2

The Precursors of Yeats in the Recovery of the Narrative Tradition

Similarly to what took place in almost all of the rest of continental Europe, in Ireland during the nineteenth century a whole series of writers—in the broadest sense of the term—undertook a task then considered laudable, that of preserving the narrative patrimony which, over time, had accumulated by means of popular storytelling. The objective was to save from the precariousness of orality a narrative tradition that reflected the deepest values of a nation, its folklore—a depository of legacy from which, until that moment, literature had kept a careful distance. It has already been seen how medieval Christian monks became protagonists of the transcription of that immense corpus of Irish tales that had been handed down for centuries, in particular by a class of professional bards to whom Celtic society had delegated the responsibility of keeping the narrative tradition intact. In the monks’ manuscripts, this tradition found its first permanent expression, and was saved from the accidents of oral transmission. Obviously, the tradition had been remodeled continually by these accidents because it depended on a specific mode of transmittal: the filid themselves, although educated to preserve the purity of their heritage, could never prove an invincible bastion against the alterations constantly encouraged by a continually evolving environment.

Writing, on its part, avails of the faculty to remove a narrative corpus created and brought to oral fruition by the people from the influence of factors that, taken together, account for the characteristics that render each tale unique. But no matter how much literature strives to modify to its own ends the materials drawn from tradition, it will always remain the fruit of traditional knowledge, of a more or less organic apparatus of myths, beliefs, customs, and rites that distinguish a given community, whether it be national or merely local. The folklore that lies behind the composition of those texts reputed to be classics—in which all that, a posteriori, we consider to be the best of the Celtic tradition is gathered—is not evident, to the extent that it has been absorbed into the logic of the literary text, for which the forms and themes of narration are independent of, or at least less conditioned by, any reference to the reality that has forged them. Once literature has taken the upper hand, the tradition follows the evolution of the literary text; at its origin, however, albeit not clearly visible, lies a process of creation and elaboration proper to folklore.

The Christian clerics of the early Middle Ages made possible the recovery of an imposing narrative tradition linked to a world that, upon their arrival, was inevitably destined to disappear or be significantly altered. In the same way, nineteenth-century writers and scholars undertook the recovery of an oral tradition that also seemed destined to fade away under the unrelenting passage of time and the ascendancy of a literary culture. Patrick Kennedy, in the introduction to his collection, on the one hand, gave vent to the fear that “the memory of the tales heard in boyhood would be irrevocably lost” and, on the other, complained that the destiny of these tales depended on the memory of the emigrant Irish and second-class magazines.1 The whole shared memory of a body of traditional tales, the only common patrimony by which an entire nation could recognize itself, was in danger of being lost for good, a patrimony not yet manipulated by writing and hence, substantially, virgin territory, still well rooted in folklore. It has already been said that a tradition genuinely free of any contact with literature is not objectively conceivable. It does not seem correct to me to assume the existence of a popular bard, and hence of a tale elaborated in an oral context, entirely uninfluenced by the circulation of written texts. However, it is equally obvious that the narrative production circulating in the Irish countryside presented itself to the intellectuals of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, as the only path by which to approach a so-to-speak primigenial, uncontaminated narrative form, and on the other, to discover an unexplored treasure that could open up new, unexpected scenarios for literature. Within this precious body of tales, there coexisted the popular re-elaboration of the classic patrimony already collected in the monastic manuscripts and the heterogeneous set of tales connected, more or less directly, to the daily life of the storyteller. In the latter context, it was possible to discern the contemporary evolution of a tradition that, although rooted in the distant past, preserved its vitality thanks precisely to the interpenetration of a system of beliefs handed down from generation to generation and a perennially new narrative act, between the collective dimension proper to a given people and the specific individuality of the storytellers spread throughout the Irish territory.

