Irish Fairy and Folk Tales Read Online Free Page A

place. Now I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labor and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate centaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and portentous monsters. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up all his time. Now, I have certainly not time for such inquiries. Shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my business, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And, therefore, I say farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself. Am I, indeed, a wonder more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of gentler and simpler sort, to whom nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?”I have to thank Messrs. Macmillan, and the editors of
Belgravia, All the Year Round
, and
Monthly Packet
, for leave to quote from Patrick Kennedy’s
Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts
, and Miss Maclintock’s articles respectively; Lady Wilde, for leave to give what I would from her
Ancient Legends of Ireland
(Ward & Downey); and Mr. Douglas Hyde, for his three unpublished stories, and for valuable and valued assistance in several ways; and also Mr. Allingham, and other copyright holders, for their poems. Mr. Allingham’s poems are from
Irish Songs and Poems
(Reeves and Turner); Fergusson’s, from Sealey, Bryers & Walker’s shilling reprint; my own and Miss O’Leary’s from
Ballads and Poems of Young Ireland
, 1888, a little anthology published by Gill & Sons, Dublin.
    * He lived some time in Dublin, and heard it then.
    *
Phæ;drus.
Jowett’s translation. (Clarendon Press.)

IRISH FAIRY
AND
FOLK TALES

THE TROOPING FAIRIES
    T he 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
Tuatha 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