Such myth stories as these ought to be preserved, since they are about the last visible link connecting civilized with pre-historic man; for, of all the traces that man in his earliest period has left behind him, there is nothing except a few drilled stones or flint arrow-heads that approaches the antiquity of these tales, as told to-day by a half-starving peasant in a smoky Connacht cabin.
It is time to say a word about the narrators of these stories. The people who can recite them are, as far as my researches have gone, to be found only amongst the oldest, most neglected, and poorest of the Irish-speaking population. English-speaking people either do not know them at all, or else tell them in so bald and condensed a form as to be useless. Almost all the men from whom I used to hear stories in the County Roscommon are dead. Ten or fifteen years ago I used to hear a great many stories, but I did not understand their value. Now when I go back for them I cannot find them. They have died out, and will never again be heard on the hillsides, where they probably existed for a couple of thousand years; they will never be repeated there again, to use the Irish phrase, while grass grows or water runs. Several of these stories I got from an old man, one Shawn Cunningham, on the border of the County Roscommon, where it joins Mayo. He never spoke more than a few words of English till he was fifteen years old. He was taught by a hedge schoolmaster from the South of Ireland out of Irish MSS. As far as I could make out from him the teaching seemed to consist in making him learn Irish poems by heart. His next schoolmaster, however, tied a piece of stick round his neck, and when he came to school in the morning the schoolmaster used to inspect the piece of wood and pretend that it told him how often he had spoken Irish when at home. In some cases the schoolmasters made the parents put a notch in the stick every time the child failed to speak English. He was beaten then, and always beaten whenever he was heard speaking a word of Irish, even though at this time he could hardly speak a word of English. His son and daughter now speak Irish, though not fluently, his grandchildren do not even understand it. He had at one time, as he expressed it, “the full of a sack of stories,” but he had forgotten them. His grandchildren stood by his knee while he told me one or two, but it was evident they did not understand a word. His son and daughter laughed at them as nonsense. Even in Achill where, if anywhere, one ought to find folk-stories in their purity, a fine-looking dark man of about forty-five, who told me a number of them, and could repeat Ossian’s poems, assured me that now-a-days when he went into a house in the evening and the old people got him to recite, the boys would go out; “they wouldn’t understand me,” said he, “and when they wouldn’t, they’d sooner be listening to géimneaċ na mbó,” “the lowing of the cows.” This, too, in an island where many people cannot speak English. I do not know whether the Achill schoolmasters make use of the notch of wood to-day, but it is hardly wanted now. It is curious that this was the device universally employed all over Connacht and Munster to kill the language. This took place under the eye of O’Connell and the Parliamentarians, and, of course, under the eye and with the sanction of the Catholic priesthood and prelates, some of whom, according to Father Keegan, of St. Louis, distinguished themselves by driving the Irish teachers out of their dioceses and burning their books. At the present day, such is the irony of fate, if a stranger talks Irish he runs a good chance of being looked upon as an enemy, this because some attempts were made to proselytize “natives” by circulating Irish bibles, and sending some Irish scripture-readers amongst them. Surely nothing so exquisitely ludicrous ever took place outside of this island of anomalies, as that a stranger who tries to speak Irish in Ireland runs the serious risk of being looked upon as a proselytizing Englishman. As matters are still progressing gaily in this direction, let nobody be surprised if a pure Aryan language which, at the time of the famine, in ’47, was spoken by at least four million souls (more than the whole population of Switzerland), becomes in a few years as extinct as Cornish. Of course, there is not a shadow of necessity, either social or economical, for this. All the world knows that bi-linguists are superior to men who know only one language, yet in Ireland everyone pretends to believe the contrary. A few words from the influential leaders of the race when next they visit Achill, for instance, would help to keep Irish alive there in sæcula sæculorum, and with the Irish language, the old Aryan folk-lore, the Ossianic poems, numberless ballads, folk-songs, and proverbs, and a thousand and one other interesting things that survive when Irish is spoken, and die when it dies. But, from a complexity of causes which I am afraid to explain, the men who for the last sixty years have had the ear of the Irish race have persistently shown the cold shoulder to everything that was Irish and racial, and while protesting, or pretending to protest, against West Britonism, have helped, more than anyone else, by their example, to assimilate us to England and the English, thus running counter to the entire voice of modern Europe, which is in favour of extracting the best from the various races of men who inhabit it, by helping them to develop themselves on national and racial lines. The people are not the better for it either, for one would fancy it required little culture to see that the man who reads Irish MSS., and repeats Ossianic poetry, is a higher and more interesting type than the man whose mental training is confined to spelling through an article in United Ireland.[15]
I may mention here that it is not as easy a thing as might be imagined to collect Irish stories. One hears that tales are to be had from such and such a man, generally, alas! a very old one. With difficulty one manages to find him out, only to discover, probably, that he has some work on hand. If it happens to be harvest time it is nearly useless going to him at all, unless one is prepared to sit up with him all night, for his mind is sure to be so distraught with harvest operations that he can tell you nothing. If it is winter time, however, and you fortunately find him unoccupied, nevertheless it requires some management to get him to tell his stories. Half a glass of ishka-baha, a pipe of tobacco, and a story of one’s own are the best things to begin with. If, however, you start to take down the story verbatim with pencil and paper, as an unwary collector might do, you destroy all, or your shanachie becomes irritable. He will not wait for you to write down your sentence, and if you call out, “Stop, stop, wait till I get this down,” he will forget what he was going to tell you, and you will not get a third of his story, though you may think you have it all. What you must generally do is to sit quietly smoking your pipe, without the slightest interruption, not even when he comes to words and phrases which you do not understand. He must be allowed his own way to the end, and then after judiciously praising him and discussing the story, you remark, as if the thought had suddenly struck you, “buḋ ṁaiṫ liom sin a ḃeiṫ agam air ṗáipeur,” “I’d like to have that on paper.” Then you can get it from him easily enough, and when he leaves out whole incidents, as he is sure to do, you who have just heard the story can put him right, and so get it from him nearly in its entirety. Still it is not always easy to write down these stories, for they are full of old or corrupted words, which neither you nor your narrator understand, and if you press him too much over the meaning of these he gets confused and irritable.
