Descriptive Formulae in Scottish and Irish Wonder Tales

 

I've been reading a lot of Irish and Scots fairy tales or wonder tales lately and have been struck, as often before, by the sheer beauty of expression in many of them. I cannot read the original Gaelic of course, but various Victorian translators seem to have done a marvellous job of indicating the poetry. For example, here are some extracts from ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’ in J.F. Campbell’s orally collected ‘Popular Tales of the West Highlands’. It was narrated in Gaelic circa 1820 on Islay by ‘an old man of the name of Angus McQueen to James Wilson, a blind fiddler on Islay' – who recited it to Hector MacLean, the schoolmaster on Islay, who wrote it down in Gaelic and sent it to Campbell in 1859. The tale tells how the young king decides to play a game (gambling) against the local Gruagach (‘the hairy one’), the stake being ‘the cropped rough-skinned maid that is behind the door’. He wins, and marries the maid, the Gruagach’s own daughter who in fact is very beautiful. Next day he visits the Gruagach again and his wife advises him to play for ‘the dun shaggy filly with the stick saddle’. Again he wins, and the dun filly is his. Of course the third time he plays, the Gruagach wins and sets out the penalty.

‘The stake of my play is,’ said he, ‘that I lay it as crosses and as spells on thee, and as the defect of the year, that the cropped rough-skinned creature, more uncouth and unworthy than thyself, should take thy head, and thy neck and thy life’s look off, if thou dost not get for me the Glaive of Light of the king of the oak windows.’

This is unfortunate. His own wife must kill him if he cannot bring back the Glaive (sword) of Light! No wonder, then –

The king went home, heavily, poorly, gloomily. The young queen came meeting him and she said, ‘Mohrooai! my pity! there is nothing with thee tonight.’ Her face and her splendour gave some pleasure to the king when he looked on her brow, but when he sat on a chair to draw her towards him, his heart was so heavy that the chair broke under him.

I love ‘heavily, poorly, gloomily’ – and the chair breaking under him because of the heaviness of his heart. Only in a fairy tale could you get away with that. But the queen tells him to cheer up. After all, he has ‘the best wife in Erin and the second-best horse in Erin’ and if he follows her advice and the filly’s advice, all will turn out well!

She set in order the dun shaggy filly, on which was the stick saddle, and though he saw it as wood, it was full of sparklings of gold and silver. He got on it; the queen kissed him and she wished him the victory of the battlefields. ‘Take thou the advice of thine own she-comrade the filly, and she will tell thee what thou shouldst do.’ He set out on his journey, and it was not dreary to be on the dun steed.

            She would catch the swift March wind that would be before her, and the swift March wind would not catch her. They came at the mouth of dusk and lateness, to the court and castle of the king of the oak windows.

‘The mouth of dusk’... all that last paragraph is pure poetry, yet made up of formulae that with variations turn up again and again in these fairy tales. (You’ll find ‘the wind of March’ in an Irish tale, below.) These repeated formulae or set pieces are an important part of oral storytelling, going back at least as far as Homer. ‘Dawn with her rosy fingers’, ‘thoughtful Telemachos’, ‘gray-eyed Athena’ – as Richmond Lattimore comments in the introduction to his verse translation of the Odyssey:

In both epics, women are deep-girdled, iron is gray, ships are hollow, words are winged and go through the barrier of the teeth, the sea is wine-coloured, barren and salt, bronze is sharp and pitiless. [...] The poet repeats brief formulae and even sizeable sequences. Adaptation may be necessary. Amphimonos goes down, Odyssey xxii: ‘He fell, thunderously, and took the earth full on his forehead.’ We cannot quite have the standard Iliad line: ‘He fell, thunderously, and his armour clattered upon him’: Amphimonos has no armour.

Memorable for their cadences and evocative power, such ready-made phrases take the strain of description, painting familiar but vivid pictures for those listening. (And to to return for a moment to ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’: the swift filly tells the young king how to steal the sword of light. She helps him escape and advises him how to slash off the head of the king of the oak windows – catching the head neatly in her mouth as they gallop side by side. On the young king’s return his wife tells him that since the king of the oak windows was the Gruagach’s brother, he had better kill him too, or be killed himself. This he successfully does, but that’s not the end of the story; next thing his wife is stolen by a giant and the king sets out to find her with the help of ‘the slim dog of the greenwood’...)

