Irish Folk Tales

by Henry Glassie

  The old teller of tale like Hugh Nolan brings his style and the style of his source into oneness. The writer of sketches shoves them apart, clarifying distinctions of style and class. What is most remarkable about Crofton Croker, standing there at the beginning, is that he felt no insecure need to make that distinction radical. He enjoys the ripple of his own prose, its light tone and learned allusions, but he restrains it, keeps it plain and direct, and when he quotes the country people he preserves their words without exaggerating them grotesquely. Other writers, though, pleasured in stretching the real social and cultural distance that lay between them and their subjects. Thomas Keightley, like Croker Irish and a founder of the discipline of folklore, carped that Croker had published stories that were his. Reclaiming his contribution during his global survey, The Fairy Mythology of 1828, Keightley gives us a tool to measure the distance between Croker and himself. Keightley begins his tale “The Leprechaun in the Garden” like this: “There’s a sort o’ people that every body must have met wid sumtime or another. I mane thim people that purtinds not to b’lieve in things that in their hearts they do b’lieve in, an’ are mortially afeard o’ too.” Croker’s “Seeing Is Believing” opens, “There’s a sort of people whom every one must have met with some time or other; people that pretend to disbelieve what, in their hearts, they believe and are afraid of.” The disbeliever is Felix O’Driscoll, who hears an old woman in a public house recount capturing a fairy who promises her wealth, but she turns her head for an instant and he is gone. “He slipped out o’ my fingers,” writes Keightley, “just as iv he was med o’ fog or smoke, an’ the sarra the fut he iver come nigh my garden agin.” Croker’s conclusion runs, “He slipped out of my hand just as if he was made of fog or smoke, and the sorrow the foot he ever came nigh my garden again.”

  There is an argument to be made for recording dialect, but misspelling little words serves science less than it serves the gentleman who wants to shake a cheap laugh out of his reader, and who, even more, wishes not to be confused with the people of the story.

  Orthographic choices separate Croker and Keightley and likely signal differences in personality. Croker, though a gentleman, stepped toward the people. Though an exile in England, he remained connected to the Ireland of his birth and raising. Keightley denigrated Croker and Croker’s folk and withdrew into erudite isolation. More deeply, however, Croker and Keightley were joined by a commitment to science. They spelled words differently but reported substantially the same text. No such commitment checked Samuel Lover. Born in Dublin a year before Croker, nine years after Keightley, Lover was an artist, a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, who followed Croker closely with two series of Legends and Stories of Ireland and one book of Songs of Ireland. His sketches stretched into extravaganzas, their plots flung to wild extremes, their peasants set to kicking with preposterous result inside the English language.

  At its most farcical limit, the sketch retains virtues. For one thing, when the gentleman elaborates upon folk belief and creates a comic fiction, he is not acting at variance with the country people who do the same thing. For another, the humorously sketched folktale was, as Samuel Lover makes clear, a popular upper-class oral genre, appropriate for after-dinner entertainment. While we may think of folktales as the sole possession of the unlettered and impecunious, all people tell stories, and the writers of sketches have preserved for us examples of the verbal art of the wealthy classes of times past. If our interest lies only in the country people and their art, then we will find the sketches containing kernels of traditional tale. Though the sketchers were tempted by demons of invention, Crofton Croker eliminated from his first edition tales of his own, and even Samuel Lover labels clearly the product of his own imagination. And in addition, while dressing stories up into sketches, the old authors sometimes provide us with information that modern folklorists have learned to cherish about the tellers, their personalities and occupations, and about the physical and social and conversational settings out of which stories emerge. So Samuel Lover does more than report a folktale he heard from one Paddy the Sport. He tells about Paddy, “a tall, loose-made, middle-aged man … fond of wearing an oil-skinned hat and a red waistcoat …, and an admirable hand at filling a game-bag or emptying a whisky-flask.” Paddy was a “professed story-teller and a notorious liar” who “dealt largely in fairy tales and ghost stories,” and we hear samples of his fare before Lover sets him in a gentleman’s hall where his cleverness outstrips the rich people around him, winning him the right to tell a tale about a fox whose wit makes a man a fool. If Lover leaves us something, Croker bequeaths more, and the incidental detail with which he decorates his tales is as much to be treasured as the stories themselves, for it carries us into the presence of other people in other times.