The peasant storyteller became a central figure in the Irish literary panorama, in particular from the point of view of Yeats, who ascribed to it the survival of a primitive reality that was saved “from the impurities of the modern world” because on its isolation depended “the purity of the literature preserved by the peasant,” the only element capable of providing a “link to an ancient literary and imaginative tradition which could . . . rival that of Greece.” The narrative tradition in its entirety enters into the field identified by Yeats, since he does not recognize the validity of a hierarchal classification which, canonically, makes a net distinction between “high poetry of bardic tradition and the simpler folk tales which spoke of fairy raths and stolen children.” Both of these narrative categories constitute corresponding gates of entry for the poet to a supernatural dimension capable of compensating for his dissatisfaction with Christian spirituality, which was no longer enough to contain the poetical horizons opening to his creative genius.2 The main theme of these nineteenth-century collections is precisely that of encounters with fairies had by one or more human protagonists, frequently identified with heroes of Celtic legend, but more often than not deprived of any precise biographical identity, and sometimes coinciding with that of the storyteller himself. In practice, almost all this tradition can be included in the conception of the fairy tale outlined in the Introduction. Thus, the fairy tale becomes the privileged point of communication between the narrative act and the element of folklore or, more precisely, it is the most important product of the interaction between the two, the most explicit manifestation of the persistence of a tradition, albeit in a framework of continual innovation.

To this tradition turned a wide array of intellectuals, among whom the dominant characteristic was a common interest in the written perpetuation of material never before deemed worthy of attention, or at least, never considered appropriate to be transferred into a literary context. In the case of many of these scholars, the boundary between the folklorist and the writer is unclear, as is the fluid barrier between scientific intentions and artistic aspiration. The resulting picture is extremely heterogeneous, because the approach to the narrative tradition is highly personal and inseparably linked to the individual judgment of those who undertook to compile the material in the first place and to final product of their work. Observing the notable diversity of orientation connected to the written appropriation of the fairy tale of popular origin—the narrative context par excellence, suspended between orality and writing, between the tradition of folklore and literary elaboration—it is possible to derive many extremely interesting ideas regarding the narrative phenomenon in its entirety. The fairy tale seems to set off a virtuous circle of narrativity, an inexhaustible movement in which the single element of tradition undergoes a change according to the use made of it by the writer or the oral bard himself. Into this context, Yeats’ work as a collector inserts itself in an activity which, taking the form of a judicious selection of fairy tales from the written tradition that developed in the nineteenth century, identified in the eternal return the principle by which to found a literature capable of arising continually from its ashes. This virtuous principle of circularity becomes vicious when one presumes it to have reached a state of immutability, at which point the link with the original patrimony loses its profoundly dynamic nature.

The Royal Hibernian Tales

The first publication specifically dedicated to fairy tales drawn directly from the living voice of the people is the anonymous The Royal Hibernian Tales: Being a Collection of the Most Entertaining Stories now Extant, going back to a date before 1825, as Séamus Ó Duilearga demonstrates in a 1940 editorial note.3 The title itself says much about the nature of this collection. It places its accent on the nationality of the tales, rendered more so by the use of the Latinized adjective Hibernian that seems to me intended, along with the reference to royalty, to suggest the great value that the compiler assigns to his work: the adjective Most Entertaining indicates that the anonymous collector has specifically oriented his research toward those examples of the narrative tradition most in conformity with the prime need of entertaining the public (although it should be noted that, in the introduction, reference is also made to the didactic aspect of the texts in question).4 Finally, it seems worthwhile to note the presence of that phrase “now Extant,” an expression that the compiler uses to acknowledge the partial nature of his collection, based on as much of the popular tradition as had been conserved up to his time. From this residual patrimony, he selects thirteen tales, freeing them, for the first time, from the uncertain destiny of orality and making them the first Irish classic in the genre.

