Source.—From Dr. Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire, 104-28, where it is a translation from the same author's Leabhar Sgeulaighteachta. Dr Hyde got it from one Shamus O'Hart, a gamekeeper of Frenchpark. One is curious to know how far the very beautiful landscapes in the story are due to Dr. Hyde, who confesses to have only taken notes. I have omitted a journey to Rome, paralleled, as Mr. Nutt has pointed out, by the similar one of Michael Scott (Waifs and Strays, i. 46), and not bearing on the main lines of the story. I have also dropped a part of Guleesh's name: in the original he is "Guleesh na guss dhu," Guleesh of the black feet, because he never washed them; nothing turns on this in the present form of the story, but one cannot but suspect it was of importance in the original form.

Parallels.—Dr. Hyde refers to two short stories, "Midnight Ride" (to Rome) and "Stolen Bride," in Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends. But the closest parallel is given by Miss Maclintock's Donegal tale of "Jamie Freel and the Young Lady," reprinted in Mr. Yeats' Irish Folk and Fairy Tales, 52-9. In the Hibernian Tales, "Mann o' Malaghan and the Fairies," as reported by Thackeray in the Irish Sketch-Book, c. xvi., begins like "Guleesh."

III. FIELD OF BOLIAUNS

Source.—T. Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, ed. Wright, pp. 135-9. In the original the gnome is a Cluricaune, but as a friend of Mr. Batten's has recently heard the tale told of a Lepracaun, I have adopted the better known title.

Remarks.—Lepracaun is from the Irish leith bhrogan, the one-shoemaker (cf. brogue), according to Dr. Hyde. He is generally seen (and to this day, too) working at a single shoe, cf. Croker's story "Little Shoe," l.c. pp. 142-4. According to a writer in the Revue Celtique, i. 256, the true etymology is luchor pan, "little man." Dr. Joyce also gives the same etymology in Irish Names and Places, i. 183, where he mentions several places named after them.

IV. HORNED WOMEN

Source.—Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends, the first story.

Parallels.—A similar version was given by Mr. D. Fitzgerald in the Revue Celtique, iv. 181, but without the significant and impressive horns. He refers to Cornhill for February 1877, and to Campbell's "Sauntraigh" No. xxii. Pop. Tales, ii. 52 4, in which a "woman of peace" (a fairy) borrows a woman's kettle and returns it with flesh in it, but at last the woman refuses, and is persecuted by the fairy. I fail to see much analogy. A much closer one is in Campbell, ii. p. 63, where fairies are got rid of by shouting "Dunveilg is on fire." The familiar "lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children at home," will occur to English minds. Another version in Kennedy's Legendary Fictions, p. 164, "Black Stairs on Fire."

Remarks.—Slievenamon is a famous fairy palace in Tipperary according to Dr. Joyce, l.c. i. 178. It was the hill on which Finn stood when he gave himself as the prize to the Irish maiden who should run up it quickest. Grainne won him with dire consequences, as all the world knows or ought to know (Kennedy, Legend Fict., 222, "How Fion selected a Wife").

V. CONAL YELLOWCLAW

Source.—Campbell, Pop. Tales of West Highlands, No. v. pp. 105-8, "Conall Cra Bhuidhe." I have softened the third episode, which is somewhat too ghastly in the original. I have translated "Cra Bhuide" Yellowclaw on the strength of Campbell's etymology, l.c. p. 158.

Parallels.—Campbell's vi. and vii. are two variants showing how widespread the story is in Gaelic Scotland. It occurs in Ireland where it has been printed in the chapbook, Hibernian Tales, as the "Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen," the Black Thief being Conall, and the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr. Lang's Red Fairy Book). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his Irish Sketch-Book, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost" (why "almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of the giant's breath occurs in the story of Koisha Kayn, MacInnes' Tales, i. 241, as well as the Polyphemus one, ibid. 265. One-eyed giants are frequent in Celtic folk-tales (e.g. in The Pursuit of Diarmaid and in the Mabinogi of Owen).

