Rich and Poor

The Rich and the Poor

A tale of Peig Mhóron from the Great Blasket
 Taken from ‘The Western Island’ by Robin Flower, Clarendon Press 1944

I said, “Some say… if all the money in the world were divided up among all the people, all could live easily and there would be neither rich nor poor.”

“Don’t believe them, Bláheen; for that plan was tried once, and we all know what came of it. 

It was this way. There was a good king once.  The people liked him well, but they liked the queen, his wife, even better.  For all she wished at all times was to keep the poor people up. And she was always complaining, asking why it was that the poor people didn’t get fair play to lift them out of their poverty.  One day she spoke to the king, “I hope, O king,” she said, “that you will do something for me and give the poor people fair play.”  “Very well, my queen,” said he, “you shall have your desire.” She was very pleased then but perhaps she wasn’t so pleased afterwards.  The king made proclamation that certain things should be done, that everyone should be put in a good way and be able to manage for himself.

It wasn’t long till the poor people were getting in a good way, and in a few years they wouldn’t be at the trouble to buy or sell anything.  And one day it came to pass that there wasn’t a potato to be bought in the market. When it was dinner time, and they sat to table, the queen saw no potatoes coming. “What’s this?” she said.  “Isn’t there a potato for my dinner today?”  “Well if you haven’t got a potato,” said the king, “you have your will.  You wouldn’t be satisfied till the poor got fair play, and now, when they have their own way, they don’t trouble to do anything for you and me. You ought to be satisfied.”  “O if that’s the way of it,” said the queen, “You’ll have to put a stop to this work.  I must have potatoes for my dinner.”  So the king had to rein in the poor again, and bring them under subjection.  And then the queen was satisfied.”

Peig rose from her stool on the floor and, “Well Bláheen,” she said, “We’ve been a long time talking, and people will be saying of me that I do nothing but sit and tell tales, and it’s time you were going home to your dinner.

“It is,” I answered, and we went to the door and looked out.  The sun was going down into the western sea, and its rays struck across on to the mainland.  Away up on the side of Sliabh an Iolair, above Dunquin, a cataract could be seen flashing white in the light of the evening sun.

“Do you see that fall?” she said. “It was in a house below that fall I lived when I was a girl, till it was time for me to go into service. And I was married at seventeen.  You wouldn’t see anywhere a merrier girl than I was till that time, for it is youth that has the light foot and the happy heart.  But since the time I was married I have never known a day that I was entirely happy.  My husband was a sick man most of his days, and then he died and left me, and I brought up my children to read and write, and there never were children with cleverer heads for their books; but there was no place for them in Ireland, and they have all gone to America but one, and soon he too will be gone, and I shall be alone in the end of my life.  But it is God’s will and the way of the world, and we must not complain.” And she threw her shawl over her head and turned back into the darkening house.

Picture credit: Sliabh an Iolair (Mount Eagle) from the Great Blasket Island, by gerrym  26 Mar 2010, courtesy of the website Mountain Views

Stolen by the Fairies

From ‘The Western Island’ by Robin Flower, Clarendon Press, 1944

A tale of Tomàs O Crithin from the Great Blasket

It is not so long ago (said he), that a woman of my mother’s kin, the O’Sheas, was taken, and when I was young I knew people who had seen her.  She was a beautiful girl, and she hadn’t been married a year when she fell sick, and she said that she was going to die, and that if she must die she would rather be in the home in which she had spent her life than in a strange house where she had been less than a year.  So she went back to her mother’s house, and very soon she died and was buried. She hadn’t been buried more than a year when her husband married again, and he had two children by his second wife.  But one day there came a letter with a seal on it.

It was from a farmer that lived in the neighborhood of Fermoy.  He said that now for some months, when the family would go to bed at night in his farm, if any food were left out they would find it gone in the morning. And at last he said to himself that he would find out what it was that came at night and took the food.  So he sat up in the corner of the kitchen one night, and in the middle of the night the door opened and a woman came in, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen with his eyes, and she came up the kitchen and lifted the bowl of milk they had left out, and drank of it.  He came between her and the door, and she turned to him and said that this was what she had wanted. So he asked her who she was, and she said that she came from the liss at the corner of his farm, where the fairies kept her prisoner. They had carried her off from a place in Ventry parish, and left a changeling in her place, and the changeling had died and been buried in her stead.

