Irish Fairy Tales

What do the Irish fairytales tell you about the Irish view of space and time?

As I mention in a few of my responses here, the Irish view of space and time, if based on these fairy tales, is much different from other western views, especially American. In several of the tales, for instance, we see time stretched and contracted – sometimes both within the same short tale. In a few, situations and bits of the story are repeated several times, with 3 repeats seeming to be the most typical. This use of 3 is popular in many cultures, actually, and I suppose the Irish are no different. The most interesting use of time is in Usheen’s Return to Ireland, in which he stays in the Tir-Nan-Oge for many years and thinks it has only been one, then becomes old and frail when time catches up with him.

Much time is spent outside, so it seems that the Irish prefer, at least in these tales, to write about open areas and not closed-in ones. I suppose Irish Fairy Tale writers have some sort of cultural story claustrophobia? There is a very dream-like state to the stories, and in at least one, most of the story takes place in a dream.

The King of Ireland's Son

This is my first of this set of fairy tales, and I must admit, it's pretty strange. Fairy tales are always strange in some way, but the beginning and end are connected by a twisting middle full of details that make me wonder if I'm missing something. The King of Ireland's Son pays off the dead man's debt in the beginning. Then he meets the green man and the other men who travel with him. The green man is told that he can have the first kiss of the King's son's wife once he has her. When the young man is finally married, the green man discovers that the wife is "full up of snakes." He removes them, then tells the King's son that he is the man who was in the coffin, and that the other men are servants that God sent him. The son and his wife then "live happily ever after." A very, very strange story.

The thing I found really interesting was the grammar. I don't know if this was translated from Gaelic or is just Irish-English, but phrases like "lay your ear to the ground and try are they coming" and "you'll get that if the thing I have in my head succeeds with me" make it sort of fun to read. I suppose the language is a more Germanic version of English, far closer to modern English than middle-English but still a bit rearranged.

Dreams of Gold

This tale seems like another version of “the grass is always greener on the other side.” The man from Mayo has a dream that he’ll find treasure in Limerick, but the cobbler from Limerick dreams of treasure in the May man’s own garden. The Mayo man ends up finding treasure in his garden… but the man from Limerick doesn’t. Is there a geography lesson here that I’m missing, maybe?

The Birth of Finn MacCumhail

This story, we discover at the end, tells of the beginning of the Fenians of Erin, who followed the orders of Finn MacCumhail after he saved their lives. Finn is offered the hand of the King’s daughter if he can save the King’s dun, which is destroyed every night after it is rebuilt. I had to look it up, but the word dun “comes from the Brythonic Din and Gaelic Dun, meaning fort, and is now used as a general term for small stone built strongholds, enclosures or roundhouses in Scotland, as a sub-group of hill forts.” After killing the witch and her 3 sons who are responsible for burning it down every night, Finn spares the lives of the other failed champions instead of taking the hand of the King’s daughter. This, like the other tales, is very strange. It involves giants and more beheadings than a 1970s slasher flick, but the story is actually very entertaining. It’s probably not the kind of story I’d tell a kid before he went to bed, though.

Usheen’s Return to Ireland

“Usheen was the last of the Fianna and the greatest of them.” Curious again who the Fianna were, I discovered that they were a band of men from several tribes, sometimes 3000 strong, who protected the land from invaders in the first to third centuries. Usheen found himself in the Tir-Nan-Oge. The Tir-Nan-Oge is the land of Irish faeries, where they can feast and battle and always be resurrected. Usheen is there for a very long time, but thinks that it’s only a year. This story, like the others, may have a moral, but it’s lost on me if it does. Usheen gets off of his horse, even though he was told not to, and all of the time that passed in the outside world catches up with him, so he becomes very old.

The Man Who Had No Story

This one was interestingly layered. Brian goes to cut rods for a basket, but he ends up having to go to a house in the distance after a dense fog appears. He is asked to tell a fairy tale, but he says he hasn’t before and doesn’t know how. He goes out to get water and (apparently) dreams about being very successful in many things he doesn’t think he can do. When he awakes, he discovers that he can indeed tell a fairy tale. He goes to bed in the house but wakes outside with his head resting on his bundles of cut rods. This means that his dreams of success were actually part of the original dream about getting lost in the fog and not knowing how to tell a fairy tale.