The Alp-Luachra.
[Page 49.] This legend of the alp-luachra is widely disseminated, and I have found traces of it in all parts of Ireland. The alp-luachra is really a newt, not a lizard, as is generally supposed. He is the lissotriton punctatus of naturalists, and is the only species of newt known in Ireland. The male has an orange belly, red-tipped tail, and olive back. It is in most parts of Ireland a rare reptile enough, and hence probably the superstitious fear with which it is regarded, on the principle of omne ignotum pro terribli. This reptile goes under a variety of names in the various counties. In speaking English the peasantry when they do not use the Irish name, call him a “mankeeper,” a word which has probably some reference to the superstition related in our story. He is also called in some counties a “darklooker,” a word which is probably, a corruption of an Irish name for him which I have heard the Kildare people use, dochi-luachair (daċuiḋ luaċra), a word not found in the dictionaries. In Waterford, again, he is called arc-luachra, and the Irish MSS. call him arc-luachra (earc-luaċra). The alt-pluachra of the text is a mis-pronunciation of the proper name, alp-luachra. In the Arran Islands they have another name, ail-ċuaċ. I have frequently heard of people swallowing one while asleep. The symptoms, they say, are that the person swells enormously, and is afflicted with a thirst which makes him drink canfuls and pails of water or buttermilk, or anything else he can lay his hand on. In the south of Ireland it is believed that if something savoury is cooked on a pan, and the person’s head held over it, the mankeeper will come out. A story very like the one here given is related in Waterford, but of a dar daol, or daraga dheel, as he is there called, a venomous insect, which has even more legends attached to him than the alp-luachra. In this county, too, they say that if you turn the alp-luachra over on its back, and lick it, it will cure burns. Keating, the Irish historian and theologian, alludes quaintly to this reptile in his Tri Biorġaoiṫe an Bháir, so finely edited in the original the other day by Dr. Atkinson. “Since,” says Keating, “prosperity or worldly store is the weapon of the adversary (the devil), what a man ought to do is to spend it in killing the adversary, that is, by bestowing it on God’s poor. The thing which we read in Lactantius agrees with this, that if an airc-luachra were to inflict a wound on anyone, what he ought to do is to shake a pinchful of the ashes of the airc-luachra upon the wound, and he will be cured thereby; and so, if worldly prosperity wounds the conscience, what you ought to do is to put a poultice of the same prosperity to cure the wound which the covetousness by which you have amassed it has made in your conscience, by distributing upon the poor of God all that remains over your own necessity.” The practice which the fourth-century Latin alludes to, is in Ireland to-day transferred to the dar-daol, or goevius olens of the naturalists, which is always burnt as soon as found. I have often heard people say:—“Kill a keerhogue (clock or little beetle); burn a dar-dael.”
[Page 59.] Boccuch (bacaċ), literally a lame man, is, or rather was, the name of a very common class of beggars about the beginning of this century. Many of these men were wealthy enough, and some used to go about with horses to collect the “alms” which the people unwillingly gave them. From all accounts they appear to have been regular black-mailers, and to have extorted charity partly through inspiring physical and partly moral terror, for the satire, at least of some of them, was as much dreaded as their cudgels. Here is a curious specimen of their truculence from a song called the Bacach Buidhe, now nearly forgotten:—
Is bacach mé tá air aon chois, siúbhalfaidh mé go spéifeaṁail,
Ceannóchaidh mé bréidin i g-Cill-Cainnigh do’n bhraois,
Cuirfead cóta córuiġthe gleusta, a’s búcla buidhe air m’aon chois,
A’s nach maith mo shlighe bidh a’s eudaigh o chaill mo chosa siúbhal!
Ni’l bacach ná fear-mála o Ṡligeach go Cinn-tráile
Agus ó Bheul-an-átha go Baile-buidhe na Midhe,
Nach bhfuil agam faoi árd-chíos, agus cróin anaghaidh na ráithe,
No mineóchainn a g-cnámha le bata glas daraigh.
i.e.,
I am a boccugh who goes on one foot, I will travel airily,
I will buy frize in Kilkenny for the breeches(?)
I will put a well-ordered prepared coat and yellow buckles on my one foot,
And isn’t it good, my way of getting food and clothes since my feet lost their walk.
There is no boccuch or bagman from Sligo to Kinsale
And from Ballina to Ballybwee (Athboy) in Meath,
That I have not under high rent to me—a crown every quarter from them—
Or I’d pound their bones small with a green oak stick.
The memory of these formidable guests is nearly vanished, and the boccuch in our story is only a feeble old beggarman. I fancy this tale of evicting the alt-pluachra family from their human abode is fathered upon a good many people as well as upon the father of the present MacDermot. [Is the peasant belief in the Alp-Luachra the originating idea of the well-known Irish Rabelaisian 14th century tale “The Vision of McConglinny?”—A.N.]