She said that the farmer must write to her people and say that she was in the liss with the fairies, and that she had eaten none of the food of the fairies, for if once she ate of their food she must remain with them for ever till she died… and when he wrote to her people he must ask her mother if she remembered one night when her daughter lay sick, and the mother was sitting by the fire, and thinking so, she had forgotten everything else, and the edge of her skirt had caught fire. …If she remembered that night, it would be a token for her, for on that night her daughter had been carried off, and the fire in her mother’s skirt was the last thing she remembered of her life on earth.  And when she said this she went out through the door, and the farmer saw her no more.

So the next day he wrote the letter as she had told him.  But her people did nothing, for they feared that if they brought her back, there would be trouble because of the new wife and her two children.  And she came again and again to the farmer, and he wrote  seven letters with seals, and the neighbours all said it was a shame to them to leave her with the fairies in the liss; and the husband said it was a great wrong to leave his wife in the liss, and whatever trouble it would bring, they should go and fetch her out of the liss.  So they set out, her own people and her husband, and when they had gone as far as Dingle, they said they would go and ask the advice of the priest.

So they went to the priest that was there at that time, and they told him the story from beginning to end.  And when he heard the story, he said that it was a hard case, and against the law of the church. And the husband said that, when they had brought the woman out of the liss, he would not bring her back with him to make scandal in the  countryside, but would send her to America, and would live with his second wife and her children.  But the priest said that even if man’s wife were in America, she was still his wife, and it was against the law of the Pope that a man should have two wives; and, though it was a hard thing, they must leave her in the liss with the fairies, for it was a less evil that she should eat the fairy bread and be always with the fairies than that God’s law should be broken and a man have two wives living in this world.

They found nothing to say against the priest, and they went back home sorrowing.  And when the woman heard this from the farmer she went back to the fairies to the liss, and ate their bread and remained with them.




Picture credit:
Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things - by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823-1903)

Folklore snippets: 'Another Troy'?

Homes on the Great Blasket, Ida M Flower, c. 1920

From ‘The Western Island’ by Robin Flower, Oxford 1944, an account of the writer’s experiences visiting and staying on the Great Blasket between 1910 and 1935.  Until 1953, the inhabitants of Great Blasket Island formed the most westerly settlement in Ireland. This small fishing community of less than 150 people lived in little cottages perched on the relatively sheltered north-east shore. In 1953 the Irish Government evacuated the islanders.

A story from Tomás ó Crithin:

‘When I was a young man growing up, it was a different world from the world we have today.  There was no silent drinking then into the tavern and out of it without a word said, but you would be walking the road and the tavern-door would open, and you would go in. There would be as many as twenty men in the room drinking, and every man that came in he would not go out without singing a song or telling a tale.  …The country was full to the lid of songs and stories, and you would not put a stir out of you from getting up in the morning to lying down at night but you would meet a poet, man or woman, making songs on all that would be happening. It is not now as it was then, but it is like a sea on ebb, and only pools left here and there among the rocks.  And it is a good thought of us to put down the songs and stories before they are lost from the world for ever.’

And so, he sitting on one side of the table, rolling a savoury sprig of dillisk round and round in his mouth to lend a salt flavour to his speech, and I diligently writing on the other side, the picture of the Island’s past grew from day to day under our hands.  At times I would stop him as an unfamiliar world or strange twist of phrase struck across my ear, and he would courteously explain it… Thus on one occasion, the phrase ‘the treacherous horse that brought destruction on Troy’ came into a song.

‘And what horse was that?’ I said.

‘It was the horse of wood,’ he answered, ‘that was made to be given to the King that was over Troy.  They took it with them and brought it into the middle of the city, and it was lovely to look upon.  It was in that city Helen was, she that brought the world to death; every man that used to come with a host seeking her, there would go no man of them safe home without falling because of Helen before the city of Troy.  It was said that the whole world would have fallen by reason of Helen that time if it had not been for the thought this man had, to give the horse of wood to the King.  There was an opening in it unknown to all, two men in it, and it full of powder and shot.  When the horse was in the middle of the city, and every one of them weary from looking at it, a night of the nights my pair opened the horse and out with them. They brought with them their share of powder and shot.  They scattered it here and there through the city in the deep night; they set fire to it and left not a living soul in Troy that wasn’t burnt that night.’

Derelict homes on The Great Blasket Island, Co. Kerry, Ireland.

Picture credits:

Derelict homes on The Great Blasket Island, Co. Kerry, Ireland, photo by Cargoking. Wikimedia Commons