            In another very long tale, ‘The Battle of the Birds’, told by ‘John Mackenzie, fisherman, near Inverarie’ the king’s son of Tethertown arrives late to view the annual battle of the birds. The raven has won, but is being attacked by a snake which the king’s son swiftly dispatches with a blow of his sword. To reward him, the raven takes him up on his back and flies ‘over seven Bens and seven Glens and seven Mountain Moors’ to the house of the raven’s sister where he receives ‘meat of each meat, drink of each drink, warm water to his feet and a soft bed for his limbs’. A similar journey is repeated on the next day; on the third, the king’s son is given the gift of a bundle to carry to the place he would wish to dwell. (Inside the bundle is a castle: much more follows.) However, the ‘seven bens and seven glens and seven mountain moors’ over which the raven flies is a stock phrase echoed by the Irish tale ‘The King Who Had Twelve Sons’ (in ‘West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances’ collected and translated by William Larminie, 1893). In this tale a boy rides a pony over ‘seven miles on hill on fire and seven miles of steel thistles and seven miles of sea’, while a shorter variant of those steel thistles appears in ‘The Wal at the Warld’s End’, a story from Fife printed in Robert Chambers’ ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland’. A lassie’s stepmother sends her to fill a bottle of water from the well at the world’s end: she gets there on the back of a pony who gallops over a ‘muir of hecklepins’ – that is, a moor of sharp steel pins of the type used for combing flax or wool.

             Another ‘West Irish Folk-Tale’ is ‘The Story of Bioultach’, narrated to Larminie in the 1880s by Terence Davies of Renvyle, Co. Galway. It contains what Larminie terms ‘a sea run’: the description of a voyage. Bioultach (the name means Yellow-Hair) is searching for his lost brother Maunus. After slaying a giant who has spirited away the three suitors of a king’s daughter – Maunus being the last – Bioultach sets out for the mysterious ‘bake-house in the east’ where Maunus is imprisoned. Since Bioultach has saved the king’s daughter, the king fits him out with a ship and two champions, and eight hundred men.

When Bioultach went on board the ship they raised their great sails, speckled, spotted, red-white, to the top of the mast, and he left not a rope unsevered, nor a helm without [here, Larminie says, ‘there were several words in the Gaelic I am unable to translate’] in the place where there were seals, whales, creeping things, little beasts of the sea with red mouth, rising on the sole and palm of the oar, making fairy music and melody for themselves, till the sea arose in strong waves, hushed with wondrous voices, with greatness and beauty was the ship sailing, till to haven she came and harbour on the coast of the Land of Brightness.

Similarly worded ‘sea-runs’ occur in other tales from the same collection. In ‘King Mananaun’, narrated by Patrick McGrale of Achill Island, a king’s daughter called Pampogue is fought over by two princes, Londu and Kaytuch. The one she loves, Kaytuch, is killed by Londu, but she refuses to marry the victorious prince. Instead she takes Kaytuch and ‘put him in a box, and the herbs of the hill about him’, and –

She went then and fitted out a ship great and gallant, till she raised the great sails, speckled, spotted, as long, as high as the top of the mast; and she left not a rope without breaking, an oar without tearing, with the crawling, creeping creatures, the little beasts, the great beasts of the deep sea coming up on the handle and blade of the oar, till she let two-thirds (of the sail) go, and one third held in, till the eels were whistling, the froth down and the sand above; till she overtook the red wind of March that was before her, and the red wind of March that was after did not overtake her; and she was sailing nine months before she came to land.

As she approached this island she witnesses two men carrying a dead man: he is alive in the morning but dead again by evening, ‘and so it was like that for three days’. Then one of the men rows out in a currach to ask rudely if she wants a husband. (‘She told him to be off, or she would sink him’.) The second approaches in the same rude manner, but the third is courteous and explains that they are three sons of a king, ‘and when he died there came Fawgawns and Blue-men on us,’ so they are now stranded on this island and their enemies attack them each day and kill one of them, whom they then bring back to life with ‘healing water’. Pampogue replies,

‘With me is a champion, the best that ever struck blow with sword; and I promise you his help for a day if you bring him to life.’