In the introduction to the collection, it is argued that the work was inspired by similar collections of fairy tales from other parts of the world and by the ensuing consideration that, for Ireland, too, rich as it was in its own national tradition, the task of giving a stable and lasting form to an albeit minimal part of the immense repertory of the storytellers could no longer be delayed. We are not told if our collector effectively toured the island to hear and transcribe fairy tales directly from the living voice of the storytellers: the fact is that there is absolutely no reference to the source and circumstance of the storytelling. It is clear, therefore, that the interest is totally concentrated on the tale itself and that the teller fades into the background. What counts is to underline the genuineness of the stories, their value as an absolute novelty for readers accustomed to official literature.5 Both the substantial novelty of the work and the cultural climate of the time guaranteed it a wide circulation, with the volume even finding pride of place in the library of Thackeray himself.6

Thomas Crofton Croker and His Followers

The circulation of a work such as The Royal Hibernian Tales gave the Anglo-Irish upper classes the chance to come into contact with the other half of the country, the poor, Catholic classes of the countryside, particularly in the West, an area in which the ancient traditions are most tenaciously preserved, predominantly through the Irish language. Indeed, this proved a linguistic barrier—the first collectors only spoke English—that made for a decidedly partial approach to the Irish narrative patrimony, which most frequently preserved its most original tales, those having no equivalent in the rest of Europe, in the native tongue. To complete the picture, cultural and ethnic prejudices came to play, on the basis of which the first writers from the east considered the peasants of Celtic origin as an inferior class, depository indeed of a precious, unexplored reserve of fairy tales, but at the same time dominated by superstitions displaying their cultural backwardness and irrationality.7

On these assumptions began the work of Thomas Crofton Croker. Croker may be considered the chief exponent of a particular intellectual orientation that, following the example of the Grimm Brothers, considered it indispensable to spread among their fellow countrymen and men of letters knowledge of a storytelling tradition that could create a specific identity for the Irish with respect to other nations in which such an identity was perhaps long consolidated. Antiquarian, folklorist, and writer, Croker published in 1825 Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, the first, but also the most successful of his collections. So popular was this work that his publisher encouraged him to collect the material for another two volumes. The work received the solemn recognition of Walter Scott and of the Grimm Brothers, who translated it into German. Thanks to Croker’s main collection, the narrative tradition deriving from folklore passed the confines of Ireland for the first time and was discovered in the rest of Europe.

Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland took the form of a more or less authentic account of a journey undertaken in the southern counties, familiar to Croker in that he came originally from Cork. The aim of this itinerant adventure was not simply to gather traditional tales, but to use them to illustrate “the superstitions of the Irish Peasantry, superstitions which . . . powerfully influence their conduct and manner of thinking” and to cast light on “the very extravagant imagination in which the Irish are so fond of indulging.”8 Croker depicted, for a presumably unaware public, the humus of folklore from which the fairy tales he had collected grew and were transmitted, a context that, from his point of view, accounted for the sociopolitical delay afflicting the entire population, solidly anchored as it was in its traditions and resistant to any idea of progress.

Taking this viewpoint into account, it is not surprising to discover that Croker’s work is far from being faithful to the letter of the tales heard and little respectful of the spirit of the storytellers. His transcriptions (in Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, as well as in his later collections) are authentic recreations, dictated by personal taste and by the expectations of Croker’s target audience, and following established practice in the contemporary European milieu. The writer expresses his freedom in completing tales that, according to a canon of “Aristotelian ‘wholeness’” are unfinished, fusing, for example, into a single whole tales that were originally separate9 or emending details considered coarse or in any case aesthetically invalid, and finally inserting rational explanations by which to correct the fallacy of popular belief. In practice, Croker used a sort of personal filter to compile his collections, one that allowed him to construct a posteriori a fictional framework in which to unite the most widely varying tales or to develop a conventional image of the popular storyteller, thus depriving him of personality and rendering him functional to the tone of every tale narrated.10 Bearing this in mind, one should by no means be astonished on hearing that Croker’s closest collaborator, Thomas Keightley, author of Tales and Popular Fictions (1834), admitted that he was capable “of inventing an Irish legend and the character of some old narrator.”11 This statement illustrates the extreme instability of the concept of authenticity relative to the tales in the collections, but also provides us with an image of an oral tradition with the power to nourish a literary current which, in one way or another, draws its inspiration from it.

