Descriptive Formulae in Scottish and Irish Wonder Tales
I've been reading a lot of Irishand Scots fairy tales or wonder tales lately and have been struck, as often before, by the sheer beautyof 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 aresome extracts from ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’ in J.F. Campbell’s orallycollected ‘Popular Tales of the West Highlands’. It was narrated in Gaelic circa1820 on Islay by ‘an old man of the name of Angus McQueen to James Wilson, a blindfiddler 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 playa game (gambling) against the local Gruagach (‘the hairy one’), the stakebeing ‘the cropped rough-skinned maid that is behind the door’. He wins, andmarries 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 ‘thedun 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.
‘Thestake 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, moreuncouth and unworthy than thyself, should take thy head, and thy neck, and thylife’s look off, if thou dost not get for me the Glaive of Light of the king ofthe oak windows.’
This is unfortunate. His ownwife must kill him if he cannot bring back the Glaive (sword) of Light! Nowonder, then –
Theking went home, heavily, poorly, gloomily. The young queen came meeting him andshe said, ‘Mohrooai! my pity! there is nothing with thee tonight.’ Her face andher splendour gave some pleasure to the king when he looked on her brow, butwhen he sat on a chair to draw her towards him, his heart was so heavy that thechair broke under him.
I love ‘heavily, poorly,gloomily’ – and the chair breaking under him because of the heaviness of hisheart. Only in a fairy tale could you get away with that. But the queen tellshim to take heart. After all, he has ‘the best wife in Erin and the second-besthorse in Erin’ and if he follows her advice and the filly’s advice, all willturn out well!
She set in order the dun shaggy filly, on which was thestick saddle, and though he saw it as wood, it was full of sparklings of goldand silver. He got on it; the queen kissed him and she wished him the victoryof 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, andit was not dreary to be on the dun steed.
She would catch the swift March windthat would be before her, and the swift March wind would not catch her. Theycame at the mouth of dusk and lateness, to the court and castle of the king ofthe oak windows.
‘The mouth of dusk’... allthat last paragraph is pure poetry, yet made up of formulae that withvariations turn up again and again in these fairy tales. (You’ll find ‘the windof March’ in an Irish tale, below.) These repeated formulae or set pieces are animportant part of oral storytelling, going back at least as far as Homer. ‘Dawnwith her rosy fingers’, ‘thoughtful Telemachos’, ‘gray-eyed Athena’ – asRichmond Lattimore comments in the introduction to his verse translation of theOdyssey:
Inboth epics, women are deep-girdled, iron is gray, ships are hollow, words arewinged and go through the barrier of the teeth, the sea is wine-coloured, barrenand salt, bronze is sharp and pitiless. [...] The poet repeats brief formulaeand even sizeable sequences. Adaptation may be necessary. Amphimonos goes down,Odyssey xxii: ‘He fell, thunderously, andtook the earth full on his forehead.’ We cannot quite have the standardIliad line: ‘He fell, thunderously, andhis armour clattered upon him’: Amphimonos has no armour.
Memorable for their cadencesand evocative power, such ready-made phrases take the strain of description, paintingfamiliar but vivid pictures for those listening. (And to to return for a moment to ‘The Young Kingof Easaidh Ruadh’: the swift filly tells the young king how to steal the swordof light. She helps him escape and advises him how to slash off the head ofthe king of the oak windows – catching the head neatly in her mouth as theygallop side by side. On the young king’s return his wife tells him that since theking 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 thestory; next thing his wife is stolen by a giant and the king sets out to findher 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 ofTethertown arrives late to view the annual battle of the birds. The raven haswon, but is being attacked by a snake which the king’s son swiftly dispatcheswith a blow of his sword. To reward him, the raven takes him up on his back andflies ‘over seven Bens and seven Glens and seven Mountain Moors’ to the houseof the raven’s sister where he receives ‘meat of each meat, drink of eachdrink, warm water to his feet and a soft bed for his limbs’. A similar journeyis repeated on the next day; on the third, the king’s son is given the gift ofa bundle to carry to the place he would wish to dwell. (Inside the bundle is acastle: much more follows.) However, the ‘seven bens and seven glens and sevenmountain moors’ over which the raven flies is a stock phrase echoed by theIrish 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 apony over ‘seven miles on hill on fire and seven miles of steel thistles andseven 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 bottleof water from the well at the world’s end: she gets there on the back of a ponywho gallops over a ‘muir of hecklepins’ – that is, a moor of sharp steelpins of the type used for combing flax or wool.