            The man went in and brought the healing water and rubbed the wound; and Kaytuch arose alive again; and he rubbed his eyes with his hands and said, ‘Great was the sleep that was on me’; and she laughed and told him everything from the time the young king cut his head off. ‘I took you on board ship, and we were sailing for nine months before we came here; and I promised your help for a day to this man if he would bring you to life; but you will not go far for a month until you grow strong.

            So he and she spent the night together – a third in talking, a third in storytelling, and a third in soft rest and deep slumber, till the whiteness of the day came upon the morrow. 

‘Till the whiteness of the day came upon the morrow.’ And I love the matter-of-fact way Kaytuch comes back to life as after a long sleep, and Pampogue’s laugh as she welcomes him.

            The third of the stories is ‘The Champion of the Red Belt’, told by Patrick Minahan of Malinmore, Glencolumkille, Co. Donegal; it is the tale of two young children who are put out to the sea in a barrel, along with two swords. One boy wears a black belt, the other a red belt; they are washed up on the shores of Greece and adopted by the king, who assumes (correctly) they are of royal blood. The boys believe they are the sons of this king but, eventually learning that they are not, they set out to discover their true parentage. Promising to come back and marry the girl he has supposed to be his sister, the Champion of the Red Belt and his brother come to the shores of the sea. 

He threw his hat out. He made a ship of the hat, a mast of his stick, a flag of his shirt. He hoisted the sails speckled, spotted, to the top of the straight mast. He turned the prow to sea, the stern to shore, and he left not a rope without breaking, nor a cable without rending, till he was listening to the blowing of the seals and the roaring of the great beasts, to the screams of the seagulls; till the little red-mouthed fishes were rising on the sole and palm of the oars; till they steered the vessel in under court and castle of the King of the Underwaveland. 

‘Not a rope without breaking, nor a cable without rending’: all three of these ‘sea-run’ passages employ a language of extravagant violence and damage to convey the topsy-turvy urgency of these journeys – ‘the froth down and the sand above’, and all three celebrate the diversity and plenty of the sea, filled with the life and activities of seals, whales, gulls, ‘great beasts’, and the little ‘red-mouthed’ fishes that rise and jump among the oar-strokes. Although these ships are supposedly large, even magical ones, with tall sails and masts, it is a fisherman’s currach close to the surface of the sea that is really being evoked each time, and the fisherman’s everyday familiarity with the sea’s creatures...

 ‘The sole and palm of the oars’ - what better phrase could there be for the way the oar-blades dip and twist as you row?

Picture credit: 

Riders of the Sidhe - by John Duncan, 1866 - 1945

THE KING WHO HAD TWELVE SONS

Are you sitting comfortably?  Because this is the story of how my blog got its name, as well as being the story of a story.

It’s hardly well known.  I found it because of my habit of picking up shabby-looking books in second hand bookshops: a lovely old book called ‘West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances’ collected and translated by William Larminie (‘with introduction and notes, and appendix containing specimens of the Gaelic originals phonetically spelt.’)  It was published by the Camden Library in 1893.

Larminie, who was born in County Mayo in 1849 and died in 1900, was a minor Irish poet and a folklorist.  He spoke Gaelic, and translated most of the stories in the book from named oral storytellers:

‘All have been taken down in the same way – that is to say, word for word from the dictation of peasant narrators… difficult and doubtful pasts being gone over again and again.  Sometimes the narrator can explain difficulties.  Sometimes other natives of the place can help you.  But after every resource of this kind has been exhausted, a certain number of doubtful words and phrases remain, with regard to which – well, one can only do one’s best.’

He describes his narrators, who come from different districts: this is really fascinating:

“Renvyle… is situated in Connemara... Terence Davis is a labourer pure and simple. A man of about forty-five years of age, and blind in one eye. Some of his tales he got from his mother…

“Next in order, Achill Island, some twenty five miles from Renvyle by sea, more than sixty miles by land.  Two narrators from that locality are … represented in the book.  One of them, Pat. McGrale, is a man of middle age, a cottier with a small holding and besides, a Jack-of-all-trades, something of a boatman and fisherman, ‘a botch of a tailor’, to use his own words, and ready for any odd job.  He can read Irish, but had very little literature on which to exercise his accomplishment.  He knows some long poems by heart, and is possessed of various odds and ends of learning, accurate and not.  John McGinty, a man of Donegal descent and name, has also some land; but his holding is so small that he is to a great extent a labourer for others, and was engaged on relief works when I first came to know him.  He, also, is a middle aged man.  He knows many Ossianic poems by heart, which, he told me, his father taught him, verse by verse…”

It is John McGinty who told William Larminie the story of ‘The King Who Had Twelve Sons’. 