Remarks.—Thackeray's reference to the "Arabian Nights" is especially apt, as the tale of Conall is a framework story like The 1001 Nights, the three stories told by Conall being framed, as it were, in a fourth which is nominally the real story. This method employed by the Indian story-tellers and from them adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all European literatures (Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally thought to be peculiar to the East, and to be ultimately derived from the Jatakas or Birth Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in former incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also in "The Story-teller at Fault" in this collection, and the story of Koisha Kayn in MacInnes' Argyllshire Tales, a variant of which, collected but not published by Campbell, has no less than nineteen tales enclosed in a framework. The question is whether the method was adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign influences. Confining ourselves to "Conal Yellowclaw," it seems not unlikely that the whole story is an importation. For the second episode is clearly the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which was known in Ireland perhaps as early as the tenth century (see Prof. K. Meyer's edition of Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis, Pref. p. xii). It also crept into the voyages of Sindbad in the Arabian Nights. And as told in the Highlands it bears comparison even with the Homeric version. As Mr. Nutt remarks (Celt. Mag. xii.) the address of the giant to the buck is as effective as that of Polyphemus to his ram. The narrator, James Wilson, was a blind man who would naturally feel the pathos of the address; "it comes from the heart of the narrator;" says Campbell (l.c., 148), "it is the ornament which his mind hangs on the frame of the story."

VI. HUDDEN AND DUDDEN

Source.—From oral tradition, by the late D. W. Logie, taken down by Mr. Alfred Nutt.

Parallels.—Lover has a tale, "Little Fairly," obviously derived from this folk-tale; and there is another very similar, "Darby Darly." Another version of our tale is given under the title "Donald and his Neighbours," in the chapbook Hibernian Tales, whence it was reprinted by Thackeray in his Irish Sketch-Book, c. xvi. This has the incident of the "accidental matricide," on which see Prof. R. Köhler on Gonzenbach Sicil. Mährchen, ii. 224. No less than four tales of Campbell are of this type (Pop. Tales, ii. 218-31). M. Cosquin, in his "Contes populaires de Lorraine," the storehouse of "storiology," has elaborate excursuses in this class of tales attached to his Nos. x. and xx. Mr. Clouston discusses it also in his Pop. Tales, ii. 229-88. Both these writers are inclined to trace the chief incidents to India. It is to be observed that one of the earliest popular drolls in Europe, Unibos, a Latin poem of the eleventh, and perhaps the tenth, century, has the main outlines of the story, the fraudulent sale of worthless objects and the escape from the sack trick. The same story occurs in Straparola, the European earliest collection of folk-tales in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the gold sticking to the scales is familiar to us in Ali Baba. (Cf. Cosquin, l.c., i. 225-6, 229).

Remarks.—It is indeed curious to find, as M. Cosquin points out, a cunning fellow tied in a sack getting out by crying, "I won't marry the princess," in countries so far apart as Ireland, Sicily (Gonzenbach, No. 71), Afghanistan (Thorburn, Bannu, p. 184), and Jamaica (Folk-Lore Record, iii. 53). It is indeed impossible to think these are disconnected, and for drolls of this kind a good case has been made out for the borrowing hypotheses by M. Cosquin and Mr. Clouston. Who borrowed from whom is another and more difficult question which has to be judged on its merits in each individual case.

This is a type of Celtic folk-tales which are European in spread, have analogies with the East, and can only be said to be Celtic by adoption and by colouring. They form a distinct section of the tales told by the Celts, and must be represented in any characteristic selection. Other examples are xi., xv., xx., and perhaps xxii.

VII. SHEPHERD OF MYDDVAI

Source.—Preface to the edition of "The Physicians of Myddvai"; their prescription-book, from the Red Book of Hergest, published by the Welsh MS. Society in 1861. The legend is not given in the Red Book, but from oral tradition by Mr. W. Rees, p. xxi. As this is the first of the Welsh tales in this book it may be as well to give the reader such guidance as I can afford him on the intricacies of Welsh pronunciation, especially with regard to the mysterious w's and y's of Welsh orthography. For w substitute double o, as in "fool," and for y, the short u in b_u_t, and as near approach to Cymric speech will be reached as is possible for the outlander. It maybe added that double d equals th, and double l is something like Fl, as Shakespeare knew in calling his Welsh soldier Fluellen (Llewelyn). Thus "Meddygon Myddvai" would be Anglicè "Methugon Muthvai."

