I mentioned last week that an Irish/Scots Gaelic king or lord had serious obligations to his people and was expected to be absolutely just and therefore to maintain the harmony of the human with the natural and supernatural worlds.
Power and glory are always a temptation, though, and particularly in periods when the structure of existence seemed shaky (the Norse invasions and aftermath that – like in England – destroyed some kingdoms and thus encouraged the expansion of others: then the rebound from the Anglo-Norman invasions), some men decided to just go for it, to hell with tradition.
Most of the time, though, the structures of daily life and of society made it easier to do the right thing. And, of course, some poet might always appear to tell you that you were screwing up. It wasn’t just the poet: behind him was the whole power of the forces of nature and “supernature”, and his satire would not only make people snicker at you, but it would also symbolically withdraw the mandate of heaven, and all kinds of bad things would happen to you and your people.
It’s easier to be good when “good” is normal and expected.
The Tudor and Stuart dynasty English who conquered and colonized Ireland in the late 16th and 17th centuries didn’t care about any of that. Their society assumed you could be a rapacious bastard all your life, and as long as you were of the right religion and paid dues to the authorities, you’d be fine. You could always repent on your death bed, but it sure looked like might made right: the guys who killed and plundered got very rich.
Anyway, Ireland was there for Englishman to get rich. The people were barbarians and followed the wrong religion and didn’t matter, so you could do things there you couldn’t get away with in England, then go home one day and enjoy life. Or you could grab lands and live like a lord in Ireland while the Teigs did all the work.
The Irish didn’t see it that way.
They saw big armies with cannon and big horses. They saw men who did not observe the rules and thought it was fine to destroy crops and starve people, slaughter prisoners and women and children, lie, go back on an oath, swindle, assassinate…that kind of thing. They saw those guys win again and again and take your lands. No harm done, though: if you were harmless and inoffensive and lucky, they would allow you to use some land at a high rent.
The Irish saw the end of the world.
The same thing has happened often in other times and places, and no one knows, but the Irish could write,
Aogán O Raithile from east of Killarney was rediscovered in the Irish Revival of the 1890s etc. and he is worth rediscovering. He was born about 1670 and, except for an O Dálaigh family that stayed pretty quiet in the backcountry nearby, the bardic schools were gone, so he did not possess the kind of learning that slightly earlier poets like O Bruadair, O Donncha an Ghleanna, etc. did. This makes him more accessible to us, in a way, because he speaks plainly, not in a traditional idiom.
He was more or less a refugee for most of his life, taking shelter wherever he could find a surviving Irish noble family that still had land. (Mostly they were Mac Carthaigh or de Brún of the old lords of his area.) His poems are those of a man pushed to the edge and dealing with ruin and evil, and they do not mince words.
There was hope, to begin, that the Stuart kings would return to England and right what had been done in Ireland, and his vision poems see the Otherworld Queens returning to the land with good tidings:
Maidean sul smaoin Titan a chosa do luaill
Ar mhullach cnoic aoird aoibhinn do lodamar suas,
Tarraster linn scaoth bhruinneasll soilbhir suairc-
Gasra bhí i Sídh Seanaibh solas-bhrugh thuaidh.
Fearastar scím driaíochta nár doracha snua
Ó Ghaillimh na líog-gheal go Corcaigh na gcuan;
Barra gach crainn síor-chuireas toradh agus cnuas,
Meas daire ar gach coill, fír-mhil ar clochaibh go buan…
Oner morning before the Sun even thought to stir his feet,
To the summit of a fine high hill I climbed (literally “we”).
There came to me a band of joyous happy maidens:
A band from the resplendent (Fairy) palace north there, Shee (Shanid?).
A druid cloud spread over all, of no dark appearance,
From Galway of shining stones to Cork with its bays:
The top of every tree put forth fruit and nuts,
A crop of acorns in each oak wood, true honey on every stone,,,
But by was clear by 1729 that darkness was not to lift.
From a lament for a last Irish lord:
Cabhair ní ghairfead go gcuirthear mé i gcruinn-chomhraiinn,
Dar an leabhar, dá ngairfinn, níor ghaire-de an ní dhomh-sa:
Ár gceodhnasch uile, glac-chumasdach shíl Eoghainn,
Is tóllta a chuisle ‘gus d’imigh a bhrí ar feochaidh…
Mo ghlam is minic, is sílimse síordheora,
Is trom mo thubaist ‘s is duine mé ar míchothrom,
Fonn ní thigeann im ghaire ‘s mé ag caoi ar bhóithre
Ach foghar na Muice nach gontar le saigheadóireacht.
Stadfadsa feasta – is gar dom éag gan mhoill
Ó treascaradh dragain Leamhain, Léin is Laoi:
Rachasd ‘na bhfasc le searc na laoch do chill,
Na flatha fá raibh mu shean roimh éag do Chríost.
I will not cry out for help until I’m put in a narrow coffin,
And by the Book, though I called, it would be no nearer to me.
Our whole support, a skilled hand of the seed of Eoghain,
His veins holed now, and all his might decaying.
It’s often I cry out in pain and tears come always,
Heavy disaster I carry always, a man on uncertain ground,
No music I hear anywhere near as I go down the road lamenting
But only the squeal of the Pig that is not slain by arrows (i.e. death)
I will stop now and forever, for death draws soon near
Since the dragons of (river) Laune, Killarney and Lee are thrown down.
