The King of Ireland’s Son.
[Page 19.] The king of Ireland’s son. This title should properly be, “The son of a king in Ireland” (Mac riġ i n-Eirinn). As this name for the prince is rather cumbrous, I took advantage of having once heard him called the king of Ireland’s son (Mac riġ Eireann), and have so given it here. In another longer and more humorous version of this story, which I heard from Shamus O’Hart, but which I did not take down in writing, the short green man is the “Thin black man” (fear caol duḃ); the gunman is guinnéar, not gunnaire; the ear-man is cluas-le-h-éisteaċt; (ear for hearing), not cluasaire; and the blowman is not Séidire, but polláire-séidte (blowing nostril). This difference is the more curious, considering that the men lived only a couple of miles apart, and their families had lived in the same place for generations.
[Page 27.] This description of a house thatched with feathers is very common in Irish stories. On the present occasion the house is thatched with one single feather, so smooth that there was no projecting point or quill either above or below the feather-roof. For another instance, see the “Well of D’yerree in Dowan,” page 131. In a poem from “The Dialogue of the Sages,” the lady Credé’s house is described thus:—
“Of its sunny chamber the corner stones
Are all of silver and precious gold,
In faultless stripes its thatch is spread
Of wings of brown and crimson red.
Its portico is covered, too,
With wings of birds both yellow and blue.”
See O’Curry’s “Man. Materials,” p. 310.
[Page 27.] “He drew the cooalya-coric,” coolaya in the text, is a misprint. The cooalya-coric means “pole of combat.” How it was “drawn” we have no means of knowing. It was probably a pole meant to be drawn back and let fall upon some sounding substance. The word tarraing, “draw,” has, however, in local, if not in literary use, the sense of drawing back one’s arm to make a blow. A peasant will say, “he drew the blow at me,” or “he drew the stick,” in English; or “ṫarraing sé an buille,” in Irish, by which he means, he made the blow and struck with the stick. This may be the case in the phrase “drawing the cooalya-coric,” which occurs so often in Irish stories, and it may only mean, “he struck a blow with the pole of combat,” either against something resonant, or against the door of the castle. I have come across at least one allusion to it in the Fenian literature. In the story, called Macaoṁ mór mac riġ na h-Earpáine (the great man, the king of Spain’s son), the great man and Oscar fight all day, and when evening comes Oscar grows faint and asks for a truce, and then takes Finn Mac Cool aside privately and desires him to try to keep the great man awake all night, while he himself sleeps; because he feels that if the great man, who had been already three days and nights without rest, were to get some sleep on this night, he himself would not be a match for him next morning. This is scarcely agreeable to the character of Oscar, but the wiles which Finn employs to make the great man relate to him his whole history, and so keep him from sleeping, are very much in keeping with the shrewdness which all these stories attribute to the Fenian king. The great man remains awake all night, sorely against his will, telling Finn his extraordinary adventures; and whenever he tries to stop, Finn incites him to begin again, and at last tells him not to be afraid, because the Fenians never ask combat of any man until he ask it of them first. At last, as the great man finished his adventures do ḃí an lá ag éiriġe agus do ġaḃar Osgar agus do ḃuail an cuaille cóṁpaic. Do ċuala an fear mór sin agus a duḃairt, “A Finn Ṁic Cúṁail,” ar sé, “d’ḟeallair orm,” etc. i.e., the day was rising, and Oscar goes and struck (the word is not “drew” here) the pole of combat. The great man heard that, and he said, “Oh, Finn Mac Cool, you have deceived me,” etc. Considering that they were all inside of Finn’s palace at Allan (co. Kildare) at this time, Oscar could hardly have struck the door. It is more probable that the pole of combat stood outside the house, and it seems to have been a regular institution. In Campbell’s tale of “The Rider of Grianag,” there is mention made of a slabhraidh comhrac, “Chain of combat,” which answers the same purpose as the pole, only not so conveniently, since the hero has to give it several hauls before he can “take a turn out of it.” We find allusion to the same thing in the tale of Iollan arm Dearg. Illan, the hero, comes to a castle in a solitude, and surprises a woman going to the well, and she points out to him the chain, and says, “Gaċ uair ċroiṫfeas tu an slaḃra sin ar an mbile, do ġeoḃaiḋ tu ceud curaḋ caṫ-armaċ, agus ni iarrfaid ort aċt an cóṁrac is áil leat, mar atá diar no triúr no ceaṫrar, no ceud,” i.e., “every time that you will shake yon chain (suspended) out of the tree, you will get (call forth) a hundred champions battle-armed, and they will only ask of thee the combat thou likest thyself, that is (combat with) two, or three, or four, or a hundred.” Chains are continually mentioned in Irish stories. In the “Little Fort of Allan,” a Fenian story, we read, Ann sin d’éiriġ bollsgaire go bioṫ-urlaṁ agus do ċroiṫ slaḃra éisteaċta na bruiġne, agus d’éisteadar uile go foirtineaċ, i.e., “then there arose a herald with active readiness, and they shook the fort’s chain of listening, and they all listened attentively;” and in the tale of “Illan, the Red-armed,” there are three chains in the palace, one of gold, one of silver, and one of findrinny (a kind of metal, perhaps bronze), which are shaken to seat the people at the banquet, and to secure their silence; but whoever spake after the gold chain had been shaken did it on pain of his head.