The attitude of Croker, and of so many of his contemporaries, including Keightley and Samuel Lover,12 toward the tale originating from folklore is, practically speaking, the exact opposite of that of Yeats, above all because the former perceived folklore in a negative light, seeing it as a decadent source of knowledge and in need of purification on the part of the rational intellectual. This devaluation of folklore also justified its being read humorously. Croker also set himself the task of casting light on the close relationship between Irish fairy tales and English literature, on the one hand (one cannot otherwise explain his references to Spenser and Shakespeare, in whose work one encounters characters very close to the fairies of popular Irish tradition), and to international folklore on the other.13 In substance, Croker is taking a stand and does not or cannot recognize the autonomy and intrinsic value of Irish storytelling and folklore. Despite these impediments, Croker’s work was Yeats’ main source, albeit read from the point of view of an absolutely antithetical poetic.

Croker’s example conditioned the approach to the oral tradition until at least halfway through the nineteenth century. Periodicals such as the Dublin University Magazine and the Dublin and London Magazine satisfied the requests of an extremely wide public for traditional tales not published in their genuine form, but rewritten on the basis of the literary module provided by Croker and completed by the comments of an “enlightened narrator.”14 The interest in folklore and its narrative products spread as a fully fledged fashion that penetrated even more properly literary texts, as witnessed by the practice of many writers who, throughout the nineteenth century, inserted oral narrations into their novels or short stories to add truthfulness or a certain note of color to their work as a whole. The intention was also to provide comic counterpoint to a tragic contest or, again, to fill up the empty spaces in the main action with pleasant tales in which the creative inspiration of the author could vent itself more freely.15 The literary use of the fairy tale, although on the one hand, it evinced its aesthetic function, on the other, distanced it from its specific oral and popular nature, the fruit of the convergence between individual creativity and ancestral legacy, between narrative pleasure and the needs of the community.

Patrick Kennedy

The fairy tale and the rest of the narrative production attributable to popular storytelling was given entirely different treatment in the work of Dublin librarian Patrick Kennedy. His two main collections were Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866) and The Fireside Stories of Ireland (1870). In both, we see the disappearance of the literary mannerism that distinguished Croker’s work and that of many influenced by his teaching. This was easier for Kennedy because he was not a writer but a simple scholar, who, moreover, had heard the oral narrations of the storytellers during his youth, an experience that provided him with a personal repertory from which to draw in the composition of his texts and instilled in him a fair dose of respect for folklore, to which he gave a certain credit, at least as far as Yeats affirms.16 In Kennedy’s transcriptions there is an unprecedented fidelity to the idiom and structure of the oral narrations. The text was intended to express the real characteristics of the rural life in which the tales were set, far from the sentimental or humorous excesses in which Croker and his followers had indulged themselves. Kennedy’s contribution, on his own admission, limited itself to making each tale presentable “in a form suitable for the perusal of both sexes and all ages,” including the choice to omit “scenes of blood and cruelty,”17 a sort of preventive censure intended to make the tales accessible to the widest readership possible without offending the delicate sense of decency typical of the Victorian age.

This substantial respect for the specificity of the oral tradition was rooted nonetheless in a traditional devaluation of the literary dignity of the narrative products of Irish folklore. They were considered valuable only insofar as they were the expression of a certain popular culture that was not thought capable of offering a real alternative to classic literature, a point of view that, under a new guise, reintroduced a sort of prohibition regarding the phenomenon of folklore as an autonomous object of narrative creativity. Although Croker frequently used folktales as mere drafts to be completed according to his literary tastes, Kennedy was as faithful as possible to the originals, not considering them suitable to literary use.

