Irish Folk Tales by Henry Glassie Read Free Book Online Page A

“approached the fountainhead more nearly than any other.”
    Anthropology makes traveling into a profession and travel literature into scientific discourse. Modern Ireland has welcomed many anthropologists, most of them Americans, who have come to analyze the living culture. This they have done to suit the presuppositions of their science, and the tales in which the people bring their own culture into order have been left to folklorists like myself. But the American discipline of folklore within which I was trained springs from the same source as anthropology. So, like Douglas Hyde, I strive to record tales exactly, but what interests me is not the rare survival from times past; it is the culture of the people who share my times, my predicament. If a story interests the people I wish to understand, then I must learn to make it interest me too, whether or not it fits academic typologies, whether or not it preserves echoes of ancient thunder.
    To bring you toward an understanding of Irish traditional culture, I have composed this book. Some of its stories are astoundingly old, someare found scattered widely across the globe, but I chose them for what they teach about the contours of the Irish consciousness.
    The stories will guide you. I have arranged them so that they speak among themselves, each providing context for the other, all bodying forth pieces of a noble culture, a culture unlike our own, against which we must test ourselves during our effort to shape a mature and reasonable way of life.
A LAST WORD
    I have brought into this anthology stories from forty different books, and from Ireland’s pair of fine journals,
Béaloideas
and
Ulster Folklife
. In partial fulfillment of an old promise to provide comic and mysterious tales to complement the historical stories I published from Ballymenone, the place I know in Ulster, I have added new texts from my dear friends Michael Boyle, Ellen Cutler, Hugh Nolan, and Joseph and Peter Flanagan. Mr. Boyle died in 1974, Joe Flanagan in 1979, Mrs. Cutler in 1980, Mr. Nolan in 1981. Peter Flanagan, God bless him, is with us yet. We had some drinks together and shared some nostalgic chat in his house on the hill at Christmas in 1983 while this book was beginning to form.
    The one book I did not plunder for texts is the best of them all, Sean O’Sullivan’s
Folktales of Ireland
. I left it undisturbed in hopes that our collections might be read together, that mine might serve as an appendage to his. They are quite different. All of the stories in Sean O’Sullivan’s book were recorded between 1930 and 1948 by trained collectors of folklore. This book gathers stories from the long stretch of Irish folktale writing, from 1825 to the present, and its authors include the people I have introduced to you, novelists and poets and playwrights, writers of sketches and travel accounts, professional folklorists. Sean O’Sullivan’s stories come from only six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties, none from Northern Ireland. Well over half come from Galway or Kerry, and Kerry supplies the most. Sean O’Sullivan’s collection begins in his own experience. He is a Kerry man. His training and commitment lead him, as I think they should, to focus upon the Irish-speaking West. My collection begins in my experience, which has been in the North, and which has suggested kinds of stories and modes of organization and has led me to emphasize Ireland’s dominant English-speaking population. What I believe to be most important for understanding Ireland are not the survivals of ancient tale that abound most beautifully in the rocky West, but the tales of all sorts through which the people of Ireland present to themselves that which is of enduring significance.
    Let me tell you just what I have done to prepare the tales for you. I maintained my professional dedication to exact transcription unless it ranathwart the obligations I owe to the tales and their tellers. They have the right to communicate. So,