The present volume consists of about half the stories in the Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta, translated into English, together with some half dozen other stories given in the original together with a close English translation. It is not very easy to make a good translation from Irish into English, for there are no two Aryan languages more opposed to each other in spirit and idiom. Still, the English spoken by three-fourths of the people of Ireland is largely influenced by Gaelic idioms, for most of those expressions which surprise Englishmen are really translations from that Irish which was the language of the speaker’s father, grandfather, or great-grandfather—according to the part of the country you may be in—and there have perpetuated themselves, even in districts where you will scarce find a trace of an Irish word. There are, however, also hundreds of Gaelic idioms not reproduced in the English spoken by the people, and it is difficult to render these fitly. Campbell of Islay has run into rather an extreme in his translations, for in order to make them picturesque, he has rendered his Gaelic originals something too literally. Thus, he invariably translates bhain se an ceann deth, by “he reaped the head off him,” a form of speech which, I notice, a modern Irish poet and M.P. has adopted from him; but bain, though it certainly means “reap” amongst other things, is the word used for taking off a hat as well as a head. Again, he always translates thu by “thou,” which gives his stories a strange antique air, which is partly artificial, for the Gaelic “thou” corresponds to the English “you,” the second person plural not being used except in speaking of more than one. In this way, Campbell has given his excellent and thoroughly reliable translations a scarcely legitimate colouring, which I have tried to avoid. For this reason, I have not always translated the Irish idioms quite literally, though I have used much unidiomatic English, but only of the kind used all over Ireland, the kind the people themselves use. I do not translate, for instance, the Irish for “he died,” by “he got death,” for this, though the literal translation, is not adopted into Hibernian English; but I do translate the Irish ghnidheadh se sin by “he used to do that,” which is the ordinary Anglo-Irish attempt at making—what they have not got in English—a consuetudinal tense. I have scarcely used the pluperfect at all. No such tense exists in Irish, and the people who speak English do not seem to feel the want of it, and make no hesitation in saying, “I’d speak sooner if I knew that,” where they mean, “if I had known that I would have spoken sooner.” I do not translate (as Campbell would), “it rose with me to do it,” but “I succeeded in doing it,” for the first, though the literal translation of the Irish idiom, has not been adopted into English; but I do translate “he did it and he drunk,” instead of, “he did it while he was drunk;” for the first phrase (the literal translation of the Irish) is universally used throughout English-speaking Ireland. Where, as sometimes happens, the English language contains no exact equivalent for an Irish expression, I have rendered the original as well as I could, as one generally does render for linguistic purposes, from one language into another.
In conclusion, it only remains for me to thank Mr. Alfred Nutt for enriching this book as he has done, and for bearing with the dilatoriness of the Irish printers, who find so much difficulty in setting Irish type, that many good Irishmen have of late come round to the idea of printing our language in Roman characters; and to express my gratitude to Father Eugene O’Growney for the unwearying kindness with which he read and corrected my Irish proofs, and for the manifold aid which he has afforded me on this and other occasions.
POSTSCRIPT BY ALFRED NUTT.
I had hoped to accompany these tales with as full a commentary as that which I have affixed to the Argyllshire Märchen, collected and translated by the Rev. D. MacInnes. Considerations of business and health prevent me from carrying out this intention, and I have only been able to notice a passage here and there in the Tales; but I have gladly availed myself of my friend, Dr. Hyde’s permission, to touch upon a few points in his Introduction.