Letitia McClintock, Lady Wilde, Douglas Hyde

Although not enjoying the renown of her literary predecessors mentioned above, Letitia McClintock deserves particular mention. Much of the evolution of the approach of the intellectual élite and writers to folklore must be ascribed to some articles published by McClintock in the Dublin University Magazine in the 1870s and 1880s, especially those published in 1876–1877 under the title “Folk-Lore of the County Donegal.” The author presented a series of fairy tales transcribed directly from the living voices of the peasants of Donegal, one of the most traditional regions of Ireland. Her transcription was not only innocent of literary tampering, but also remained free of influences of a moral or political nature. Absolutely no attempt is made to rationalize the information contained in the tales, which are called instead to demonstrate “human interaction with the world of the spirits.”18 This is an aspect of McClintock’s work that, in addition to the favor it might have found with Yeats, witnesses to the deeper value that was beginning to be attributed to a phenomenon until then deemed the fruit of a “subculture.” McClintock may be considered the first real example, in the Irish context, of a folklorist, since in her texts we find “a living Irish tradition which she had observed all around her in County Donegal,”19 a narrative tradition considered absolutely alive and properly speaking Irish—and hence capable of being assimilated into an indigenous ferment that had the requisites to make an original contribution to the birth of a real national literature.

The work of Jane Francesca Elgee, or rather Lady Wilde, mother of the famous Oscar, seems to move along the same lines. In her Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland, which came out in 1887, just before Yeats’ first publication, we find a faithful and accurate transcription of material gathered previously by her doctor husband, whose interests as an antiquarian and occultist led him to prefer being paid with fairy tales, rather than with geese and eggs.20 What emerges above all is the loving care that a nationalist devotes to that patrimony of beliefs, usages, and tales that make her country unique and different from the rest of the world. Therefore, in her work, and even more strongly than in McClintock’s works, there is an impulse to discover, first, what it is that renders the folklore tradition a “uniquely Irish phenomenon,” and second, to explore the occult dimension of that tradition (in keeping with literary and intellectual fashions of the time) that made it even more worthy of being intensely studied. Here, however, one notes the influence of political propaganda and a marked “ethnological nationalism,” rather than serious study of the narrative object. This is borne out further by a lack of noted sources and the effective absence of any correspondence between the ideas of the author and those contained in the material collected.21

In Yeats’ opinion—and it is clear that this is what counts most in this context—the most remarkable work in the field of the transcription of traditional tales is Douglas Hyde’s Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories (1890). From its title, one can note a detail of primary importance that distinguishes this work from almost all the collections previously published: for the first time, a collector, thanks to his bilingualism, could hear tales narrated directly in Gaelic, then translate them into English for his readership. Although, as shall be seen, written translations of texts from Gaelic to English had been flowering for some time, this was a novelty for the oral tradition, and it allowed an entire repertory of tales that had remained for the greater part unexplored to be uncovered. What is more, storytellers were offered the opportunity to express themselves in their usual idiom, and hence to tell their stories in the original form, thus guaranteeing a stricter adherence of the transcribed text to its source. Perhaps it was for this reason that the tales gathered by Hyde were marked by a singular “imaginative extravagance” that “needed no literary embellishments to make them interesting.”22 In practice, the compiler’s faithful approach to the letter of the tales he heard was rewarded by their assuming an intrinsic value, since, from the source itself, they were invested with a by no means negligible aesthetic quality. Furthermore, what Yeats appreciated in Hyde was his ability to simultaneously exercise scientific rigor and poetic evocativeness: Hyde was capable of giving an absolutely faithful image of the reality of the oral tale, without renouncing his identity as a “man of letters.”23

But as Hyde himself was to demonstrate later, maintaining an ideal equal distance between the scientific and literary approaches to folklore was an arduous task,24 one that could not be completed, in that a real science of folklore had not yet emerged from the study of popular storytelling. This paralleled the situation that existed before Yeats, in which no organic literary movement had emerged that could really bring to fruition the wealth hidden in the oral tradition. The entire work of collection discussed above can be considered as a series of steps toward the discovery and appropriation of a patrimony that, until then, had remained hidden in shadows. The intrinsic value of these collections resides above all in their having laid the groundwork for the more mature and culturally aware treatment that the phenomenon of folklore would receive in the twentieth century. Within the ambit of our research here, one should again underline the multifaceted dialectic that had established itself in the field of the fairy tale between orality and writing, between tradition and innovation. This was to reach its climax in the Irish Revival, and especially in the early works of Yeats, in which the work of recovery lasting more than a century was to find expression.

