On turning round of me, towards the left-hand side,
I beheld the Great Devil that got the bribe,
Going to fall upon me from above [literally, "on the top of my branches or limbs,">[
And it was then that the thirst grew upon my poor soul!
And, oh! God! oh! it was no wonder!
I looked up and beheld the Blessed Virgin,
I asked a request of her——to save me from the foul devils.
She lowered herself down actively, quickly,
She laid herself upon her polished smooth knee
And asked a request of her One-Son and her child,
To put me in the top of the branches, or in the fold of a stone,
Or under the ground where the weasel goes,
Or on the north side where the snow blows,
Or in the same body again to teach the people,
—And the blessing of God to the mouth that tells it.
THE OLD WOMAN OF BEARE
PREFACE.
The Old Woman of Beare may, perhaps, have been an historical personage. Kuno Meyer has printed a touching poem (of the 11th century as he thinks) ascribed to her. "It is the lament of an old hetaira who contrasts the privations and sufferings of her old age with the pleasures of her youth when she had been the delight of kings." The ancient prose preface runs, "The Old Woman of Beare, Digdi was her name. Of Corcaguiny she was, i.e., of the Ui Maic Iair-chonchinn. Of them also was Brigit, daughter of Iustan, and Liadain, the wife of Cuirither,[57] and Uallach, daughter of Muinegan.[58] Saint Finan had left them a charter that they should never be without an illustrious woman of their race.... She had seven periods of youth, one after another, so that every man who had lived with her came to die of old age, so that her grandsons and great-grandsons were tribes and races." Legends about her are common all over Ireland, and even verses are ascribed to her. There is another story about her in O Fotharta's "Siamsa an Gheimhridh," p. 116. She was either a real character, an early Ninon de l'Enclos, or else a mythic personage euphemized by the romancists.
There is a short legend about her under the title of Mór ní Odhrain, written down in County Donegal by, I think, Mr. Lloyd, in which O'Donnell comes to visit her, and counts the bones of 500 beeves, one of which she had killed every year. Mr. Timony found the same story in Blacksod Bay, only she was there called "Aine an chnuic." She is said in one version to have resided in "Teach Mor," "the house furthest west in Ireland," which Mr. Lloyd identified with Tivore on the Dingle promontory, and in a southern version which I also give she is called The Old Woman of Dingle.
The vision told here as having been seen by the Old Woman is extremely like a story in the "Dialogus Miraculorum of Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dist. xii., cap. 20, quoted by Landau in his "Quellen des Dekameron," and again by Lee in "The Decameron, its Sources and Analogues." It runs as follows:—
"The leman of a priest before her death had made for herself shoes with thick soles, saying 'bury me in them for I shall want them.' The night of her death a knight was riding down the street in the bright moonlight, accompanied by his attendants, when they heard a woman screaming for help. It was this woman in her shift, and with the new shoes on her feet, fleeing from a hunter. One could hear the terrible sound of his horn and the yelping of his hounds. The knight seized the woman by her hanging tresses, wound them round his left arm, and drew his sword to protect her. The woman, however, cried out, "Let me go, let me go, he is coming." As the knight, however, would not let her go, she tore herself away from him, and in so doing left her locks wound round his arm; the hunter then caught her up, threw her across his horse and rode away with her. On the knight returning home he related what he had seen and was not believed until they opened the woman's grave and found that her hair was missing."