OLD CELTIC ROMANCES
translated from the gaelic
BY
P.W. JOYCE, M.A., LL.D., T.C.D. M.R.I.A.
One of the Commissioners for the Publication of the Ancient Laws of Ireland
President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, Ireland
Author of
"A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANCIENT IRELAND" "THE STORY OF ANCIENT IRISH CIVILISATION" "A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND"
"A CHILD'S HISTORY OF IRELAND" "IRISH NAMES OF PLACES" "ANCIENT IRISH MUSIC"
AND OTHER WORKS RELATING TO IRELAND "I shall tell you a pretty tale"
--Coriolanus. DUBLIN
THE EDUCATIONAL CO. OF IRELAND, LIMITED
89 TALBOT STREET LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND COMPANY
39 PATERNOSTER ROW
1920 [iii] PREFACE.
Among the Celtic people of Ireland and the north-west of Scotland, story-telling has always been a favourite amusement. In the olden time, they had professional story-tellers, variously designated according to rank--ollaves, shanachies, files, bards, etc.--whose duty it was to know by heart a number of old tales, poems, and historical pieces, and to recite them at festive gatherings, for the entertainment of the chiefs and their guests. These story-tellers were always well received at the houses of princes and chiefs, and treated with much consideration; and on occasions when they acquitted themselves well, so as to draw down the applause of the audience, they were often rewarded with costly presents.
To meet the demand for this sort of entertainment, ingenious "men of learning," taking legends or historical events as themes, com-posed stories from time to time; of which those that struck the popular fancy were caught up and remembered, and handed down[iv] from one generation of story-tellers to another. In course of time, a body of romantic literature grew up, consisting chiefly of prose tales, which were classified, according to subject, into Battles, Voyages, Tragedies, Military Expeditions, Cattle-Raids, Courtships, Pursuits, Adventures, Visions, etc.[I.]
Some of these tales were historical, i.e. founded on historical events, and corresponded closely with what is now called the historical romance; while others were altogether fictitious--pure creations of the imagination. But it is to be observed that even in the fictitious tales, the main characters are always historical, or such as were considered so. The old ollaves wove their fictions round Conor Mac Nessa and his Red Branch Knights, or Finn and his Fena, or Luga of the Long Arms and his Dedannans, or Conn the Hundred-fighter, or Cormac Mac Art; like the Welsh legends of Arthur and his Round Table, or the Arabian romances of Haroun-al-Raschid and his Court. The greater number of the tales were, as I have said, in prose. But some were in poetry; and in many of the prose tales the leading characters are often made to express themselves in verse, or some striking incident of the story is repeated in a poetical[v] form. Not unfrequently the fragments of verse introduced into a prose tale are quotations from an older poetical version of the same tale; and hence it often happens that while the prose may be plain enough, the poetry is often archaic and obscure. At some very early period in Ireland--how early we have now no means of determining with certainty--Celtic thought began to be committed to writing; and as everything seems to have been written down that was considered worth preserving, manuscripts accumulated in course of time, which were kept either in monasteries, or in the houses of the hereditary professors of learning. But in the dark time of the Danish ravages, and during the troubled centuries that followed the Anglo-Norman invasion, the manuscript collections were gradually dispersed, and a large proportion lost or destroyed. Yet we have remaining--rescued by good fortune from the general wreck--a great body of manuscript literature. Our two most important collections are those in Trinity College and 1 in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; where we have manuscripts of various ages, from the year 1100 down to the present century, on every conceivable subject--Annals, History, Biography, Theology, Romance, Legend, Science, etc. These manuscripts, which, it should be remarked, are nearly all copies from older books, contain a vast collection of romantic literature: it may, indeed, be said that there is scarcely one important event in our early history, or one important native personage or native[vi] legend, that has not been made the subject of some fanciful story. The volume I now offer to the notice of the public contains eleven tales, selected and translated from the manuscripts of Trinity College and of the Royal Irish Academy. Some have been already published, with original text and literal translation, and are to be found in the Transactions of various literary societies, where, however, they are inaccessible to the general run of readers; and even if they were accessible, they are almost unreadable, the translations having been executed, not for literary, but for linguistic purposes. Others have never been translated or given to the public in any shape or form till now. Of the whole collection of eleven tales, therefore, it may be said that they are quite new to the general mass of the reading public. And furthermore, this is the first collection of the old Gaelic prose romances that has ever been published in fair English translation. Scraps and fragments of some of these tales have been given to the world in popular publications, by writers who, not being able to read the originals, took their information from printed books in the English language. But I am forced to say that many of these specimens have been presented in a very unfavourable and unjust light--distorted to make them look funny, and their characters de-based to the mere modern conventional stage Irishman. There is[vii] none of this silly and odious vulgarity in the originals of these fine old tales, which are high and dignified in tone and feeling--quite as much so as the old romantic tales of Greece and Rome.[II.] A translation may either follow the very words, or reproduce the life and spirit, of the original; but no translation can do both. If you render word for word, you lose the spirit; if you wish to give the spirit and manner, you must depart from the exact words, and frame your own phrases. I have chosen this latter course. My translation follows the original closely enough in narrative and incident; but so far as mere phraseology is concerned, I have used the English language freely, not allowing myself to be trammelled by too close an adherence to the very words of the text. The originals are in general simple in style; and I have done my best to render them into simple, plain, homely English. In short, I have tried to tell the stories as I conceive the old shanachies themselves would have told them, if they had used English instead of Gaelic. [viii] In the originals, the stories run on without break or subdivision;[III.] but I have thought it better to divide the longer ones into chapters, with appropriate headings. In almost all cases I had at my command several copies of the same story, some of them differing in phraseology and in minor points of detail, though agreeing, in the main, in narrative and incident. I found this a considerable advantage, as it gave me more freedom in the choice of expression. I have made full use of the literal translations of those tales that have been already published in the Transactions of the Ossianic Society, in the Atlantis, in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, and in the Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland. But, in order to secure the advantage of various readings, I compared, in every case, the published text with at least one copy of the story, in the Royal Irish Academy, in Trinity College, or in my own private manuscript collection. The ancient institution of professional story-telling held its ground both in Ireland and in Scotland down to a very recent period; and it is questionable if it be even yet quite extinct. Within my own memory,[ix] this sort of entertainment was quite usual among the farming classes of the south of Ireland. The family and workmen, and any neighbours that chose to drop in, would sit round the kitchen fire after the day's work--or perhaps gather in a barn on a summer or autumn evening--to listen to some local shanachie reciting one of his innumerable Gaelic tales. The story-teller never chose his own words--he always had the story by heart, and recited the words from memory, often gliding into a sort of recitative in poetical passages, or when he came to some favourite grandiose description abounding in high-sounding alliterative