The Literary Reception of the Written Gaelic Tradition

Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, Ireland was remarkable for the rediscovery of its traditional literature, which had been transcribed in the Middle Ages by Irish monks working to preserve the Celtic narrative heritage. I speak of “rediscovery” because it was in this century that Irish writers finally realized that they possessed “perfect material for a creative literature . . . the most plentiful treasure of legends in Europe.”25 This was possible because it was only in the nineteenth century that writers had at their disposal a conspicuous corpus of translations from the Gaelic, the language in which the greater part of the mythical and legendary tradition of the Celts had been transmitted. The availability of this material offered Irish literature a precious opportunity to escape from English and continental models and to renew itself through the reacquisition of an entirely indigenous treasure.

As one might imagine, the approach to the translation of texts dating so far back in time was by no means univocal. This was all the more so evident because these texts had been transmitted for centuries in manuscript form, which had necessarily compromised, on who knows how many points, the originality and correctness of the tradition. One must also take into account the personal taste and ethical and aesthetic exigencies of those authors who had chosen to draw from the texts in order to transform them into high literature. Thus, analogously the case of the fairy tale originating from folklore, different orientations developed in the literary recovery of the written tradition, which was a more or less legitimate heritage from the Celtic epoch. This written corpus had always been the main repertory of themes, motifs, and characters for oral narrative, and for the fairy tale in particular, especially in those zones where the substratum of the Gaelic language had proved most resistant. In virtue of this undoubted connection, it seems opportune to dwell briefly on the protagonists and modalities that gave birth to the wide variety of orientations that the reception of the early stories provoked. This is a subject that interests us closely, especially if the culmination of the literary events discussed below is believed to be reached in James Stephens’ Irish Fairy Tales.

As a point of departure, it seems logical to me to choose Gerald Griffin and Denis F. MacCarthy, the two principal exponents of the most elementary approach to the text: that is, a faithful adherence to the form and content of the original, a fidelity maintained even when some characteristics of the transmitted texts seemed dystonic, so to speak, to the sensibility of the contemporary reader, and did not take into account the errors inevitably caused by the manuscript tradition. Using this approach, as passive as it was impersonal, one can perceive, on the one hand, an effectively exaggerated respect for the classical source, and on the other, the intention to place all the value—and hence merit—of their work exclusively in having brought to light and offered to the public something absolutely new and original, renouncing a priori any kind of re-editing and therefore managing a real appropriation of the text.

For the greater part of the “early myth-users,”26 such a scrupulous approach to the sources proved impracticable. On the one hand, it was necessary to take into account the inevitable corruption lying hidden in a good part of the tradition, to the point of compromising its original aesthetic quality. On the other hand, these scholars faced the widespread presence of elements contrasting decisively with the idealized image of the Celtic age popular at the time, and also in opposition to the morality of an era in which certain kinds of expressive license were frowned upon.

The leading personality in a more active approach to the tradition was Patrick W. Joyce, who, despite considering himself a scholar, in the composition of Old Celtic Romances awarded himself the freedom of a writer, as he proposed restoring to the transmitted texts what, in his opinion, was their original spirit. Although on the structural level Joyce remained substantially faithful to the sources, on the level of form and language, his approach was far more incisive, to the point of emending whatever he considered the sloppy handiwork of clumsy or ignorant copyists. On some occasions, he opted for the omission of sections of the text that he considered to be subsequent additions; at other times, he was driven by a certain “prudishness”:27 his aim was to recover the original spirit, possibly in harmony with a sense of contemporary morality.