The first thing to be said about this story is that it’s picaresque, episodic, free-moving, fluid.  This is how it begins:

He went down to the river every day and killed a salmon for each one of them.

Who?  Who is this? Who’s ‘them’? What’s going on?  Ah, this is what the King who had Twelve Sons did, of course!  We’ve been flung into the middle of a conversation here.  John (Sean?) McGinty has already introduced the story by its title and plunged straight in.

He saw a duck on the river and twelve young birds with her; and she was beating the twelfth away from her.  He went to the old druid and asked what was the cause why the duck was beating the twelfth bird from her.

“It was this,” said the old druid, “she gave the bird to God and the Djachwi.”

Immediately, the King decides to do the same thing as the duck:

The younger children were running on first to the house, being hungry, and the eldest was coming, reading a book, after them.  The father was standing at the gate on the inside, and he threw him a purse of money and told him he must go seek his fortune, that he gave him to God and the Djachwi. 

The first time I read this, I had no idea what the Djachwi might be.  The story never tells, and the relevant note by Larminie at the back of the book, which might have ventured a guess, had been torn away.  It was only with the help of Charlotte from Charlotte's Library (a truly excellent blog on children's and YA sci-fi and fantasy) and Mr James Nyhan, a colleague of my husband, that I found out.   Charlotte hunted down another copy of the book and actually sent me a photo of the relevant note - here -

 
- and James sent me a link to an article by a Slovenian folklorist, Monika Kropej: 'The Tenth Child In Folk Tradition' which casts further light on who or what the Djachwi is. It seems that the word stems from the Old Irish word for ten or tenth, and refers to the legend that the tenth child (or in some cases the seventh or twelfth) must roam the world as either a sacrifice to (a tithe) or as a personification of Fate or Destiny.


However that may be, the Djachwi never re-enters the story.  This is merely the kick-start to get the son away from the house and on the road to adventure.  Note that the King is conceived pretty much as any small farmer with a garden and a gate… The son soon takes service under another king: his wages ‘the beast that comes and puts his head in this bridle mine.’  He soon hears news:

“The daughter of the King of the great Wren is to be devoured tomorrow by a piast.” 

Here a footnote explains that a Piast is ‘a Gaelic monster, not exactly equivalent to either serpent or dragon.’  There’s no explanation about the Wren, though, and the lad’s informant continues with great and realistic unconcern:

“Was it in a wood or a hole in the ground you’ve been, that you didn’t hear it? Gentle and simple of the three islands are to be there tomorrow to look at the piast swallowing her – at twelve o’ clock tomorrow.”

Naturally, the lad goes riding to save her.

He called for his second best suit of clothes, and it came to him with a leap; and he shook the bridle, and the ugliest pony in the stables came to him and put her head in the bridle.  “Be up riding on me with a jump” (said the pony)… He gave his face to the way and he would overtake the wind of March that was before him, and the wind of March that was after would not overtake him.

The princess is saved, and in a Cinderella-like motif, the lad is identified as her rescuer by his boot, which she had seized as he rode past her. The pair are married: ‘They spent that night part in talking and part in storytelling’: it sounds an idyllic union: but the very next day the lad finds a pearl of gold upon the beach, and the druid (remember him?) tells him it belongs to “the daughter of a king of the eastern world, who lost it from her hair; - that there was a pearl of gold on every rib of her hair”.

The lad wants to find her.

The pony told him that she was hard to see.  “There are seven miles of hill on fire to cross before you come to where she is, and there are seven miles of steel thistles, and seven miles of sea for you to go over. I told you to have nothing to do with the apple.” 

