The Weasel.
[Page 73.] The weasel, like the cat, is an animal that has many legends and superstitions attaching to it. I remember hearing from an old shanachie, now unfortunately dead, a long and extraordinary story about the place called Chapelizod, a few miles from Dublin, which he said was Séipeul-easóg, the “weasel’s chapel,” in Irish, but which is usually supposed to have received its name from the Princess Iseult of Arthurian romance. The story was the account of how the place came by this name. How he, who was a Connachtman, and never left his native county except to reap the harvest in England, came by this story I do not know; but I imagine it must have been told him by some one in the neighbourhood, in whose house he spent the night, whilst walking across the island on his way to Dublin or Drogheda harbour. The weasel is a comical little animal, and one might very well think it was animated with a spirit. I have been assured by an old man, and one whom I have always found fairly veracious, that when watching for ducks beside a river one evening a kite swooped down and seized a weasel, with which it rose up again into the air. His brother fired, and the kite came down, the weasel still in its claws, and unhurt. The little animal then came up, and stood in front of the two men where they sat, and nodded and bowed his head to them about twenty times over; “it was,” said the old man, “thanking us he was.” The weasel is a desperate fighter, and always makes for the throat. What, however, in Ireland is called a weazel, is really a stoat, just as what is called a crow in Ireland is really a rook, and what is called a crane is really a heron.
Cáuher-na-mart, to which Paudyeen (diminutive of Paddy) was bound, means the “city of the beeves,” but is now called in English Westport, one of the largest towns in Mayo. It was apropos of its long and desolate streets of ruined stores, with nothing in them, that some one remarked he saw Ireland’s characteristics there in a nutshell—“an itch after greatness and nothingness;” a remark which was applicable enough to the squireocracy and bourgeoisie of the last century.
[Page 79.] The “big black dog” seems a favourite shape for the evil spirit to take. He appears three times in this volume.
[Page 81.] The little man, with his legs astride the barrel, appears to be akin to the south of Ireland spirit, the clooricaun, a being who is not known, at least by this name, in the north or west of the island. See Crofton Croker’s “Haunted Cellar.”
[Page 87.] “The green hill opened,” etc. The fairies are still called Tuatha de Danann by the older peasantry, and all the early Irish literature agrees that the home of the Tuatha was in the hills, after the Milesians had taken to themselves the plains. Thus in the story of the “Piper and the Pooka,” in the Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta, not translated here, a door opens in the hill of Croagh Patrick, and the pair walk in and find women dancing inside. Dónal, the name of the little piper, is now Anglicised into Daniel, except in one or two Irish families which retain the old form still. The coash-t’ya bower, in which the fairy consorts ride, means literally “the deaf coach,” perhaps from the rumbling sound it is supposed to make, and the banshee is sometimes supposed to ride in it. It is an omen of ill to those who meet it. It seems rather out of place amongst the fairy population, being, as it is, a gloomy harbinger of death, which will pass even through a crowded town. Cnoc Matha, better Magha, the hill of the plain, is near the town of Tuam, in Galway. Finvara is the well-known king of the fairy host of Connacht. In Lady Wilde’s “Ethna, the Bride,” Finvara is said to have carried off a beautiful girl into his hill, whom her lover recovers with the greatest difficulty. When he gets her back at last, she lies on her bed for a year and a day as if dead. At the end of that time he hears voices saying that he may recover her by unloosing her girdle, burning it, and burying in the earth the enchanted pin that fastened it. This was, probably, the slumber-pin which we have met so often in the “King of Ireland’s Son.” Nuala, the name of the fairy queen, was a common female name amongst us until the last hundred years or so. The sister of the last O’Donnell, for whom Mac an Bhaird wrote his exquisite elegy, so well translated by Mangan—
“Oh, woman of the piercing wail,
That mournest o’er yon mound of clay”—
was Nuala. I do not think it is ever used now as a Christian name at all, having shared the unworthy fate of many beautiful Gaelic names of women common a hundred years ago, such as Mève, Una, Sheelah, Moreen, etc.