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

without adding a word or shifting any out of order, I edited the opening sentences of a few of the tales that I lifted out of long runs of prose. Then, to bring the stories I found in print a little closer to those I heard, I broke some long paragraphs into shorter ones. In addition, I regularized punctuation and spelling. That sounds easy, but it was not. Writers have done wild things with spelling to capture the English spoken in Ireland. In their own place and day, they might have been successful, but their efforts have erected barriers between the storyteller and the reader and dragged their tales toward oblivion, so, even in texts of my own, I have shifted spelling toward standard literary usage. The distinctive textures of the Irish dialects of English remain in syntax and word choice. Mere spelling should not stand between you and the people who spoke the stories. Not all of the tales came with titles, so I invented some of them, a small matter because it is my experience that most folktales, unlike folksongs, do not exist in the tradition with native titles. After the title for each tale you will find a little information, first the name of a teller and a county, then the name of a writer and a date. Sometimes these few facts eluded me—a sad commentary on past practice—and sometimes I guessed a bit, but I wished to make the big story of the Irish folktale and its subplots clearer by setting each story in place and time. Still more, I wished the repetition of names to remind you that these stories do not come to us from some mystical agency called tradition. We owe them to the collaborative efforts of real people. I held my editing to a minimum to honor both the storyteller and the writer, but every change I made came because my first responsibility is to the storyteller.
    It is the storyteller’s culture I wish you to enter. To that end I clumped the texts into chapters, but the chapters do not follow scholastic convention. Academic categories serve academic needs, and they have tended to obscure whole classes of traditional narration. They rise from the values of scholars, but the values I wish you to understand are those of the tellers of tale, men like Hugh Nolan, women like Ellen Cutler, so my chapters represent neither old nor new schemes of classification. They are but hints to ease your entry into the Irish folk culture. Here is the course I recommend for your journey:
THE OLD STORY
    Three texts review the Introduction and form a prelude to the collection. Each represents one of the classes of tale that have most engaged Irish collectors: fairy legends, Fenian tales,
Märchen
. And in sequence they teach of the progress in the recording of stories, from T. Crofton Croker’s sketch of1825, to Patrick Kennedy’s mid-nineteenth-century attempt to write down a story as he heard it, to Douglas Hyde’s exact translation of a tale taken down verbatim and published in the first truly modern Irish folktale collection,
Beside the Fire
of 1890.
FAITH
    At the dawn of human time, in the first mythic moment, the saints arrive and put the finishing touches on the Irish land, planting it with proof of God’s existence. They take control of nature, vanquish the Druids, convert the old warriors, and charge the people of the future to obey God’s law of love. Some do.
WIT
    Intelligence balances power. Inbuilt wit enables the lawyer to win his case against Satan, the outlaw to escape the authorities, and the peasant to outfox the outlaw. The tenant of story is the master of the landlord. The victory of the humbler brother proves that poverty and weakness tell nothing of wisdom or courage. Even the toughest enemy—boredom—falls before the person who can command the language to yield poetry, who can conquer pain in comic hyperbole.
MYSTERY
    This world and the other occasionally veer near collision. The witnesses speak sincerely. They have heard death announced in the earth and felt the ghost’s weight and seen the