Irish Books and Irish People

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

They proved, however, not identity only but difference; and the ballad as I have it in full with its nineteen quatrains, is even less like the longer version given by O'Halloran to Miss Brooke, than the opening stanzas suggested. In them the variations were mainly textual, and when I read out O'Halloran's version to James Kelly, his son, a keen listener, declared a preference for the printed text. But the old man was of another mind. "It's the same song," he said, "sure enough, but there's things changed in it, and I know rightly about them. Some one was giving it the way it would be easier to understand, leaving out the old hard words. And I did that myself once or twice the last day you were here, and I was vexed after, when I would be thinking about it. And this day you will be to take down what I say, let you understand it or not; just word for word, the right way it should be spoken."

There you have in a glimpse the custodian of legend. The man was illiterate, technically, but he knew by instinct, as his ancestors had known before him, that he was the guardian of the life of a song; he recognised that it was a scripture which he had no right to mutilate or alter. He had to the full that respect for a work of literature which is the best indication of a scholar, and for him at least the line was unbroken from the Ireland of heroes and minstrels to the hour when he chanted over the poem that some bard in the remote ages had fashioned.

Little wonder, too, for his own way of life was close to that of the Middle Ages. Below in the valley, where the Swilly River debouches into its sea lough, was a prosperous little town with banks and railway; but to reach the bleak brown moor where James Kelly's house stood, you must climb by one of two roads, each so rough and steep that a bicycle cannot be ridden down them. Here, in a little screen of scrub alders, stands the cottage, where three generations of the family live together. His own home consisted simply of two rooms with no upper story, but it was trim and comfortable, the dresser well filled, and the big pot over the turf fire gave out a prosperous steam. The son, a grown man, waited from his turf-cutting to help in our discussion; the wife was abroad that day, and one daughter was just starting for market with a web of homespun cloth which they had dressed in the household. The spinning wheel stood in the corner; but another girl was busy near the fire with more modern work, hemming shirts with a machine for a Derry factory, and the bleached linen was the only thing in the house which had not taken on the brown tints of peat smoke.

James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaiming at me, was all browns and greys, like the country outside his door; and his eyes were like brown streams running through that peaty mountain, with their movement and sparkle, and their dark depths. At other times easy, like that of all Irish peasants, his manner changed and grew rough and imperious when the business began. I must not interrupt with questions. I must write down, syllable for syllable, that the song might be got "the right way." It was by no means easy to carry out these directions, for the poem was written in an Irish not spoken to-day, as unlike as the Chaucerian English is to our common speech; and even to write down modern Irish by ear I was poorly qualified. Things were made harder, too, by the manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he chanted, elbow and knee worked like a fiddler's or piper's marking the time. However, with persistence, I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully through, then writing line by line or as near as I could; then going back and asking questions in detail: the son coming to my rescue, when the old man lost patience (as he did once in every ten minutes) and interposing usefully in our discussions.

For there were endless discussions as to the meaning of words, and nothing could be more curious than to see the old man's endeavour to give in English not merely a bare rendering, but the colour of every phrase. It made me realise as nothing else could have done, how fine was his feeling for the shade of a word, and I cannot describe his dissatisfaction with the poor equivalents he could find. He was happy enough when the debate drifted into an exposition—always addressed to his son—of the uses of some rare word in the Irish, the manner of exposition being by citation of passages from other songs, or phrases that might occur in talk. I have listened to many a professor doing the same thing in Greek and Latin, but to none who had a finer instinct for the business. Kelly's vexation came when he had to "put English on" a word for me, and the obvious equivalent was not the right one. Sometimes I could help; sometimes he arrived by himself at what satisfied him, though once at least it was droll enough. We were at the lines where Connlaoch, dying, says to his father: "If I could give my secret to any under the sun, it is to your bright body I would tell it." The trouble was about the phrase "bright body," for the word "cneas" means literally "skin," but is used (just like χρὡς in Homer) to signify "person." What James wanted to convey to me was that the word was not the common one for "body," and at last he smote his thigh. "Carkidge," he cried, "it's carkidge (carcase), 'It is to your clear carkidge I would tell it.'" A man with less instinct for literature would have said "body" at once, and never trouble more; but James knew at once too much and too little, and I give the instance to show how an Irishman unlettered in English may be deeply imbued with the true spirit of letters through a literature of his own.

There were, however, several passages where I could get no clear account of the meaning, and in some I have since found by comparison with the text which O'Halloran provided for Miss Brooke that Kelly had got the words twisted. For instance, the first stanza opens simply:—

"There came to us a stout champion,
The hearty champion Connlaoch."

But of the next two lines I could get no clearer rendering than that "he just came in full through these people for diversion and for fun to himself." Then the ballad continues at once—for its method is terse and its transitions abrupt throughout—to give us the words of the men who meet Connlaoch on his landing:—

"Where have you been, O tender gallant,
Riding like a noble's son?
Methinks by the way of your coming,
You are wandering or astray."

And Connlaoch answers the taunt and the challenge implied:—