68 Rich Folklore And Heritage

Irish storytellers are famous for their wit and inventiveness. The extraordinary range of Irish stories comes from a folklore tradition more than 2,000 years old, which successfully blended Celtic, Christian, and English influences to create some of the most distinctive oral literature in all of Europe. Although the traditional format for Irish storytelling is dying out, its legacy continues in books and in poetry.

Ireland has one of the richest folklore traditions in the world. Folklorists have hypothesized that in 1935 the parish of Carna, in west Galway, held more unrecorded folktales than did the rest of Western Europe combined. There are many reasons for this rich heritage, but two main factors stand out. First, Irish culture kept a Celtic base for more than 2,000 years, while incorporating the traditions and beliefs of Christianity, the Vikings, the Normans, and the English. These layers of culture piled on top of one another to create a rich tapestry. Second, the tradition of oral composition and performance has been strong in Ireland throughout the years.

In ancient Celtic society, professional singers and poets called bards were extremely important. The Celts didn’t write, so bards memorized vast amounts of poetry and performed it live. Their poems and songs were often the only record of a king’s deeds or misdeeds, and their performances were the best entertainment around. People were accustomed to listening to stories told aloud and appreciated skilled storytellers.

As time went on, more people learned to read and write and the bards became less important. But the Irish populace remained mostly illiterate, so they kept up the tradition of oral storytelling. Bards evolved into wandering storytellers called shanachies, or seanachaí (SHAN-uck-ee), who went from town to town, entertaining the townsfolk. Shanachies, like their bard predecessors, were always welcome; people paid them with food if money wasn’t available. When there wasn’t a shanachie around, ordinary people entertained themselves by telling stories around the fire.

A good storyteller knew hundreds of tales and could perform them with gusto and eloquence. In this informal way, an ancient oral literary tradition quietly continued into modern times.

For centuries, Irish folktales were unknown to the outside world. During the Protestant ascendancy, the ruling class had nothing but disdain for the stories of Irish farmers. Not only were the stories in the barbaric Irish tongue, but also they were all about fantastic heroes and fairies, which the English dismissed as a bunch of superstitious nonsense.

In the early nineteenth century folklore suddenly became fashionable. The brothers Grimm in Germany started collecting and studying folktales (which you can read in Grimm’s Fairy Tales) and declared folklore a vital expression of a culture’s heritage. Soon, enterprising Irish scholars began to explore the countryside, looking for stories of value. They found a gold mine.

The first volume of Irish folktales was Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, published in 1825 by Thomas Croker from Cork. Croker and other early scholars of Irish folklore visited the Anglicized areas of Ireland in the east and recorded stories in English; this limited the value of their work because it ignored the great majority of Irish folktales, which were told only in Irish. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Irish folklore studies became respectable. Oscar Wilde’s parents, Sir William and Speranza Wilde (Speranza was Mrs. Wilde’s pen name, her real name was Jane Francesca), were important figures in this field and eccentric luminaries on the Anglo-Irish scene. The intellectuals of the Celtic Renaissance drew their inspiration from the Irish language and its folklore. Douglas Hyde’s Beside the Fire, William Butler Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight, Lady Augusta Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs of the West of Ireland, and Standish O’Grady’s collections not only established Irish folklore as one of the great oral literature traditions of Western civilization, but also provided an immense source of pride for the growing Irish Nationalist movement.

Even as Yeats and Lady Gregory collected tales in the cottages of Sligo and Connemara, they recognized that the storytelling tradition was dying out. They knew that if the Irish language died, a vast literary heritage would die with it. To prevent that from happening, in 1935 the Irish government created the Irish Folklore Commission. In the following decades, Irish-speaking collectors scoured the countryside to record stories of saints, heroes, and spirits. Currently, more than a million and a half pages of folklore reside in the commission’s collection which, since 1971, has been continued on by the Folklore Department at University College Dublin.

One of the most popular themes for stories was the spirit world. Ireland was widely known to be inhabited by all manner of fairies. The fairies were notoriously mischievous, and a vast array of stories described the mysterious tricks they played on unsuspecting mortals.

The leprechaun is perhaps the most famous of Ireland’s little people. In one story, a man came down from his fields one day and went to look after his old mare, who had served him well for many years. When he approached the stable, he heard a loud hammering sound. He peeked in through a window and spotted a funny little man sitting under his mare, hammering away at some shoes and whistling the prettiest tune you ever heard. The man realized what he had in his stable—a leprechaun.

Leprechauns are famous for their shoemaking abilities, but they’re even more famous for their gold. The man knew this, so he snuck in the backdoor and tiptoed up behind the little man. The leprechaun was so busy making his shoes that he didn’t notice the man until the man had caught the leprechaun fast. “I have you now,” the man said, “and I won’t let you go until I have your gold!”

“Stop, you’re squeezing too hard!” said the leprechaun. “Let me go for a moment and I’ll get you the gold.” Eager for the gold, the man released the leprechaun, who, quick as a wink, ran out the door. All the man had left was the little shoe that the leprechaun had been making. The man didn’t get any gold, but his wife said that it was the prettiest shoe she’d ever seen.

Some fairies were thought to be helpful, in their own mysterious ways. One story tells of a man who started feeling faint while in church. He walked outside to clear his head, and a gentleman approached to ask if he was all right. The man explained that he was feeling faint. The gentleman handed him a florin (a valuable coin) and told him to go have a whiskey at the local pub (Irish whiskey, of course, has amazing curative powers). The man thanked him and walked to the pub.

He paid for his drink with the florin, took the change, and drank down the whiskey. In no time at all he was feeling better. The man went home thinking nothing of it.

The next day he was going fishing, so he went to the store to buy some tobacco for his trip. When he reached into his pocket to get some money, he was surprised to find that the same florin was in his pocket. He paid with the florin, took the change, and walked away smoking, wondering what had happened. On the way home after fishing, he stopped by the bakery for some bread. He discovered that the same florin was in his pocket again.

The man continued in this way for some time, paying for everything with the florin and always finding it back in his pocket. He was happy with his good fortune, but something about the strange coin never seemed right to him. One day he went into the pub where he’d bought the first glass of whiskey. He threw the florin down on the counter and yelled, “May the devil go with you!”

He never saw the coin again. To the end of his days, he always said that it was a fairy man who had given it to him.