[In the story of Cuchullain’s youthful feats it is related that, on his first expedition, he came to the court of the three Mac Nechtain, and, according to O’Curry’s Summary (“Manners and Customs,” II., p. 366), “sounded a challenge.” The mode of this sounding is thus described by Prof. Zimmer, in his excellent summary of the Tain bo Cualgne (Zeit, f. vgl., Sprachforschung, 1887, p. 448): “On the lawn before the court stood a stone pillar, around which was a closed chain (or ring), upon which was written in Ogham, that every knight who passed thereby was bound, upon his knightly honour, to issue a challenge. Cuchullain took the stone pillar and threw it into a brook hard by.” This is the nearest analogue I have been able to find to our passage in the old Irish literature (the Tain, it should be mentioned, goes back in its present form certainly to the tenth, and, probably, to the seventh century). As many of the Fenian romances assumed a fresh and quasi-definite shape in the twelfth-fourteenth centuries, it is natural to turn for a parallel to the mediæval romances of chivalry. In a twelfth century French romance, the Conte de Graal, which is in some way connected with the body of Gaelic Märchen (whether the connection be, as I think, due to the fact that the French poet worked up lays derived from Celtic sources, or, as Professor Zimmer thinks, that the French romances are the origin of much in current Gaelic folk-tales), when Perceval comes to the Castle of Maidens and enters therein, he finds a table of brass, and hanging from it by a chain of silver, a steel hammer. With this he strikes three blows on the table, and forces the inmates to come to him. Had they not done so the castle would have fallen into ruins. Other parallels from the same romances are less close; thus, when Perceval came to the castle of his enemy, Partinal, he defies him by throwing down his shield, which hangs up on a tree outside the castle (v. 44,400, et seq.). It is well known that the recognised method of challenging in tournaments was for the challenger to touch his adversary’s shield with the lance. This may possibly be the origin of the “shield-clashing” challenge which occurs several times in Conall Gulban; or, on the other hand, the mediæval practice may be a knightly transformation of an earlier custom. In the thirteenth century prose Perceval le Gallois, when the hero comes to the Turning Castle and finds the door shut, he strikes such a blow with his sword that it enters three inches deep into a marble pillar (Potvin’s edition, p. 196). These mediæval instances do not seem sufficient to explain the incident in our text, and I incline to think that our tale has preserved a genuine trait of old Irish knightly life. In Kennedy’s “Jack the Master, and Jack the Servant” (Fictions, p. 32), the hero takes hold of a “club that hangs by the door ”and uses it as a knocker.—A.N.]
[Page 29.] They spent the night, &c. This brief run resembles very much a passage in the story of Iollan Arm-dearg, which runs, do rinneadar tri treana de ’n oiḋċe, an ċeud trian re h-ól agus re h-imirt, an dara trian re ceól agus re h-oirfide agus re h-ealaḋan, agus an treas trian re suan agus re sáṁ-ċodlaḋ, agus do rugadar as an oiḋċe sin i.e., they made three-thirds of the night; the first third with drink and play, the second third with music and melody and (feats of) science, and the third third with slumber and gentle sleep, and they passed away that night.
[Page 33], line 28. This allusion to the horse and the docking is very obscure and curious. The old fellow actually blushed at the absurdity of the passage, yet he went through with it, though apparently unwillingly. He could throw no light upon it, except to excuse himself by saying that “that was how he heard it ever.”
[Page 37], line 4. The sword of three edges is curious; the third edge would seem to mean a rounded point, for it can hardly mean triangular like a bayonet. The sword that “never leaves the leavings of a blow behind it,” is common in Irish literature. In that affecting story of Deirdre, Naoise requests to have his head struck off with such a sword, one that Mananan son of Lir, had long before given to himself.
[Page 47.] The groundwork or motivating of this story is known to all European children, through Hans Andersen’s tale of the “Travelling Companion.”
[I have studied some of the features of this type of stories Arg. Tales, pp. 443-452.—A.N.]