  Crofton Croker retold most of the stories that he included in the Fairy Legends, but the sketch was not his only experiment. His tale “The Crookened Back” begins with information on the teller, Peggy Barrett, who “like all experienced story-tellers, suited her tales, both in length and subject, to the audience and the occasion.” A clear, uninterrupted text follows. Then “there was a pause,” and Croker describes the varieties of reaction among the listeners, some who had heard the story, some who had not. That was no sketch but a model report of a folktale, and after “The Capture of Bridget Purcell,” Croker notes, “This narrative was taken down verbatim from the lips of a poor cottager in the county Limerick, by Miss Maria Dickson, 22nd April, 1825.”

  So, there at the beginning, we find two distinct ways to get an orally delivered narrative onto the page. One was to remake it into a piece of prose in conformity with the reigning rules of literary art. The other was to record the text in the words of its own author, unaltered by the outsider, whose task was restricted to translating sounds into letters. From that time to the present, every writer of Irish folktales has had to decide whether to honor literary convention through reinvention or folk art through transcription.

  In the days of Croker and Lover, one solution to the Irish writer’s dilemma was devised by William Carleton. Glance over the sketches Carleton arranged into his immensely popular Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry of 1842 and you might be reminded of Samuel Lover, whose “unrivalled wit and irresistable drollery” Carleton admired, but probe more deeply and you will find his stories saturated with a strange darkness. Some seem affectionate, others mean, some funny, some somber. Carleton was not like those writers who could maintain their distance and their tone. They were born to be Protestant gentlemen, but he was born poor and Catholic, “a peasant’s son” in rural Tyrone. He left the country for Dublin, converted to Protestantism, and confected out of his wide reading a literary style that enabled him to stand alongside the witty and wealthy, recomposing his memories into sketches filled with rural folk who speak and behave strangely. But Carleton’s great heart ached. He protested that he had never been estranged from the people of his youth. His virtue, he wrote, was that he knew them, had danced and laughed and gotten drunk with them. His goal was serious, the defense and improvement of his people, so before he releases his readers into the Traits and Stories, he enjoins them to abandon their prejudices, and after his rollicking, painful tale was told, he added another book, Tales and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, in which he offers some of the tales again but narrated in a more straightforward manner, like Croker at his best. William Carleton provides two versions of the same tale. His solution was to construct for himself two contexts, one in which, through fiction, he answers the call of art, another in which, through essays, he answers the call of science. Nothing so neat, though, would suit William Carleton. He could not help but make the peoples’ tales his own, for he and they were one in blood and earth. So he mounted the complicated literary apparatus he had mastered in Dublin and drove it into the heart of the tradition. At the end of Tales and Stories, Carleton, now learned, now prosperous, merges with his people once more, retelling an old folktale of a blacksmith who beats the
Devil, and witnessing to the rural belief in ghosts, with all the literary might he could muster.

  William Carleton is no man for easy schemes, yet his works yield three approaches to the folktale. In one, he utilizes the tale as a colorful element in a piece of his own in which the styles of the author and his characters, their diction and conduct, are set distinctly apart. The author, like Chaucer on the road to Canterbury, is an observer, amused, amazed, confused, offended. In another, Carleton takes the tale over and tells it again to suit a new audience, much as Shakespeare made old tales into new drama. The author becomes a storyteller, at one with the tradition. William Butler Yeats called William Carleton a “novelist” and a “storyteller” and a “historian,” and the third of Carleton’s approaches, the historian’s, was to present the tale as a fact, worthy of preservation for the information it contains about people who are not the author. William Carleton, who was born in 1794 and who died in 1869, was an exact contemporary of Croker, Keightley, and Lover, and he epitomizes their period, the period of Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, Gerald Griffin, and the first maturing of Irish literature in the English language. Carleton had two ways to make folklore into literature, the Chaucerian and the Shakespearean. At the same time, he was interested in folklore as it flourished in country places far removed from the drawing room and the office of the literary gazette. But Carleton was too close to the people, too bothered by his separation from them, to perfect his own solution to the problem of the relationship between the writer and the storyteller. That would wait until the nineteenth century was at an end. Then the perfection of Carleton’s solution would become a fundamental principle of the movement that spun around William Butler Yeats and generated out of Ireland the greatest body of literature in the modern world.

