I think I remember Mr. Martyn telling me that he knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the belief in such women as Peg Inerny among the Irish peasants.1 Unless the imagination has a means of knowledge peculiar to itself, he must have heard of this belief as a child and remembered it in that unconscious and instinctive memory on which imagination builds. Biddy Early,I who journeyed with the people of faery when night fell, and who cured multitudes of all kinds of sickness, if the tales that one hears from her patients are not all fancy, is, I think, the origin of his Peg Inerny; but there were, and are, many like her.2 Sometimes, as it seems, they wander from place to place begging their bread, but living all the while a noble second life in faery. They are sometimes called ‘women from the North’, because witchcraft, and spirits, and faeries come from the North. A Kiltartan woman said to a friend who has got me many tales, ‘One time a woman from the North came to our house, and she said a great deal of people are kept below there in the lisses. She had been there herself, and in the night-time, in one moment, they’d be all away at Cruachma, wherever that may be—down in the North, I believe. And she knew everything that was in the house, and told us about my sister being sick, and that there was a hurling match going on that day, and that it was at the Isabella Wood. I’d have picked a lot of stories out of her, but my mother got nervous when she heard the truth coming out, and told me to be quiet. She had a red petticoat on her, the same as any country-woman, and she offered to cure me, for it was that time I was delicate, and her ladyship sent me to the salt water. But she asked a shilling, and my mother said she hadn’t got it. “You have”, said she, “and heavier metal than that you have in the house”. So then my mother gave her the shilling, and she put it in the fire and melted it, and, says she, “after two days you’ll see your shilling again”; but we never did. And the cure she left, I never took it; it’s not safe, and the priests forbid us to take their cures. No doubt at all she was one of the ingentry (I have never heard this word for the faeries from anybody else) that can take the form of a woman by day and another form by night’.3 Another woman in the same neighbourhood said, ‘I saw myself, when I was but a child, a woman come to the door that had been seven years with the good people, and I remember her telling us that in that seven years she’d often been glad to come outside the houses and pick the bits that were thrown into the trough for the pigs; and she told us always to leave a bit about the house for those that could not come and ask for it: and though my father was a cross man, and didn’t believe in such things, to the day of his death we never went up to bed without leaving a bit of food outside the door!’ Sometimes, however, one hears of their being fed with supernatural food, so that they need little or none of our food.
I have two or three stories of women who were queens when in faery; I have many stories of men and women, and have even talked with some four or five among them, who believed that they had had supernatural lovers. I met a young man once in the Burren Hills who remembered an old Gaelic poet, who had loved Maeve, and was always very sorrowful because she had deserted him. He had made lamentation for her, but the young man could only remember that it was sorrowful, and that it called her ‘beauty of all beauty’; a phrase that makes one think that she had become a symbol of ideal beauty, as the supernatural lover is in Mr. Martyn’s play.4 One of the most lovely of old Gaelic poems is the appeal of such a lover to his beloved. Midhir, who is called King of the Sidhe (the faeries), sang to the beautiful Etain, wife of the King who was called Eochaid the ploughman. ‘O beautiful woman, come with me to the marvellous land where one listens to a sweet music, where one has spring flowers in one’s hair, where the body is like snow from head to foot, where no one is sad or silent, where teeth are white and eyebrows are black . . . . cheeks red, like foxglove in flower. . . . . Ireland is beautiful, but not so beautiful as the Great Plain I call you to. The beer of Ireland is heady, but the beer of the Great Plain is much more heady. How marvellous is the country I am speaking of: Youth does not grow old there; streams of warm blood flow there, sometimes mead, sometimes wine. Men are charming, and without a blot there. O woman, when you come into my powerful country, you will wear a crown of gold upon your head. I will give you the flesh of swine, and you will have beer and milk to drink, O beautiful woman. O beautiful woman, come with me!’5
Maeve (Medb is the Irish spelling) is continually described as the queen of all the western faeries, and it was probably some memory of her lingering in western England, or brought home by adventurers from Ireland, that gave Shakespeare his Queen Mab.6 But neither Maeve, nor any of our Irish faeries are like the faeries of Shakespeare; for our faeries are never very little, and are sometimes taller and more beautiful than mortals. The greatest among them were the gods and goddesses of ancient Ireland, and men have not yet forgotten their glory.
I recently described in the North American Review a vision of Queen Maeve that came to an old Mayo woman.7 ‘She was standing in the window of her master’s house, looking towards a mountain, when she saw “the finest woman you ever saw” travelling right across from the mountain and straight to her. The woman had a sword by her side and a dagger lifted up in her hand, and was dressed in white with bare arms and feet. She looked “very strong, and fierce, but not wicked”—that is, not cruel. (She was one of ‘the fair, fierce women’ of the Irish poem quoted in Mr. Martyn’s play.)8 The old woman had seen the Irish giant, and “though he was a fine man” he was nothing to this woman, “for he was round and could not have stepped out so soldierly”. “She was like Mrs.—,” naming a stately lady of the neighbourhood; “but she had no stomach on her, and was slight, and broad in the shoulders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about thirty”. The old woman covered her eyes with her hands, and when she uncovered them the apparition had vanished. The neighbours were wild with her for not waiting to see if there was a message, for they were sure it was Queen Maeve, who often shows herself to the pilots. I asked the old woman if she had seen others like Queen Maeve, and she said, “some of them have their hair down, but they look quite different, like the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with their hair up are like this one. The others have long white dresses; but those with their hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to the calf”. After some careful questioning I found that they wore what appear to be buskins. She went on, “They are fine and dashing-looking, like the men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the mountains with their swords swinging”. She repeated, over and over, “There is no such race living now, none so finely proportioned”, or the like, and then said, “The present queen is a nice, pleasant-looking woman, but she is not like her.9 What makes me think so little of the ladies is that I see none as they be”, meaning the spirits. “When I think of her and of the ladies now, they are like little children running about without knowing how to put their clothes on right. Is it the ladies? Why, I would not call them women at all!”’ This old woman, who can neither read nor write, has come face to face with heroic beauty, that ‘highest beauty’, which Blake says, ‘changes least from youth to age’, a beauty that has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence, we call progress, set voluptuous beauty in its place.10
I. See my article in the Contemporary Review for September, 1899.