Parallels.—Other versions of the legend of the Van Pool are given in Cambro-Briton, ii. 315; W. Sikes, British Goblins, p. 40. Mr. E. Sidney Hartland has discussed these and others in a set of papers contributed to the first volume of The Archaeological Review (now incorporated into Folk-Lore), the substance of which is now given in his Science of Fairy Tales, 274-332. (See also the references given in Revue Celtique, iv., 187 and 268). Mr. Hartland gives there an ecumenical collection of parallels to the several incidents that go to make up our story—(1) The bride-capture of the Swan-Maiden, (2) the recognition of the bride, (3) the taboo against causeless blows, (4) doomed to be broken, and (5) disappearance of the Swan-Maiden, with (6) her return as Guardian Spirit to her descendants. In each case Mr. Hartland gives what he considers to be the most primitive form of the incident. With reference to our present tale, he comes to the conclusion, if I understand him aright, that the lake-maiden was once regarded as a local divinity. The physicians of Myddvai were historic personages, renowned for their medical skill for some six centuries, till the race died out with John Jones, fl. 1743. To explain their skill and uncanny knowledge of herbs, the folk traced them to a supernatural ancestress, who taught them their craft in a place still called Pant-y-Meddygon ("Doctors' Dingle"). Their medical knowledge did not require any such remarkable origin, as Mr. Hartland has shown in a paper "On Welsh Folk-Medicine," contributed to Y Cymmrodor, vol. xii. On the other hand, the Swan-Maiden type of story is widespread through the Old World. Mr. Morris' "Land East of the Moon and West of the Sun," in The Earthly Paradise, is taken from the Norse version. Parallels are accumulated by the Grimms, ii. 432; Köhler on Gonzenbach, ii. 20; or Blade, 149; Stokes' Indian Fairy Tales, 243, 276; and Messrs. Jones and Koopf, Magyar Folk-Tales, 362-5. It remains to be proved that one of these versions did not travel to Wales, and become there localised. We shall see other instances of such localisation or specialisation of general legends.

VIII. THE SPRIGHTLY TAILOR

Source.—Notes and Queries for December 21, 1861; to which it was communicated by "Cuthbert Bede," the author of Verdant Green, who collected it in Cantyre.

Parallels.—Miss Dempster gives the same story in her Sutherland Collection, No. vii. (referred to by Campbell in his Gaelic list, at end of vol. iv.); Mrs. John Faed, I am informed by a friend, knows the Gaelic version, as told by her nurse in her youth. Chambers' "Strange Visitor," Pop. Rhymes of Scotland, 64, of which I gave an Anglicised version in my English Fairy Tales, No. xxxii., is clearly a variant.

Remarks.—The Macdonald of Saddell Castle was a very great man indeed. Once, when dining with the Lord-Lieutenant, an apology was made to him for placing him so far away from the head of the table. "Where the Macdonald sits," was the proud response, "there is the head of the table."

IX. DEIRDRE

Source.—Celtic Magazine, xiii. pp. 69, seq. I have abridged somewhat, made the sons of Fergus all faithful instead of two traitors, and omitted an incident in the house of the wild men called here "strangers." The original Gaelic was given in the Transactions of the Inverness Gaelic Society for 1887, p. 241, seq., by Mr. Carmichael. I have inserted Deirdre's "Lament" from the Book of Leinster.

Parallels.—This is one of the three most sorrowful Tales of Erin, (the other two, Children of Lir and Children of Tureen, are given in Dr. Joyce's Old Celtic Romances), and is a specimen of the old heroic sagas of elopement, a list of which is given in the Book of Leinster. The "outcast child" is a frequent episode in folk and hero-tales: an instance occurs in my English Fairy Tales, No. xxxv., and Prof. Köhler gives many others in Archiv. f. Slav. Philologie, i. 288. Mr. Nutt adds tenth century Celtic parallels in Folk-Lore, vol. ii. The wooing of hero by heroine is a characteristic Celtic touch. See "Connla" here, and other examples given by Mr. Nutt in his notes to MacInnes' Tales. The trees growing from the lovers' graves occurs in the English ballad of Lord Lovel and has been studied in Mélusine.