  “Folk art,” wrote W. B. Yeats, closing The Celtic Twilight, “is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted.” So grandly did Yeats’ own art flower from the tradition of his nation that when age began settling upon him, he was elected a senator of the new Irish Free State, and in the next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Stockholm in 1923, addressing the Swedish Royal Academy, he said that when he received the Nobel medal, two others should have been standing beside him, “an old woman sinking into the infirmity of age, and a young man’s ghost”: Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge.

  Together with Lady Gregory, Yeats had collected folktales. Each of them published clear texts, fresh from the lips of country people. Both built original works of art out of their experiences with the Irish tradition. But John Synge, because his life was brutally short, and because he was attracted both to science and art, provides us with the simplest case of the successful dynamic of their movement.

  When Synge met Yeats in Paris in 1896, Yeats was the author of The Wanderings of Oisin, The Countess Cathleen, The Land of Heart’s Desire, and The Celtic Twilight. He had edited a volume of Carleton’s sketches and assembled two anthologies, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry and Irish Fairy Tales, intermingling old texts from Croker, Lover, and Carleton with newly collected stories from Douglas Hyde. His career was more than begun. Synge, six years his junior, had published verse in the manner of Wordsworth, whom he admired for his clarity, but he had not yet found his voice. Still, there was much in Synge to appeal to Yeats. Like Lady Gregory he came of an old Irish Protestant family. In Irish matters, he was a nationalist. Politically, he was a socialist. He had read William Morris, who encouraged Yeats’ early interest in folklore and efforts in poetry, and whom Yeats would always call “my chief of men.” John Synge wandered alone in youth through the Wicklow hills, meeting the country people and becoming a serious naturalist. Contemplating Darwin in isolated terror, he denounced Christianity. In college at Trinity in Dublin, an interest in Irish antiquities led him through study of the Irish language into familiarity with ancient Irish literature. Paris may have been the place for an aspiring poet, but Synge’s calling was higher than sprinkling pages with pretty words. “Give up Paris,” Yeats told him. “Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”

  John Synge did not go to the Arans immediately, and when he did it cannot have been easy for him. Bedeviled by pains in his body, big but natively shy, Synge entertained his hosts with little magic tricks and set up his music stand in the kitchen to perform upon the violin, for he had trained at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. None of his four trips to the Arans was long, he drew his friends from the margins of society and spent much time lying on his back and watching the clouds go east, yet his experience there gave him his career and the book he wrote to tell of his adventure is a masterpiece.

  The Aran Islands brings together Synge’s interests in evolution and socialism. That mix characterized the folklore scholarship of his period, when folk culture was defined as a survival from an earlier evolutionary stage, marked by a generous and happy collective spirit. But Synge’s book was not conventional folklore writing, which was one reason it took years to find its publisher. Nor was The Aran Islands anything like the old sketches of peasant life, though the sketching idea remained alive in hands like those of Seumas MacManus. And Synge’s book was not journalism. Its prose was clear and new and beautiful. John Synge observed like a naturalist, and like others of his time who belonged to naturalists’ clubs in Ireland, he was a pioneer photographer of rural life. He observed like a naturalist and wrote like a poet to invent a new genre of emotional ethnography.

  While The Aran Islands was being rejected by a series of publishers, John Synge entered a state of white-hot creativity. In six years he wrote all of his plays, all but one influenced by his time on the Arans, two of them founded directly upon traditional narratives he heard there. Familiarity with the idea of the sketch breeds misunderstanding of Synge’s achievement. He does not depict Irish life as it is or was, but like the old teller of tales, he enters and enacts the Irish consciousness. Do not think of the country people he knew as playing upon the stage but as sitting beside him in the darkened theater, laughing and crying and twitching at his restatement of their ideas.

