This story is motivated like “The King of Ireland’s Son.” It is one of the many tales based upon an act of compassion shown to the dead.
Trunk-Without-Head.
[Page 157.] This description of the decapitated ghost sitting astride the beer-barrel, reminds one of Crofton Croker’s “Clooricaun,” and of the hag’s son in the story of “Paudyeen O’Kelly and the Weasel.” In Scotch Highland tradition, there is a “trunk-without-head,” who infested a certain ford, and killed people who attempted to pass that way; he is not the subject, however, of any regular story.
In a variant of this tale the hero’s name is Labhras (Laurence) and the castle where the ghost appeared is called Baile-an-bhroin (Ballinvrone). It is also mentioned, that when the ghost appeared in court, he came in streaming with blood, as he was the day he was killed, and that the butler, on seeing him, fainted.
It is Donal’s courage which saves him from the ghost, just as happens in another story which I got, and which is a close Gaelic parallel to Grimm’s “Man who went out to learn to shake with fear.” The ghost whom the hero lays explains that he had been for thirty years waiting to meet some one who would not be afraid of him. There is an evident moral in this.
The Hags of the Long Teeth.
[Page 162.] Long teeth are a favourite adjunct to horrible personalities in folk-fancy. There is in my “Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta,” another story of a hag of the long tooth; and in a story I got in Connacht, called the “Speckled Bull,” there is a giant whose teeth are long enough to make a walking-staff for him, and who invites the hero to come to him “until I draw you under my long, cold teeth.”
Loughlinn is a little village a few miles to the north-west of Castlerea, in the county Roscommon, not far from Mayo; and Drimnagh wood is a thick plantation close by. Ballyglas is the adjoining townland. There are two of the same name, upper and lower, and I do not know to which the story refers.
[In this very curious tale a family tradition seems to have got mixed up with the common belief about haunted raths and houses. It is not quite clear why the daughters should be bespelled for their father’s sin. This conception could not easily be paralleled, I believe, from folk-belief in other parts of Ireland. I rather take it that in the original form of the story the sisters helped, or, at all events, countenanced their father, or, perhaps, were punished because they countenanced the brother’s parricide. The discomfiture of the priest is curious.—A.N.]