talk has run richly and naturally into story. Folk and fairy tales of all kinds abound, from long sagas of legendary heroes to personal accounts of dealings with the fairies, from wonder tales full of magic and transformation to comic anecdotes about local characters, from legends of saints or popular history to shivering ghost stories.
The Irish fairy tales in this book are chosen from two volumes edited by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats when he was a young man: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892). They offer examples of various kinds of story, and various ways of writing down stories which were meant to be heard, not read. But most of all they concentrate on the fairies themselves, creatures which fascinated Yeats, who all his life was entranced by the otherworld. He yearned to know more about these “Nations of gay creatures, having no souls; nothing in their bright bodies but a mouthful of sweet air.”
On the fourteenth of October, 1892, he was rewarded with a strange experience, which he described in his book The Celtic Twilight. Here is his account from a letter written the very next day:
I went to a great fairy locality – a cave by the Rosses sands – with an uncle & a cousin who is believed by the neighbours & herself to have narrowly escaped capture by that dim kingdom once. I made a magical circle & invoked the fairies. My uncle – a hard headed man of about 47 – heard presently voices like those of boys shouting & distant music but saw nothing. My cousin however saw a bright light & multitudes of little forms clad in crimson as well as hearing the music & then the far voices. Once there was a great sound as of little people cheering & stamping with their feet away in the heart of the rock. The queen of the troop came then – I could see her – & held a long conversation with us & finally wrote in the sand “be careful & do not seek to know too much about us”.
Others have received much the same warning. Old Biddy Hart told Yeats much about the fairies, but for long she turned his questions aside with, “I always mind my own affairs, and they always mind theirs.” Another informant, “Paddy Flynn, a little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare” answered Yeats’s query as to whether he had ever seen the fairies with the long-suffering, “Am I not annoyed with them?” Yet another, an old Galway countryman renowned as a seer and healer whom Yeats calls Kirwan, told him, “I see them in all places, and there’s no man mowing a meadow that doesn’t see them at some time or other.” Yeats’s home district in County Sligo was full of such beliefs.
Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865, and died in 1939. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, and he was the central figure of the Irish literary revival in the early years of the twentieth century. Much of that revival, including the work of Yeats and his close friends Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge, drew its strength from the rediscovery of traditional story and traditional speech. Yeats’s two collections of Irish fairy tales stand at the head of this rediscovery. Indeed he said of Fairy and Folk Tales that, “It was meant for Irish poets. They should draw on it for plots and atmosphere.” He showed he meant what he said in a generous letter to the poet Nora Hopper, who had been accused of stealing from him: “It has given me great pleasure to find by stray words & sentences that my own little collections of Irish folk lore have been of use to you.”
His own interest in folk traditions was aroused as a young child in visits to his cousin George Middleton at Rosses, County Sligo: “It was through the Middletons perhaps that I got my interest in country stories, and certainly the first faery-stories that I heard were in cottages about their houses.” His mother and her servant, a fisherman’s wife, were good storytellers, too, and in The Celtic Twilight, his book of about fairy lore, Yeats published an account of one of their story sessions.
By his early twenties, the poet was already “searching for people to tell me fairy stories” and noting them down. So the commission from Ernest Rhys (later editor of the “Everyman” series for J.M. Dent) to compile for the Camelot Series a representative collection of Irish fairy stories was a wonderful opportunity for the young man to explore the published and unpublished treasure trove of Irish story. In a few months of furious work, spurred on equally by enthusiasm for his task and the thought of the seven guineas it would earn him, Yeats ransacked all the available books and journals, and added new material of his own and from the collection of his friend Douglas Hyde.
Douglas Hyde, later the first President of the Republic of Ireland, was immensely helpful to Yeats, who in turn wrote of him, “Hyde is the best of all the Irish folklorists – His style is perfect – so sincere and simple – so little literary.” The truth of this was proved in 1890 with the publication, through Yeats’s intervention, of Hyde’s marvellous collection of stories Beside The Fire. Later, Hyde was to encourage the work of the Irish Folklore Commission (now the Department of Irish Folklore, University College, Dublin) under the direction of his old assistant James Delargy, which sent collectors to every corner of Ireland in search of stories and traditions, with the result that its archives are now the envy of the world. Its archivist, Sean O’Sullivan, has published two representative collections, Folktales of Ireland (1966) and Legends from Ireland (1977). These, together with Henry Glassie’s Irish Folk Tales (1985), give a fair sample of the riches now available to anyone interested in Irish folklore.
But in 1888 when Yeats compiled his Folk and Fairy Tales, while there was still a vibrant storytelling tradition in Ireland, very little of it had been written down, and what there was was often spoilt by the writers, who ignored what Lady Gregory called “the beautiful rhythmic sentences” of the original tellers and put the stories, rued Yeats, into “newspaper English” on the one hand or “ramshackle towrow dialect” on the other. So Yeats had to search hard to find stories from early collectors such as Thomas Crofton Croker, Patrick Kennedy and Letitia McClintock suitable for his book. In his long, favourable review, Oscar Wilde commented particularly on Yeats’s “quick instinct in finding out the best and most beautiful things in Irish folk-lore.” Wilde’s own father and mother had been pioneer collectors (one of their stories was “The Horned Women”, p. 119), so his good opinion was cheering. Criticisms by other reviewers of the unscientific and rather literary nature of the book did not trouble its editor, who retorted that “scientific people cannot tell stories”, and sighed, “Oh these folklorists! and what have they done – murder a few innocent fairy tales.”
In fact Yeats and the scientific folklorists were not as far apart as they thought. Both applauded Douglas Hyde as the best of all Irish folklorists; both agreed with Lady Gregory when she wrote that, “To gather folk-lore one needs, I think, leisure, patience, reverence, and a good memory.” Despite modern recording equipment, this is still true today.
It was with Lady Gregory that Yeats pursued his interest in folklore, collecting tales, legends and folk beliefs on which he wrote six long essays between 1897 and 1902, incorporating some material in The Celtic Twilight. The plan was for the two friends to write a “big book of folk lore” together, but the bulk of the work was Lady Gregory’s, and the book, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, came out in her name, with essays and notes by Yeats. Together with Hyde’s Beside the Fire, Visions and Beliefs is one of the best books on Irish traditions of the era before sound recording. Lady Gregory, like Hyde, had patience and reverence, and also what Yeats called “the needful subtle imaginative sympathy” to record the tone, the meaning and the context of a story as well as the words in which it is told. She had also, like Hyde, mastered Gaelic, the Irish language in which the bulk of Irish stories has been recorded. Without fluent Gaelic, Yeats could never be more than an amateur Irish folklorist.
Still, if Yeats was hampered by his English tongue and his educated mind, he loved “those old rambling moralless tales, which are the delight of the poor and hard-driven wherever life is left in its natural simplicity.” He discerned in such stories as are collected here, “the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations”, declaring that, “Folk-art … is the soil where all great art