  “All art,” John Synge said, “is a collaboration.” No mere association between like-minded artists, the collaboration that powered his movement unified the artist with the national tradition. This is the structure of collaboration: in order to locate deep truths and to gain wide appeal, to avoid the trivializing constraints of academic endeavor, the artist roots his work in the folk culture and then accepts two responsibilities: to preserve the old tradition intact for the future; to do battle with the tradition so as to answer the needs of the self while creating new works for new worlds. In The Aran Islands and its companion, In Wicklow and West Kerry, Synge recorded the old ways as Lady Gregory said the folklorist should, with patience and reverence. All of his plays bear a relation to the tradition and two of them at least, Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World, are among the first great works of modern drama.

  John Synge’s oeuvre provides one pristine example of the perfection of Carleton’s solution. In The Aran Islands he quotes Pat Dirane’s folktale from which his play In the Shadow of the Glen was constructed. The story that inspired The Playboy is not presented as a text, and the rest of his plays are less specifically drawn from folk art. Scientist and artist, John Synge was an artist first, so we will relocate the center of his movement by balancing him with Douglas Hyde, who did write plays based on folktales, but who dedicated himself primarily to the collection and preservation of folklore.

  Only Ireland could choose a folklorist for its first president. Douglas Hyde’s election in 1937 capped a career that commenced in serious linguistic study. The son of a Protestant
minister from Roscommon, Hyde studied Hebrew and Greek and Irish at Trinity. To improve his Irish, he went into the countryside, listened to the aged speakers, and wrote down their stories and songs. To preserve Irish, he founded the Gaelic League in 1893. The League extended its mission from linguistic to national revival and provided the context in which the spirit of rebellion was nurtured until it broke forth in war in 1916. While others pressed toward armed action, Hyde withdrew to protect his culture by writing his monumental Literary History of Ireland and by publishing, between 1889 and 1939, a sequence of volumes filled with folk texts.

  Douglas Hyde, wrote William Butler Yeats, “knows the people thoroughly.… His work is neither humorous nor mournful; it is simply life.” Accuracy was Hyde’s concern. He surveyed the works that preceded his own in a kindly mood, but still found their stories manipulated, padded, and cooked. “Attempts,” he wrote in Beside the Fire, published in 1890, “have been made from time to time during the present century to collect Irish folk-lore, but these attempts, though interesting from a literary point of view, are not always successes from a scientific one.” Art and science obey different rules. Before Hyde, some writers of folktales leaned more toward art, others more toward science, but all created imperfect blends. In Hyde’s day, his friends W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge separated science and art and performed differently in different contexts to meet different responsibilities. After Hyde, division became complete. Some devoted themselves to art, others to science.

  In 1902, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce met for the first time on a street in Dublin. Joyce told the poet that his reliance on folklore was a sign of his deterioration. Yeats constructed a long counterargument, contending that art depends on the popular tradition to prevent the pursuit of individualism from ending in sterility. The twenty-year-old Joyce replied, or so Yeats tells it, that it was a pity Yeats was too old to receive his influence. The next year Joyce met Synge, read Riders to the Sea and did not like it, and reviewing Lady Gregory’s new Poets and Dreamers he described her storytellers as senile, feeble, and sleepy. Then the next year, with a little gift from Lady Gregory in his pocket, Joyce flew by the nets of home and religion to lodge in exile. Early in Ulysses, when the clever college boys speak of Hyde and Synge and “that old hake Gregory,” they do so to divorce themselves from the dominant Irish literary movement of their day, but the adult Joyce incorporated the school of Yeats and about everything else into his unreadable masterpiece named after a folksong, Finnegans Wake. In it James Joyce makes the Irish land, its rivers and ancient murmurs, heroic to the modern world, and from Joyce on, profoundly in Samuel Beckett, contentiously in Patrick Kavanagh, hilariously in Flann O’Brien, sublimely in the verse of the major poetic school of our day, that of Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Murphy, the Irish land and its people and their art have continued to prove inspiring and worthy of defeat. But the work of preserving folklore has been taken up by others, committed first to science.