Another ‘West Irish Folk-Tale’ is ‘The Storyof 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 avoyage. Bioultach (the name means Yellow-Hair) is searching for his lostbrother Maunus. After slaying a giant who has spirited away the three suitors ofa 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 savedthe king’s daughter, the king fits him out with a ship and two champions, andeight hundred men.
WhenBioultach 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 theplace where there were seals, whales, creeping things, little beasts of the seawith red mouth, rising on the sole and palm of the oar, making fairy music andmelody for themselves, till the sea arose in strong waves, hushed with wondrousvoices, with greatness and beauty was the ship sailing, till to haven she cameand 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 byPatrick McGrale of Achill Island, a king’s daughter called Pampogue is foughtover by two princes, Londu and Kaytuch. The one she loves, Kaytuch, is killedby Londu, but she refuses to marry the victorious prince. Instead she takesKaytuch and ‘put him in a box, and the herbs of the hill about him’, and –
Shewent then and fitted out a ship great and gallant, till she raised the greatsails, speckled, spotted, as long, as high as the top of the mast; and she leftnot a rope without breaking, an oar without tearing, with the crawling,creeping creatures, the little beasts, the great beasts of the deep sea comingup 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 thesand above; till she overtook the red wind of March that was before her, andthe red wind of March that was after did not overtake her; and she was sailingnine months before she came to land.
As she approached this islandshe witnesses two men carrying a dead man: he is alive in the morning but deadagain by evening, ‘and so it was like that for three days’. Then one of the menrows out in a currach to ask rudely if she wants a husband. (‘She told him tobe 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 nowstranded on this island and their enemies attack them each day and kill one ofthem, whom they then bring back to life with ‘healing water’. Pampogue replies,
‘With me is a champion, the best that ever struck blow withsword; and I promise you his help for a day if you bring him to life.’
The manwent in and brought the healing water and rubbed the wound; and Kaytuch arosealive again; and he rubbed his eyes with his hands and said, ‘Great was thesleep that was on me’; and she laughed and told him everything from the timethe young king cut his head off. ‘I took you on board ship, and we were sailingfor nine months before we came here; and I promised your help for a day to thisman if he would bring you to life; but you will not go far for a month untilyou grow strong.
So he andshe spent the night together – a third in talking, a third in storytelling, anda third in soft rest and deep slumber, till the whiteness of the day came uponthe morrow.
‘Till the whiteness ofthe day came upon the morrow.’ And I love the matter-of-fact way Kaytuch comesback 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 RedBelt’, told by Patrick Minahan of Malinmore, Glencolumkille, Co. Donegal; it isthe tale of two young children who are put out to the sea in a barrel, alongwith two swords. One boy wears a black belt, the other a red belt; they arewashed 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 thisking but, eventually learning that they are not, they set out to discover theirtrue parentage. Promising to come back and marry the girl he has supposed to behis sister, the Champion of the Red Belt and his brother come to the shores ofthe sea.
He threw his hat out. He made a ship of the hat, a mast ofhis stick, a flag of his shirt. He hoisted the sails speckled, spotted, to thetop of the straight mast. He turned the prow to sea, the stern to shore, and heleft not a rope without breaking, nor a cable without rending, till he waslistening to the blowing of the seals and the roaring of the great beasts, tothe screams of the seagulls; till the little red-mouthed fishes were rising onthe sole and palm of the oars; till they steered the vessel in under court andcastle of the King of the Underwaveland.
‘Not a rope withoutbreaking, nor a cable without rending’: all three of these ‘sea-run’ passagesemploy a language of extravagant violence and damage to convey the topsy-turvy urgencyof these journeys – ‘the froth down and the sand above’, and all threecelebrate the diversity and plenty of the sea, filled with the life andactivities of seals, whales, gulls, ‘great beasts’, and the little‘red-mouthed’ fishes that rise and jump among the oar-strokes. Although these shipsare supposedly large, even magical ones, with tall sails and masts, it is afisherman’s currach close to the surface of the sea that is really being evokedeach 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 asyou row?
Picture credit:
Riders of the Sidhe - by John Duncan, 1866 - 1945