Remarks.—The "Story of Deirdre" is a remarkable instance of the tenacity of oral tradition among the Celts. It has been preserved in no less than five versions (or six, including Macpherson's "Darthula") ranging from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. The earliest is in the twelfth century, Book of Leinster, to be dated about 1140 (edited in facsimile under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy, i. 147, seq.). Then comes a fifteenth century version, edited and translated by Dr. Stokes in Windisch's Irische Texte II., ii. 109, seq., "Death of the Sons of Uisnech." Keating in his History of Ireland gave another version in the seventeenth century. The Dublin Gaelic Society published an eighteenth century version in their Transactions for 1808. And lastly we have the version before us, collected only a few years ago, yet agreeing in all essential details with the version of the Book of Leinster. Such a record is unique in the history of oral tradition, outside Ireland, where, however, it is quite a customary experience in the study of the Finn-saga. It is now recognised that Macpherson had, or could have had, ample material for his rechauffé of the Finn or "Fingal" saga. His "Darthula" is a similar cobbling of our present story. I leave to Celtic specialists the task of settling the exact relations of these various texts. I content myself with pointing out the fact that in these latter days of a seemingly prosaic century in these British Isles there has been collected from the lips of the folk a heroic story like this of "Deirdre," full of romantic incidents, told with tender feeling and considerable literary skill. No other country in Europe, except perhaps Russia, could provide a parallel to this living on of Romance among the common folk. Surely it is a bounden duty of those who are in the position to put on record any such utterances of the folk-imagination of the Celts before it is too late.

X. MUNACHAR AND MANACHAR

Source.—I have combined the Irish version given by Dr. Hyde in his Leabhar Sgeul., and translated by him for Mr. Yeats' Irish Folk and Fairy Tales, and the Scotch version given in Gaelic and English by Campbell, No. viii.

Parallels.—Two English versions are given in my Eng. Fairy Tales, No. iv., "The Old Woman and her Pig," and xxxiv., "The Cat and the Mouse," where see notes for other variants in these isles. M. Cosquin, in his notes to No. xxxiv., of his Contes de Lorraine, t. ii. pp. 35-41, has drawn attention to an astonishing number of parallels scattered through all Europe and the East (cf., too, Crane, Ital. Pop. Tales, notes, 372-5). One of the earliest allusions to the jingle is in Don Quixote, pt. 1, c. xvi.: "Y asi como suele decirse el gato al rato, et rato á la cuerda, la cuerda al palo, daba el arriero á Sancho, Sancho á la moza, la moza á él, el ventero á la moza." As I have pointed out, it is used to this day by Bengali women at the end of each folk-tale they recite (L. B. Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal, Pref.).

Remarks.—Two ingenious suggestions have been made as to the origin of this curious jingle, both connecting it with religious ceremonies: (1) Something very similar occurs in Chaldaic at the end of the Jewish Hagada, or domestic ritual for the Passover night. It has, however, been shown that this does not occur in early MSS. or editions, and was only added at the end to amuse the children after the service, and was therefore only a translation or adaptation of a current German form of the jingle; (2) M. Basset, in the Revue des Traditions populaires, 1890, t. v. p. 549, has suggested that it is a survival of the old Greek custom at the sacrifice of the Bouphonia for the priest to contend that he had not slain the sacred beast, the axe declares that the handle did it, the handle transfers the guilt further, and so on. This is ingenious, but fails to give any reasonable account of the diffusion of the jingle in countries which have had no historic connection with classical Greece.

XI. GOLD TREE AND SILVER TREE

Source.—Celtic Magazine, xiii. 213-8, Gaelic and English from Mr. Kenneth Macleod.

Parallels.—Mr. Macleod heard another version in which "Gold Tree" (anonymous in this variant) is bewitched to kill her father's horse, dog, and cock. Abroad it is the Grimm's Schneewittchen (No. 53), for the Continental variants of which see Köhler on Gonzenbach, Sicil. Mährchen, Nos. 2-4, Grimm's notes on 53, and Crane, Ital. Pop. Tales, 331. No other version is known in the British Isles.

Remarks.—It is unlikely, I should say impossible, that this tale, with the incident of the dormant heroine, should have arisen independently in the Highlands; it is most likely an importation from abroad. Yet in it occurs a most "primitive" incident, the bigamous household of the hero; this is glossed over in Mr. Macleod's other variant. On the "survival" method of investigation this would possibly be used as evidence for polygamy in the Highlands. Yet if, as is probable, the story came from abroad, this trait may have come with it, and only implies polygamy in the original home of the tale.

