives always left out little plates of food or milk for the little people to enjoy. If someone should be so unfortunate as to cross paths with hostile fairies, it was well known that throwing dust from under one’s feet would force the fairies to give up any human captives. When gathering wood for a fire, people would never take anything growing on a fairy mound.

  A number of beliefs dealt with specific holidays. On Halloween it was customary to put up Parshell crosses — two sticks tied together with twine — to keep spirits at bay (the Parshell cross looks suspiciously like the spooky sticks in the film The Blair Witch Project). On May 1, a woman could achieve great beauty by rolling naked in the morning dew. St. Stephen’s Day — December 26 — was also known as Wren Day because local boys would hunt down a wren and then parade it around town on a stick for good luck. On Whit Sunday it was considered unwise to go anywhere near water, because it was widely known that the spirits of drowned people would rise up on that day and try to pull down the living.

  67 { Irish Sports

  The Celts were an active, warlike folk, so when they found themselves at peace, they invented warlike sports to keep themselves fit. Although they’d beaten their Celtic swords into plowshares, Irish farmers continued to play these exciting sports. In the late nineteenth century, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) officially revived them. GAA matches still gather roaring crowds from across the island.

  One of the most unique Irish sports is hurling, an ancient game played by two fifteen-member teams armed with curved wooden sticks called “hurlies.” They use the sticks to smack around a hard leather ball (sliothar), at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour, until it goes through a hoop. With all the swinging and smacking, injuries are common; it’s said that the anci
ent Celts used the sport as a training tool to give their warriors strong bones. The All-Ireland Hurling Final, held every year at Croke Park in Dublin, excites fanatical enthusiasm.

  The woman’s version of hurling is called camogie. Camogie matches tend to be somewhat less violent than the men’s matches, but they are popular anyway.

  Hurling is an ancient sport, and forms of it have evolved into a number of popular modern sports. The Scottish form of hurling is called shinty. Since shinty involves hitting a ball around with a stick, it is thought to have inspired that other Scottish sport, golf. Hurling and shinty enthusiasts who emigrated to Canada, adapted their favorite sport to the ice and called it hockey. Unlike the Celts or the Irish, however, the Canadians had the sense to wear pads.

  A marginally safer form of hurling evolved into Gaelic football, the GAA’s other major sport. It’s kind of like soccer, except the players use their hands, and it’s kind of like rugby, and the players don’t wear pads. Games are fast and furious.

  68 { Rich Folklore and Heritage

  Irish storytellers are famous for their wit and inventiveness. The extraordinary range of Irish stories comes from a folklore tradition more than 2,000 years old, which successfully blended Celtic, Christian, and English influences to create some of the most distinctive oral literature in all of Europe. Although the traditional format for Irish storytelling is dying out, its legacy continues in books and in poetry.

  Ireland has one of the richest folklore traditions in the world. Folklorists have hypothesized that in 1935 the parish of Carna, in west Galway, held more unrecorded folktales than did the rest of Western Europe combined. There are many reasons for this rich heritage, but two main factors stand out. First, Irish culture kept a Celtic base for more than 2,000 years, while incorporating the traditions and beliefs of Christianity, the Vikings, the Normans, and the English. These layers of culture piled on top of one another to create a rich tapestry. Second, the tradition of oral composition and performance has been strong in Ireland throughout the years.

  In ancient Celtic society, professional singers and poets called bards were extremely important. The Celts didn’t write, so bards memorized vast amounts of poetry and performed it live. Their poems and songs were often the only record of a king’s deeds or misdeeds, and their performances were the best entertainment around. People were accustomed to listening to stories told aloud and appreciated skilled storytellers.

  As time went on, more people learned to read and write and the bards became less important. But the Irish populace remained mostly illiterate, so they kept up the tradition of oral storytelling. Bards evolved into wandering storytellers called shanachies, or seanachaí (SHAN-uck-ee), who went from town to town, entertaining the townsfolk. Shanachies, like their bard predecessors, were always welcome; people paid them with food if money wasn’t available. When there wasn’t a shanachie around, ordinary people entertained themselves by telling stories around the fire.

  A good storyteller knew hundreds of tales and could perform them with gusto and eloquence. In this informal way, an ancient oral literary tradition quietly continued into modern times.

  For centuries, Irish folktales were unknown to the outside world. During the Protestant ascendancy, the ruling class had nothing but disdain for the stories of Irish farmers. Not only were the stories in the barbaric Irish tongue, but also they were all about fantastic heroes and fairies, which the English dismissed as a bunch of superstitious nonsense.

  In the early nineteenth century folklore suddenly became fashionable. The brothers Grimm in Germany started collecting and studying folktales (which you can read in Grimm’s Fairy Tales) and declared folklore a vital expression of a culture’s heritage. Soon, enterprising Irish scholars began to explore the countryside, looking for stories of value. They found a gold mine.