With the declared intention of turning “the old legends into ‘good stories,’”28 other authors were responsible for an even more active approach to the traditional material. This is the case of Henry de Vere, who approached the various versions of the same legend in such a way as to combine those elements that would make it more aesthetically valid. With the intention, once again, of restoring the original spirit of the tales, he added passages not present at the source, or expanded or condensed sections according to his own sensibility. Motivated by a personal ideal of native poeticalness, de Vere intervened so deeply in the texts as to frequently erase what might be considered the effective “spirit of the originals.”29

Thomas W. Rolleston also aimed at getting good stories from traditional sources through a careful re-editing that would restore the original spirit—purified, however, of those trivial tracts that Joyce had attributed to subsequent interpolations. Rolleston instead acknowledged that “the early Gale was capable of grossness and other faults,”30 so that his task as a man of letters was to select his material in such a way that his readership would discover only the “good side” of the Celtic spirit.31

In contrast to the reverence shown by his brother to the original sources, Robert D. Joyce composed two poems, Deirdre and Blanid, in which only the theme is derived from episodes narrated in the legendary tradition. The rest is almost complete re-elaboration, in which the original spirit is consciously betrayed in the name of a freedom of approach to the tradition, which was affirming itself more and more over the course of the nineteenth century (as proved by the great success, albeit brief, of the second Mr. Joyce). Yeats himself recognized Robert D. Joyce as a sort of precursor.32

Samuel Ferguson, on the other hand, offers us the most significant example of a re-elaboration of traditional material whose aim is moral and religious edification. His work does not limit itself to the simple exclusion of “‘vulgarity’ and ‘turbid extravagances and exaggerations’ in the old stories,”33 but isolates in particular those aspects of the narrative patrimony more suitable to being interpreted in an ethical key, so that the text becomes a vehicle through which to further the Christian message so dear to its author. It is hardly coincidence that many of Ferguson’s poems end with the prophetic announcement, on the part of a still pagan character, of the advent of the new faith.

In conclusion, we come to Standish J. O’Grady, whose work may legitimately be termed the definitive consecration, if not the most organic ordering, of the entire Celtic narrative tradition. It was appreciated and elected as a model by all the main exponents of what would shortly become the Irish Revival. O’Grady recognized the substantial superiority of the indigenous Irish tradition to any other, including the Greek, which, although it could boast of “polish and artistic form,” was not capable of exhibiting “the sentiment deeper and more tender, the audacity and freedom more exhilarating, the reach of imagination more sublime, the depth and power of the human soul”34 (all exclusive properties, in his opinion) of the Celtic narrative patrimony. O’Grady’s aim, therefore, was to spread a highly idealized image of the myths, legends, and characters themselves, handed down from the noble Irish past, by virtue of which he was careful to purify the originals of all the immoral and grotesque elements that might have obscured this image. He described his heroes in such a way as to exalt their greatness while depriving them of superhuman qualities, as in the exemplary case of Cú Chulainn, who was meant to be “the noblest character”35 of all literature. His History of Ireland offered, therefore, an artistic rather than strictly academic reading of Irish history, in which the past event was seen “through an imaginative medium.”36

With O’Grady, the process of fusion between fabula and historia reached its pinnacle. In his wake, followed those who more knowingly appropriated the Irish narrative tradition as the privileged source of their artistic creativity.

Notes

1. Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, 205.

2. Joan Fitzgerald, “Yeats’s Irish Traditions,” Textus II, 1–2 (1989): 27–28.

3. I am referring to the introduction by Séamus Ó Duilearga to the new edition of Royal Hibernian Tales, Béaloideas 10 (1940), 148–50.

4. Cf. ibid., 152: “I thought I could not benefit my readers more than by committing them [the stories in the collection] to print for their instruction and amusement” (my italics).

5. Cf. ibid.: “In fine, what will greatly enhance the value of this production is, that all the stories in it will be found to be genuine and never before offered to the public.”

6. Cf. Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 172: “Thackeray bought a copy [of the Royal Hibernian Tales] in 1842 and found in it ‘the old tricks and some of the old plots that one has read in many popular legends of almost all countries, European and Eastern’ (Irish Sketch Book 156, 189ff.).”

7. See ibid., 173.

8. Passages taken from Croker’s introduction to Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, quoted in Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 175.