XII. KING O'TOOLE AND HIS GOOSE

Source.—S. Lover's Stories and Legends of the Irish Peasantry.

Remarks.—This is really a moral apologue on the benefits of keeping your word. Yet it is told with such humour and vigour, that the moral glides insensibly into the heart.

XIII. THE WOOING OF OLWEN

Source.—The Mabinogi of Kulhwych and Olwen from the translation of Lady Guest, abridged.

Parallels.—Prof. Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, p. 486, considers that our tale is paralleled by Cuchulain's "Wooing of Emer," a translation of which by Prof. K. Meyer appeared in the Archaeological Review, vol. i. I fail to see much analogy. On the other hand in his Arthurian Legend, p. 41, he rightly compares the tasks set by Yspythadon to those set to Jason. They are indeed of the familiar type of the Bride Wager (on which see Grimm-Hunt, i. 399). The incident of the three animals, old, older, and oldest, has a remarkable resemblance to the Tettira Jataka (ed. Fausböll, No. 37, transl. Rhys Davids, i. p. 310 seq.) in which the partridge, monkey, and elephant dispute as to their relative age, and the partridge turns out to have voided the seed of the Banyan-tree under which they were sheltered, whereas the elephant only knew it when a mere bush, and the monkey had nibbled the topmost shoots. This apologue got to England at the end of the twelfth century as the sixty-ninth fable, "Wolf, Fox, and Dove," of a rhymed prose collection of "Fox Fables" (Mishle Shu'alim), of an Oxford Jew, Berachyah Nakdan, known in the Records as "Benedict le Puncteur" (see my Fables Of Aesop, i. p. 170). Similar incidents occur in "Jack and his Snuff-box" in my English Fairy Tales, and in Dr. Hyde's "Well of D'Yerree-in-Dowan." The skilled companions of Kulhwych are common in European folk-tales (Cf. Cosquin, i. 123-5), and especially among the Celts (see Mr. Nutt's note in MacInnes' Tales, 445-8), among whom they occur very early, but not so early as Lynceus and the other skilled comrades of the Argonauts.

Remarks.—The hunting of the boar Trwyth can be traced back in Welsh tradition at least as early as the ninth century. For it is referred to in the following passage of Nennius' Historia Britonum ed. Stevenson, p: 60, "Est aliud miraculum in regione quae dicitur Buelt [Builth, co. Brecon] Est ibi cumulus lapidum et unus lapis super-positus super congestum cum vestigia canis in eo. Quando venatus est porcum Troynt [var. lec. Troit] impressit Cabal, qui erat canis Arthuri militis, vestigium in lapide et Arthur postea congregavit congestum lapidum sub lapide in quo erat vestigium canis sui et vocatur Carn Cabal." Curiously enough there is still a mountain called Carn Cabal in the district of Builth, south of Rhayader Gwy in Breconshire. Still more curiously a friend of Lady Guest's found on this a cairn with a stone two feet long by one foot wide in which there was an indentation 4 in. x 3 in. x 2 in. which could easily have been mistaken for a paw-print of a dog, as maybe seen from the engraving given of it (Mabinogion, ed. 1874, p. 269).

The stone and the legend are thus at least one thousand years old. "There stands the stone to tell if I lie." According to Prof. Rhys (Hibbert Lect. 486-97) the whole story is a mythological one, Kulhwych's mother being the dawn, the clover blossoms that grow under Olwen's feet being comparable to the roses that sprung up where Aphrodite had trod, and Yspyddadon being the incarnation of the sacred hawthorn. Mabon, again (i.e. pp. 21, 28-9), is the Apollo Maponus discovered in Latin inscriptions at Ainstable in Cumberland and elsewhere (Hübner, Corp. Insc. Lat. Brit. Nos. 218, 332, 1345). Granting all this, there is nothing to show any mythological significance in the tale, though there may have been in the names of the dramatis personae. I observe from the proceedings of the recent Eisteddfod that the bardic name of Mr. W. Abraham, M.P., is 'Mabon.' It scarcely follows that Mr. Abraham is in receipt of divine honours nowadays.