  The first volume of Irish folktales was Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, published in 1825 by Thomas Croker from Cork. Croker and other early scholars of Irish folklore visited the Anglicized areas of Ireland in the east and recorded stories in English; this limited the value of their work because it ignored the great majority of Irish folktales, which were told only in Irish. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Irish folklore studies became respectable. Oscar Wilde’s parents, Sir William and Speranza Wilde (Speranza was Mrs. Wilde’s pen name, her real name was Jane Francesca), were important figures in this field and eccentric luminaries on the Anglo-Irish scene. The intellectuals of the Celtic Renaissance drew their inspiration from the Irish language and its folklore. Douglas Hyde’s Beside the Fire, William Butler Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight, Lady Augusta Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs of the West of Ireland, and Standish O’Grady’s collections not only established Irish folklore as one of the great oral literature traditions of Western civilization, but also provided an immense source of pride for the growing Irish Nationalist movement.

  Even as Yeats and Lady Gregory collected tales in the cottages of Sligo and Connemara, they recognized that the storytelling tradition was dying out. They knew that if the Irish language died, a vast literary heritage would die with it. To prevent that from happening, in 1935 the Irish government created the Irish Folklore Commission. In the following decades, Irish-speaking collectors scoured the countryside to record stories of saints, heroes, and spirits. Currently, more than a million and a half pages of folklore reside in the commission’s collection which, since 1971, has been continued on by the Folklore Department at University College Dublin.

  One of the most popular themes for stories was the spirit world. Ireland was widely known to be inhabited by all manner of fairies. The fairies were notoriously mischievous, and a vast array of stories described the mysterious tricks they played on unsuspecting mortals.

  The leprechaun is perhaps the most famous of Ireland’s little people. In one story, a man came down from his fields one day and went to look after his old mare, who had served him well for many years. When he approached the stable, he heard a loud hammering sound. He peeked in through a window and spotted a funny little man sitting under his mare, hammering away at some shoes and whistling the prettiest tune you ever heard. The man realized what he had in his stable — a leprechaun.

  Leprechauns are famous for their shoemaking abilities, but they’re even more famous for their gold. The man knew this, so he snuck in the backdoor and tiptoed up behind the little man. The leprechaun was so busy making his shoes that he didn’t notice the man until the man had caught the leprechaun fast. “I have you now,” the man said, “and I won’t let you go until I have your gold!”

  “Stop, you’re squeezing too hard!” said the leprechaun. “Let me go for a moment and I’ll get you the gold.” Eager for the gold, the man released the leprechaun, who, quick as a wink, ran out the door. All the man had left was the little shoe that the leprechaun had been making. The man didn’t get any gold, but his wife said that it was the prettiest shoe she’d ever seen.

  Some fairies were thought to be helpful, in their own mysterious ways. One story tells of a man who started feeling faint while in church. He walked outside to clear his head, and a gentleman approached to ask if he was all right. The man explained that he was feeling faint. The gentleman handed him a florin (a valuable coin) and told him to go have a whiskey at the local pub (Irish whiskey, of course, has amazing curative powers). The man thanked him and walked to the pub.

  He paid for his drink with the florin, took the change, and drank down the whiskey. In no time at all he was feeling better. The man went home thinking nothing of it.

  The next day he was going fishing, so he went to the store to buy some tobacco for his trip. When he reached into his pocket to get some money, he was surpr
ised to find that the same florin was in his pocket. He paid with the florin, took the change, and walked away smoking, wondering what had happened. On the way home after fishing, he stopped by the bakery for some bread. He discovered that the same florin was in his pocket again.

  The man continued in this way for some time, paying for everything with the florin and always finding it back in his pocket. He was happy with his good fortune, but something about the strange coin never seemed right to him. One day he went into the pub where he’d bought the first glass of whiskey. He threw the florin down on the counter and yelled, “May the devil go with you!”

  He never saw the coin again. To the end of his days, he always said that it was a fairy man who had given it to him.

  69 { Potatoes, for Better or Worse

  An Gorta Mór, the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s, is one of the pivotal events in Irish history. Millions emigrated, and the resulting demographic shift led to a decreasing population. The famine also ignited anger at the British government, which eventually grew into the Irish independence movement.

  Potatoes came to Europe from the New World in the early sixteenth century. Sir Francis Drake is thought to have introduced the potato to England, and shortly afterward Sir Walter Raleigh tried planting them on his Irish estates.

  When potatoes reached Ireland, they created a revolution. They were very easy to grow; farmers could plant them in the spring and leave them alone for months while they went off and worked elsewhere (anywhere that scarce wages might be offered). People grew potatoes on any patch of land that could sustain them, even the most marginal of fields.

  Potatoes are extremely nutritious; they are full of vitamins, protein, calcium, and iron, especially when washed down with buttermilk, the potato’s traditional accompaniment. The potato, in fact, is perhaps the only crop that can provide a balanced diet by itself, which kept the Irish healthier than other people living on one starch such as rice or millet or even bread (made of wheat). It was relatively easy to store over the winter, which was important because most tenant farmers had no buildings in which to store vast quantities of grain. Unfortunately, you can’t store potatoes for much more than a year, and this would have devastating consequences for the Irish in the famine years.