Irish Folk Tales by Henry Glassie Read Free Book Online

and that continues to call serious students of folklore.
    W. B. Yeats desired proof of the limited vision of factual man, but when Lady Gregory heard stories, she “cared less for the evidence given in them than for the beautiful rhythmic sentences in which they were told.” The words and cadences that she recorded taught her the language she would use in her own plays and in her translations of the old Irish epics. That language, praised by Yeats for being as beautiful as Morris and as true as Burns, inspired John Synge, helping him to shape his dramatic diction. Lady Gregory’s fine ear provided the art of her movement with a voice and it made her one of the first great modern folklorists. On collecting trips with Yeats or with Hyde, and more often alone in her Kiltartan district of Galway, she listened closely and recorded with precision “because folklorists in these days are expected to be as exact as workers at any other science.” Committed first to language, Lady Gregory was not confined by scholarly conventions of story type. Though she produced a collection of
Märchen
in her
Kiltartan Wonder Book
, she was receptive to new kinds of tale. Before her, the Dublin bookseller Patrick Kennedy, working to preserve the folk traditions of his native Wexford, had expanded his collections of international tale to include a few religious and historical texts. Out of each of these neglected varieties, Lady Gregory would construct a major collection. Protestant scholars tended to treat Irish faith as a pagan survival, but Lady Gregory faced the Catholicism of her people directly. In
A Book of Saints and Wonders
, published in 1906, she tells legends of the Irish saints and preserves testimony of Irish religiosity. Aristocratic scholars shied away from Irish folk history, in which an alternative view of the past, rife with hostility toward the invader and the landlord, implied a rebellious future. But gently nationalistic Lady Gregory gathered a sampling of historical legends, of “myths in the making,” into her
Kiltartan History Book
,published in 1909, expanded in 1926. Later Sean O’Sullivan would feature these kinds of tale, the religious and the historical, in two major collections, one in the journal
Béaloideas
, one formed as a book,
Legends from Ireland
, published in 1977.
    Attending more to what the people have to say than to academic convention, Lady Gregory and Sean O’Sullivan, she because of her ear for speech, he because of his responsibility to the Irish nation, suggest a different motive for the presentation of folktale texts. Stories not only carry ancient and unwritten history, they manifest the living culture of the people.
    Discovering the culture in the story as a motive for reporting folklore had been there from the beginning. Both Crofton Croker and Samuel Lover explain stories of fairy pots of gold and demons that guard hidden treasure as exhibitions of the deep Irish ambivalence over material wealth. But the ethnographic concern was brushed aside during the excited scholarly search for international tales that led outward away from Ireland and backward away from the people who tell the tales. Interest in tales as evidence of contemporary culture became largely the province of travelers who, like Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall in the nineteenth century, or Sean O’Faolain and Brendan Behan in the twentieth, encountered folktales as features of the places they went and retold them as emblems of the people they met.
    One special traveler was the American Jeremiah Curtin. He was the son of Irish immigrant parents, a staff member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, and an expert on American Indian mythology. In 1887 and again in 1892, he visited the West of Ireland to record
Märchen
, Fenian tales, and legends of ghosts and fairies. His knowledge of Irish was not deep, but guided by the principles in the new science of anthropology, Curtin, according to Douglas Hyde,