Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry

Understanding why things happen and why the world is the way it is may be a uniquely human preoccupation, if only because there’s no way of knowing if animals are wondering why something is the way it is.  These days, we like to think that we have all the answers, or at least most of them, and that they can all be found on the internet.  This preoccupation with ‘why’ is nothing new, however, even if we’ve found, in our hubris, new ways of being more confident in our explanations and reasons.  Folk tales exist not just for moralizing but for providing explanation, for helping to define the mysterious and justify the inexplicable.  They impose an important order, however capricious, on an unpredictable world, and they are fundamental to a culture in the same way that mythologies are.

WB Yeats, a famous Irish poet and playwright in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, undertook to collect the folktales of his homeland.  He didn’t do this by perusing ancient manuscripts, studying inscriptions on stones, or listening to carefully preserved oral histories passed down from generation to generation over centuries and millennia by dedicated wise women.  Instead, he went amongst the common people of Ireland, his contemporaries, and spoke with them, listened to them, asked them for their stories.  The result is a book that, if less academically rigorous in the traditional sense than a comprehensive mythological study or translation, is more genuine to the real culture it is meant to reflect, for these are not stories from the deep past that are preserved – they are stories that are alive and present today (or at least as of a mere hundred years ago).

That liveliness and present-ness mean that you won’t find a comprehensive, organized mythology in these fairy tales.  There is no one answer to “what is a fairy and what do they do,” “what are a witch’s powers,” or “who were the giants?”  Common threads unite certain types of tales, which is how Yeats organizes the book, and there are certain commonalities, but first and foremost these stories are explanations, and idiosyncratic ones.  They answer why farmer MacDonald’s cows went bad one summer, not comprehensive questions about cows or farmers in general.  Each story is unique, each circumstance equally unique, and they are cobbled together from a patchwork of supernatural entities drawn from sources as varied as Celtic symbolism, Norse mythology, and Christian religion (of multiple denominations and variations).

A modern reader might be tempted to dismiss this as a collection of “rural superstitions” that amount to little more than flights of (drunken) fancy.  Yeats’ writing, simultaneously earthy and elegant (although his invocation of dialect is at times opaque rather than helping set the tales), helps counter that temptation, although I hope if you are a long-time reader here you already know better that to succumb to such hubris.  Imagine how our distant heirs might laugh derisively at our quaint notions of atoms, or our superstitious invocations of “dark energy.”  Take these stories for what they are, suspend your disbelief, for they are, in this presentation and in these words, true for what they are.  They convey a culture, its mores, its traditions, and its beliefs about itself and the world.

Don’t expect something like Cath Maige Tuired. Instead, think of this more like an anthology, with Yeats hovering between the roles of translator and editor.  The stories aren’t intended to connect, to tell a neat, cohesive plot, or to describe a mathematically consistent reality.  They’re stories that revolve around a shared theme of Irishness, whatever that happens to mean, and the only story they tell together is the story of the “Irish peasantry” from whom they are derived.  And that, faeries, witches, devils, and leprechauns aside, is a true story in its own realm.