The Virtual Reality of Irish Fairy Legend

THE VIRTUAL REALITY OF IRISH FAIRY LEGEND1 ANGELA BOURKE irish fairy legend is a vast body of narrative which still circulates in the two languages spoken in Ireland.2 Made up of short, vivid, easily memorable and interconnecting units, it floats like a web of story above the physical landscape, pegged down at point after point, as incidents are recounted of a piper lured into a cave here; a young girl found wandering mute on a hillside there; a lake where a cow emerged to give miraculous quantities of milk, and disappeared again with all her progeny when illtreated ; a hill where mysterious music could be heard after dark. Hovering in this way above the human community, the web of stories is also like a kite controlled by one or many storytellers. Under the delicate shadows it casts, places are singled out for avoidance or attention; people are identified as deviant, dangerous, afflicted, or knowledgeable. By any standards, the fairy legends that make up this fabric constitute a marginal verbal art, subaltern discourse: the opposite of the dominant modes of speech and thought, the elaborated codes by which most privileged ideas are conveyed, especially in print. Gapped and discontinuous, lacking a tradition of exegesis, they are almost entirely confined to oral communication , and almost never taken seriously. They belong in social THE VIRTUAL REALITY OF IRISH FAIRY LEGEND 7 1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered as the 1996 Vernam Hull Memorial Lecture at Harvard University. I am grateful to Harvard’s Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures for the invitation, and to Professor Art Cosgrove, President, University College Dublin, for a discretionary research grant which enabled me to prepare it for publication. 2 The best collection of transcribed and translated Irish-language texts is Ó hEochaidh, Mac Néill & Ó Catháin, Síscéalta. For discussion see Narváez, esp. (for the English-language tradition), Lysaght, “Fairylore.” Closely similar traditions are found in Scotland: clergyman Robert Kirk’s The Secret Common-Wealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies was written more than three hundred years ago; Scott, Minstrelsy, includes an essay, “On the Fairies of Popular Superstition ,” (439–73), and the periodical Tocher contains many modern examples. For North American reflexes see Rieti. situations whose participants hold many of their experiences and assumptions in common and where much may be left unspoken, and so share the major characteristics of restricted linguistic codes.3 Fairy legends are told to amuse adults and frighten children, to entertain tourists, and to mark the distance we have come from the supposed credulity of our ancestors.4 In some cases they may be shibboleths: indicators of adherence to older, repudiated modes of thinking and living, markers of contamination (Bourke, “Reading” 583; cf Gibbons 153-5). Even within the groups where fairy legends are most elaborately told, they are rated less valuable, less important, than other kinds of narrative, notably the long, episodic hero-tales and the international folktales or Märchen (Delargy, Story-teller 6-7), a situation noted by the celebrated Irish-language prose writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain. As a young schoolteacher, Ó Cadhain collected and published oral legends from his neighbours in Connemara , County Galway, and remarked that “a story-teller, whose reputation has been made on his skill in telling the old-time Fenian tales or other [M]ärchen, is, as a rule, somewhat scornful of these short trifles and must be pressed to recite them” (Delargy, Béaloideas). Much that has been written about Irish storytelling echoes these pejorative terms, and while they have undoubtedly served to validate the taste and preoccupations of collectors and scholars, they also clearly reflect a vernacular aesthetic, at least among those proficient in the telling of longer tales. Still, fairy legends are so ubiquitous and so tenacious, and ultimately so consistent, that they merit serious consideration (see Almqvist). Rich sources of inspiration for poets—from W. B. Yeats writing in English to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill who writes in Irish—by their very obliqueness they offer a possibility of expressing things that are generally unspeakable: for Yeats, a painful tension between imagination and life (Kinahan 41–84); for Ní Dhomhnaill, violence, sexuality and language loss...