And that's why this blog is called Seven Miles of Steel Thistles. This traditional set of difficulties (there's another variant from Scotland in which the hero has to cross 'seven bens and seven glens and seven mountain moors) strikes me as a pretty good metaphor for the difficulties of writing - as well as for life itself. But anyhow. Note that the lad’s advisor has morphed from the druid to the pony in the space of a couple of sentences.  We’re now a long way from the boy’s father, the eponymous King Who Had Twelve Sons: we’ve had two kings already and are about to meet a third, while the boy is about to collect a second princess.  He leaps the pony into the castle where she lives, catches her up and leaps out with her, and takes her home.  The pony is turned into a rock, which can turn to a pony again if struck with a ‘rod of druidism’. 

Now there are two women in the castle:

And the young queen he married did not know… till the hen-wife told her.  “Well!” said the hen-wife.  “He has no regard for you beside the other.  There is an apple of gold on every rib of hair upon her head.”  

On the hen-wife’s advice, the young queen plays cards with the lad till he loses, and she commands him to bring her ‘the black horse of the bank’. ( Could this be a water horse?  There’s no knowing).  The lad brings the pony back to life, and the pony fights the black horse and brings it home.

At this point, I don’t know about you, but I’m on the side of the young queen who was rescued from the Piast.  I’m expecting this to be her story now.  And so it is, for a while.  She and her husband continue to play cards and send each other on tit-for-tat errands.  The queen has to fetch for him ‘the three black ravens that are in the eastern world’, and succeeds, helped by friendly giants: but – feeling contrary no doubt, and who would blame her? – releases them, once her husband has seen them:

“If I promised to bring them to you, I did not promise to give them to you.”

Now, however, the young man is irritated by the henwife’s interference.  He summons her and sends her off to ‘the Gruagach of the Apple, and bring …the sword of light that is with the King of Rye’. 

Are you still with me?  Still keeping up with the storyteller John McGinty as he leaps from character to character – from King to lad, from lad to queen, from queen to hen-wife – agile as a man crossing a river on stepping stones?

The hen-wife succeeds in her task with the help of a friendly smith (and the loss of both the tips of her little fingers) and brings back the sword. 

Now then!  Surely it’s time for this story to spring back on itself and wrap everything neatly up at last!  But what do we get?  A row of asterisks:

*        *        *        *        *        *       
And a footnote:

‘The narrator’s memory failed him at this point, and he was unable to relate the further developments of this remarkable game of plot and counterplot.  Although the hen-wife was successful in the last event mentioned, it must be inferred that she was ultimately defeated.' 


All John McGinty could remember of the rest of the story was the last, disconnected and downbeat sentence:

And when the first wife saw the second wife with her own eyes, she could esteem herself no longer, and she died of a broken heart.

Here are some asterisks of my own:

*        *        *        *        *         *

Why have I spent so much time telling you about this story – when John McGinty himself couldn’t remember what happened?  What’s the good of a story (as Alice might say) with no proper ending?

To me, the good of it is that it reminds us of the process by which all fairytales have come down to us.  Though there are many good oral storytellers today, as there are many good folk and ballad singers – and I’ve tried my hand at both – we’d have to confess that the immediate origin of most of our stories and songs is from books.

I’m terribly impressed by the honesty which led William Larminie to include this story in his collection.  It starts promisingly, it’s got many intriguing developments – but in the end, we don’t know what happens.  We never will know.  John McGinty forgot. 

And perhaps, who knows? another night, a week or two later, stung by his failure to tell the story all the way through, John McGinty did remember the ending, but Larminie wasn’t there.  Or perhaps he strung on to it the ending of some other story, which could be appropriately altered to fit.  Or perhaps he made something up out of his own head. That’s the way oral storytelling works: it isn’t fixed, it isn’t canonical.  This broken telling is ‘authentic’. 

If I added an ending of my own, it wouldn’t be authentic at all. 

Or would it? 

“This story is true,” as one of the other tales in the book concludes.  “All the other ones are lies.”



Picture credit: Arthur Rackham, frontispiece to 'Irish Fairy Tales' by James Stephens,

Fairytale Reflections - "Happily Ever After"

Oral storytelling necessitates a framework.  Anyone who’s tried singing or storytelling or in any way performing, for that’s what it is, in a crowded space, knows that you have to call for attention before you can begin.  That’s why Shakespeare’s plays often begin with a prologue – a man standing on the stage to deliver a speech about the background to the drama, or a couple of minor characters loudly joking and quarrelling, or a shipwreck with lots of dramatic sound effects  – something that won’t matter if you miss half of it, something to shut the audience up and make them settle down and pay attention. 

