In memory of WB Yeats

Today marks 85 years since the passing of WB Yeats, who first introduced me to the heartstopping beauty of Irish myth, and is one of a small band who continually remind me to seek out the magic in life, especially in the natural world.

I usually don't quote at this length on this blog, but I had coincidentally been reading his 1888 'Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry' this week, and came across such a lyrical and moving passage that I had to sit in silence for several seconds at the end. It seemed fitting to share it with you today.

Note: a 'rath' is a circular fort. A 'pooka' is a mischievous spirit (more commonly recognisable as Shakespeare's 'puck.')

From 'Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry' by WB Yeats

The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue [sidheóg], a diminutive of "shee" in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee [daoine sidhe] (fairy people).

Who are they? "Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost," say the peasantry. "The gods of the earth," says the Book of Armagh. "The gods of pagan Ireland," say the Irish antiquarians, "the Tuatha De Danān, who, when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high."

And they will tell you, in proof, that the names of fairy chiefs are the names of old Danān heroes, and the places where they especially gather together, Danān burying-places, and that the Tuath De Danān used also to be called the slooa-shee [sheagh sidhe] (the fairy host), or Marcra shee (the fairy cavalcade).

On the other hand, there is much evidence to prove them fallen angels. Witness the nature of the creatures, their caprice, their way of being good to the good and evil to the evil, having every charm but conscience—consistency. Beings so quickly offended that you must not speak much about them at all, and never call them anything but the "gentry," or else daoine maithe, which in English means good people, yet so easily pleased, they will do their best to keep misfortune away from you, if you leave a little milk for them on the window-sill over night. On the whole, the popular belief tells us most about them, telling us how they fell, and yet were not lost, because their evil was wholly without malice.

Are they "the gods of the earth?" Perhaps! Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin. In dreams we go amongst them, and play with them, and combat with them. They are, perhaps, human souls in the crucible—these creatures of whim.

Do not think the fairies are always little. Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what size or shape pleases them. Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun—the shoemaker. Perhaps they wear their shoes out with dancing. Near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven years. When she came home she had no toes—she had danced them off.

They have three great festivals in the year—May Eve, Midsummer Eve, November Eve. On May Eve, every seventh year, they fight all round, but mostly on the "Plain-a-Bawn" (wherever that is), for the harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man told me he saw them fight once; they tore the thatch off a house in the midst of it all. Had anyone else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling everything into the air as it passed. When the wind makes the straws and leaves whirl as it passes, that is the fairies, and the peasantry take off their hats and say, "God bless them."

On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the fairies are at their gayest, and sometime steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides.

On November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for, according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After November Eve the blackberries are no longer wholesome, for the pooka has spoiled them.

When they are angry they paralyse men and cattle with their fairy darts.

When they are gay they sing. Many a poor girl has heard them, and pined away and died, for love of that singing. Plenty of the old beautiful tunes of Ireland are only their music, caught up by eavesdroppers. No wise peasant would hum "The Pretty Girl milking the Cow" near a fairy rath, for they are jealous, and do not like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips. Carolan, the last of the Irish bards, slept on a rath, and ever after the fairy tunes ran in his head, and made him the great man he was.

Do they die? Blake saw a fairy's funeral; but in Ireland we say they are immortal.'

*

From Lady Wilde's 1887 Ancient legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland:

'Sometimes the cave fairies [so named for the hill-caves they inhabit] make a straight path in the sea from one island to another, all paved with coral, under the water; but no one can tread it except the fairy race. Fishermen coming home late at night, on looking down, have frequently seen them passing and re-passing—a black band of little men with black dogs, who are very fierce if any one tries to touch them'

*

Browsing through my Yeats collection, I found the poem Cuchulain's Fight With the Sea. The wife of the hero Cuchulain, Emer, discovers that her husband is coming home with another woman, bids her son go fight his unknown father, but only identify himself if defeated. Dying the boy reveals his name. Cuchulain, devastated, deals the death-blow to ease his son's passing, and in a bid to divert the terrible rage of his grief:

'Then Conchubar, the subtlest of all men,

Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten,

Spake thus: ‘Cuchulain will dwell there and brood

For three days more in dreadful quietude,

And then arise, and raving slay us all.

Chaunt in his ear delusions magical,

That he may fight the horses of the sea.’

The Druids took them to their mystery,

And chaunted for three days.

Cuchulain stirred,

Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard

The cars of battle and his own name cried;

And fought with the invulnerable tide'

It's slightly baffling that, as far as a Google and JSTOR trawl informs me, no one has thought to make the comparison to Ajax. Bitter at not being awarded the armour of Achilles after the latter's death, Ajax sets out to kill his fellow heroes, but is derailed by Athena:

'It was I that stopped him from his deadly joy

by casting over his eyes delusional imaginings

and I turned him on the flocks and the mixed

unassigned cattle in the charge of the herdsmen.

Falling upon them he slaughtered the horned beasts

hacking their spines this way and that. At one time

he thought he was killing with his own hand the two

sons of Atreus, another, then another of the commanders.'

(Sophocles' Ajax, l. 51-58, tr. Luschnig (2021))

There is, of course, a world of difference in the tone of the two scenes. The actual bloodshed involved in Ajax's ordeal makes it gruesomely terrifying, whereas Cuchulain's plight is more gently, yet more devastatingly heartbreaking, both due to the nature of his opponent and the self-wrought bereavement.

*

A curiosity from Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, published between 1825 and 1828, and collected directly from the people themselves. The famed piper Maurice Connor is playing for a dance in Ballinskellig Bay, and so beautifully as to set the very sea-creatures dancing out of the water:

'Every inch of [the strand] covered with all manner of fish jumping and plunging about to the music, and every moment more and more would tumble in out of the water, charmed by the wonderful tune. Crabs of monstrous size spun round and round on one claw with the nimbleness of a dancing-master [..]'

Among these dancing sea-creatures is a beautiful woman, a fairy, who Thomas, drunk on whiskey and music, accepts to marry and live with under the sea. His mother pleads with him, and the lad answers, in admirably casual fashion:

'“Whisht with you, mother—sure I’m going to be king over the fishes down in the sea, and for a token of luck, and a sign that I am alive and well, I’ll send you in, every twelvemonth on this day, a piece of burned wood to Trafraska.'

And that's the last we ever see of him, but (another long passage worth quoting in its entirety):

'That day twelvemonth the piece of burned wood came ashore in Trafraska. It was a queer thing for Maurice to think of sending all the way from the bottom of the sea. A gown or a pair of shoes would have been something like a present for his poor mother; but he had said it, and he kept his word. The bit of burned wood regularly came ashore on the appointed day for as good, ay, and better than a hundred years. The day is now forgotten, and may be that is the reason why people say how Maurice Connor has stopped sending the luck-token to his mother. Poor woman, she did not live to get as much as one of them; for what through the loss of Maurice, and the fear of eating her own grandchildren, she died in three weeks after the dance—some say it was the fatigue that killed her, but whichever it was, Mrs. Connor was decently buried with her own people.'