9. Neil C. Hultin, “Anglo-Irish Folklore from Clonmel: T. C. Croker and British Library add. 20099,” Fabula 27 (1986): 293.

10. Cf. Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 176: “Croker contributed to the elaboration and diffusion of the image of the truculent Irish storyteller, well settled in a local community, which partly replaced the rather incredible solitary ‘bard’ and was definitely offered as contemporary.” Croker places the figure of the storyteller in a realistic framework, far from the ideal image of the traditional bard. However, in this framework, the bard loses his individuality, becoming a representative figure from the point of view of the writer.

11. Ibid., 181.

12. Regarding the work of Samuel Lover, which in many respects can be traced back to that of Croker, see Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 193–95.

13. See Mary H. Thuente, “W. B. Yeats and Nineteenth-Century Folklore,” The Journal of Irish Literature 6 (1977): 65–66.

14. Ibid., 66.

15. To get an idea of the varied relationships that developed between Irish writers and the oral tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Zimmermann, The Irish Story Teller, 225–62. In synthesis (260): “When novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century referred to or represented aspects of Irish rural storytelling, their purpose may have been just to add picturesque touches to their books, but they could also make it significant—to emphasize social polarities, or point to an ambiguous relationship between truth and lies (Edgeworth); or romanticize a more or less mythical past and a relatively elementary conception of national specificity (Lady Morgan); or exaggerate supposed national characteristics so as to meet demand for stage-Irish monologue and comic situations (Lover); or preach education and reconciliation while providing an element of local colour (Hall); or expose a symptom of Irish Catholic Barbarity (O’Sullivan) . . . The Banim brothers and Griffin showed that storytelling and rumours were a normal social activity associated with both pleasant and horrible aspects of Irish life. Carleton offered a view of diversified kinds of oral arts and their essential roles in the life of a society which was vanishing like his own youth.” In the last two positions, one can begin to make out what would prove to be the approach of Yeats and the Irish Revival to the traditional material.

16. See William B. Yeats, The Four Winds of Desire, in Id., The Collected Works: Early Articles and Reviews (New York: Scribner, 2004), vol. IX, 125: “Kennedy, an incomparably worse writer, had one great advantage: he believed in his goblins as sincerely as any peasant. He has explained in his Legendary Fictions that he could tell a number of spells for raising the fairies, but he will not—for fear of putting his readers up to mischief.”

17. Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Nineteenth-Century Folklore, 66.

18. Ibid., 67.

19. Ibid.

20. See ibid.: “For when grateful patients would offer to send him [Lady Wilde’s husband] geese or eggs or butter, he would bargain for a fragment of folklore instead.”

21. Ibid., 68.

22. Ibid., 70.

23. Yeats, The Four Winds of Desire, 125.

24. Cf. Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Nineteenth-Century Folklore, 70–71: “This blend of the scholar and poet in Hyde is what always appealed to Yeats, but as Hyde directed his attention more and more to politics and the revival of the Irish language, Yeats complained that Hyde the nationalist and the scholar was completely eclipsing Hyde the poet and tale-teller.”

25. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, 223.

26. Ibid., 226.

27. Ibid., 227.

28. Ibid., 228.

29. Ibid., 229.

30. Ibid., 231.

31. See ibid.: “We want the Irish spirit, certainly, in Irish literature; but we want its gold, not its dross; its spirituality, not its superstition; its daring fancy, not its too frequent recourse to mechanical exaggeration.”

32. See ibid.: “They [Robert D. Joyce’s works] were read by a number of other Irish writers who were working with similar materials, and Yeats wrote one of his earliest ‘Irish’ articles about them.”

33. Ibid., 232 (the words of Ferguson himself in Lays of the Western Gael are quoted between inverted commas).

34. Standish J. O’Grady, History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical (London-Dublin: Sampson, Low & Co.-E. Ponsonby & Co., 1881), 201.

35. Ibid., 235.

36. Standish J. O’Grady, History of Ireland (London-Dublin: Sampson, Low, Searle, Marston & Rivington-E. Ponsonby, 1878): vol. I, pp. IV–V.