A song will begin with a chord or a run of notes upon the harp or guitar, and the beginning of a story is signalled by a stock phrase: ‘Once upon a time’.  It’s a device to arrest the listener, and to locate the story, placing it in a mythic but relevant past.  ‘Il etait une fois’, or ‘Es war einmal…’or ‘It wasn’t in my time, or in your time, but once upon a time, and a very good time it was…’

The device is common to so many languages, I think people must have been beginning stories in this way since paleolithic times.  I'm told classical Arabic stories begin: There was, oh, what there was or what there wasn’t, in the oldest of days and ages and times…’  North American Mi’kmaq stories begin, ‘Long ago, in the time of the Old Ones…’  Czech and Hungarian stories begin, ‘Once there was, once there wasn’t…’

And this sort of opening phrase sends a subtle but distinct message to listeners.  It says: ‘Pay attention!’; but it also says: ‘Though this is going to be amusing or stirring or exciting, it’s probably not true.’  It says, ‘This is a story.  Sit back and listen.’

And so the room hushes, the people attend, the storyteller spins her tale.  There’s a real physical element to listening to a story.  It’s like going on a roller coaster.  It’s not like reading, where everything happens at exactly your own pace, and you can glance ahead, or turn back to check on something, or put the whole book down for ten minutes to make a cup of coffee.  Listening to a story, you are in the power of the storyteller.  You must keep still and listen carefully not to miss a word.  You watch her face as she frowns or smiles.  The flash of her eyes, her gesturing hands.  You don’t know what is coming next, or even how long the story is going to be. For she on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.  Everything is a surprise. 

Some stories are very short.  Some are very long.  Some divide into almost separate segments, picaresque narratives in which one thing follows upon another with the most tenuous of links.  The princess and the prince are married, they become king and queen.  The audience draws breath - but that’s not the end.  The storyteller is still speaking.  The king goes to war, leaving the young queen in the care of his old mother.  But the old woman hates her, and so, when the queen gives birth to her first child, the old woman orders it to be killed and the blood smeared over the queen’s clothes so that everyone will think she has killed her own child…

No, it’s not the end yet.

And so, when the end does come, it is often signalled with another stock phrase, to show that the show is over.  Puck delivers the epilogue; Rosalind steps out of the framework of the play to flirt with the audience about their beards.  Fairytales conclude with the words ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ – or sometimes, ‘they all lived happily till they died’ – or even, ‘if they haven’t died yet, they are living there still’…

It’s getting more conscious and ironic, isn’t it? 

Fairytales, contrary to what people suppose, are not naïve.  Their very existence floats in the relationship between narrator and audience.  Indeed it is naïve to imagine that ‘happy ever after’ – much derided as a banal or smug or thoughtless conclusion – was ever intended as much more than the signal that the story is over.  The bite of narrative has been chewed and swallowed: the show is done.  The listeners can get on with drinking beer, eating, bargaining, gossiping, telling rude jokes, or heading off outside for a piss, or trudging home to their own difficult wife, husband or parent.  Beginnings are important, endings less so, because the stock phrases that signal the end of a fairytale do not call for attention, but dismiss it.  They don’t place the story in the mythic past, they undermine it.  ‘If they haven’t died yet, they are living there still’ (but how likely is that?).  And so fairytale endings are far more varied than beginnings: in fact they can be purposely surreal and disconnected.  

‘They found the ford, I the stepping stones.  They were drowned, and I came safe.’

‘This is a true story.  They are all lies but this one.’

‘There runs a little mouse.  Anyone who catches it can make himself a fine fur cap!’

‘Snip, snap, snout – this is the end of the adventure.’

‘And when the wedding was over, they sent me home in little paper shoes over a causeway covered in broken glass’. 

Dear readers – here is the end of the Fairytale Reflections series. 

Unless I change my mind. 

Picture credit: Fairy by Arthur Rackham

She may actually be Iris with her rainbow scarf.  

She hasn't much to do with the post, but I like her.