What they offer confronts the mystery of the world beyond, and it
provides for many puzzled by loss or wearied by drudgery a chance to enter the
imaginative sphere. The fantastic leaps out to pull in the wanderer, but it
often repels or threatens those humans tempted or foolish enough to cross its
border.
The results, compiled here with two CDs of forty stories and songs in
both Irish and English, represent but a smidgen of the material at UCD, but
they allow researchers and students to listen in on recordings, as well as to
follow along with transcriptions and photographs which enrich this
well-designed (by Red Dog) text. Voices
from all but Offaly, Derry, and Longford contribute individual and communal
memories. The value of this edition rests in its thematic range and bilingual
accessibility into this lore.
For instance, the juxtaposition of Irish and English, urban and rural,
widens the perhaps expected territory investigated here. Told by Meg Doyle in
Dublin’s Ringsend or Edward Kendellan in Stonybatter, the tale of the banshee
(a popular choice for many interviewed) from 1980 balances out the
preponderance of rural material collected as
Gaeilge in earlier years. Following Doyle’s report, the famous fiddler
Micho Russell from Doolin in Clare plays ‘The Banshee Reel’ as the text includes
a photograph of a local holy well and a placename report (originally in Irish,
translated) on a local hill associated with keening cats ‘wailing and
shrieking’.
Séan Ó Catháin tells a legend of Petticoat Loose, who ‘among other
crimes’ in Munster, ‘drowned a school master in Coilleagán and killed infants’.
The action damning her was being drunk ‘and about to have a child’ while Sunday
Mass was being said. It’s a bit confusing, but the haunting nature of such
tales, perpetuated widely and doggedly, supports the popular warning of the
fate of a ‘fallen woman’.
On the other hand, ‘Amhrán an Frag’ comically contrasts a frog’s entry
across the domestic threshold (as told to the Conamara teller as if real) with
an invented song by Peadar Ó Ceannabháin likening that intrusion to ‘the fight
in the gap of the fort/ an troid a bhí I
mBearna an Dúin’. The mock-heroic,
complete with the amphibian converted into a ‘mermaid’s husband dressed in
women’s clothing’ conveys the manner in which the everyday inflates into the
epic.
Fear, humor, and respect mingle in such reactions to the uncanny.
Meeting the devil at the crossroads and learning a rousing tune, for example,
can conjure up the clever retort of the human player confronted by the
revelation from the next world. Jigs
stolen or learned from devious faeries repeat the prevalent notion that pipers
suddenly appear among humans to play before vanishing as quickly. Máire Ní Bheirne of Teelin passes on such an
account to Donegal collector Mícheál Ó Domhnaill in 1974, and from here, the
reel ‘Tiúin an Phíobaire Sí’ passes (and takes on two more titles in English)
into the repertoire of the group Altan, widening its audience and broadening
the scope of the living tradition.
Also common and continuing today is the tacit admonition to those
walking about not to enter the realm of those who often are given, for fear of
summoning them or a curse, no name but ‘them’.
The widespread notion that metal and water protect the man or woman from
the fate dangled by the fairy hosts or the sí
attest to the enduring (and quietly persisting, or at least not denied)
awareness of a mysterious presence hovering near farms and villages, in
circles, forts, bushes, trees, or cairns.
Associations of venerable places with the otherworld fill many pages
here, such as Fionnbhearra (Cnoc Meá near Athenry in Galway) and Áine (Cnoc
Áine near Teelin in Donegal). Most of
Ireland is covered, and much of the past century. Collectors for the Folklore
Commission, such as Tom Munnelly, Seán Ó hEochaidh, and Caoimhín Ó Danachair
(who looks quite the indefatigable itinerant in his leather vest and pipe)
garner credit as the predecessors to the current editors and their colleagues,
who wrote down and taped such material. The compact discs show the results,
originally on acetate disc, cassette, reel-to-reel tape, digital audio,
minidisc, and memory sticks. While the technological progression proves the
passing of time for its archivists, the variety of places the fieldwork was
conducted reveals the way such material was gathered: in the fields, in a car,
or at home.
Labeling this as tradition does not detract from its ongoing relevance.
As the editors remind us, Tom Munnelly titled a paper ‘They’re there all the
same’ when it came to the question of belief. Elusive or vague as Irish
responses may continue to be when asked about the truth of ‘the good people’ or
the banshee, the popularity of Samhain, bonfires, vampires, lotteries, and
prophecy persists despite a purportedly secularised mindset today. One wonders
after perusing these attractive pages and hearing the creaky fiddles or bold
voices from the recent past what folklorists a century hence will say about us. (In pdf and online at: Estudios Irlandeses 9 (2014): 195-196)
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