I will go to them in the graveyard, with love for those heroes:
The lords under whom my own ancestors served (as poets) since before Christ died.
Mist and Pigs
Coxie
Aoghán O Raithile expressed his rage at the invaders openly in the poem translated here last week, and his despair.
Another poet, either Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín of Clare or Cormac O Luinín of Fermanagh or maybe someone else, took a different road.
A Courtly Poem For Sir R. Cox (O Luinín) was published in Eigse (vol iv, p.284-6), followed in a later issue by the article Sgiathluithreach an Choxaigh by Briain O Cuív (A shield-prayer for Cox). O Cuív pointed out that the poem was not the fawning, adulatory exercise that O’Sullivan described, but instead an slightly-camouflaged series of insults. it’s actually hard to see how O’Sullivan missed that fact, but that he seems to have been a contrary and argumentative person.
Cox (1650 – 1730) himself was a prominent English landlord, soldier and administrator who as Lord Administrator in 1703 passed “the most penal of the penal laws” and wrote a book, Hibernica Anglicana, telling how the brave, clean-living English defeated hordes of savage barbarian Irish and took control of the place in the interests of good administration. He imprisoned Mac Cruitín in Dublin for daring to publish a book in English dissenting from that view.
Do you get the impression he didn’t like the Irish?
He also had power, and anybody who wanted to criticize him could not do it openly.
The poem in question survives in two manuscripts as far as I know: one by historian of noble Irish family)_ Charles O’Connor (Roscommon), and an earlier one by Mac Cruitín now at Maynooth. The text is very similar in both.
The poem starts out more or less normally enough:
A Risteard mhuirnidh na gcreach,
Go maire tú fá oineach:
Nár théidh tú go hifrionn na gceall,
‘s go raibh tú beo again tamull.
A little clumsy in Irish, and, come to think of it, poems of praise don’t usually start by hoping the subject will not go to Hell. The next three quatrains continue to talk about Cox not ending up going to Hell. Yes, a bit odd, but Cox, hearing a translation of them, might just think, “Well, those Irish aren’t much as writers either…”
The poem gets weirder:
May you never be felled in an alehouse brawl
by a four-sided cudgel wielded by a wanderer.
May no unsteady tree ever fall on you:
May your enemies never destroy your coach.
May you never sit on the white mare
A big sore ready to burst on your buttocks.
If ever it happens you have to go out,
May Christ protect you from the diarrhea.
May you never have to box a big burly soldier
And you with an anguished scab on your neck.
May your britches never fall down in battle
And you without button or button-hole to keep them up
when panicked hasty retreat is called.
May you never have a big open sore on your shoulder
From having to carry heavy bundles each and every day.
May you never be observed sweeping the streets,
Oh miserable excuse for a mother’s son.
May you and a hag with a hat, on a winter’s day
Never have to stand all day long at the market cross
Crook mouthed from ear to ear
Shivering while you bawl out ballads for sale.
May you never be a penniless wanderer
Traveling all Ireland, cursed and unlucky forever.
With no food, wit hno clothes, with no possessions,
Begging hopelessly forever for pennies to live.
May no Church minister ever discover you out in the field
Just as you finish screwing your mother.
May you never have to stand before the congregation,
A sinner’s white sheet all around you.
May you never have to fight for your life
And you on the back of a cursed misshapen horse,
Without saddle, without reins, without spurs,
Tortured and bothered with the rain and snow in your face.
while the wind blasts out of the north
Always into your face, never ceasing even for a second,
And you having a tall English hat perched on your head,
Gripping it with desperate fingers lest it fly away.
And then your horse stops all of a sudden, no warning,
Right in the middle of the river ford,
And you in a panic kicking her ribs with your heels
But it’s no good: you have to jump off right there.
It goes on like that for five more verses, four of which are insulting, th last of which could be interpreted as something like praise if you weren’t reading carefully.
The poet never says anything like “You’re a vicious tyrant.” He never criticizes Cox at all, and if called out, he could say (like Good Soldier Schweik) “What? I was just saying I hoped bad things don’t happen to you? What did I do wrong?”
Whoever heard the poem in Irish , though, would always think of Cox in these degrading situations and
might not fear him quite as much. Even if they did, they might smile behind their hands when they saw him ride by.
James Scott wrote a big book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale, 1985) about his fieldwork in a Malaysian village where he focused on the strategies poor peasants used to deal with big farmers and landlords when any open disagreement or opposition is not tolerated. His point was that silence and apparent agreement do not always imply consent, and poor obsequious peasants are often smarter and more determined than their betters think.
Praise poems are not always about praise, especially when the big people with power know that you are just an Irish fool trying to ingratiate himself with you
Irish? Who Cares?
Irish? Who Cares?
Irish literature is uniquely interesting, the oldest surviving European literature after Greek and Latin, but it is very different from them\. It is a voice from ancient Europe, a voice from beyond the town walls, and a vessel of at least 2500 years of human experience in the island of Ireland, and also in the Highlands of Scotland, because the Highlanders were really just Irish with boats.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish society underwent a traumatic, extended, violent break with all that had gone before. The social structure that resulted in many areas was an unbalanced, neurotic one; communities of survivors and of people who had watched their neighbors go under. Yes, that was long ago, but the world view and social structures that “long ago: engendered are still with us in a mutated form. In the silence when the power is switched off, ghosts still walk. People learn Irish to reconnect to the main line of the development of Irish culture.
The land in many places still speaks Irish, and I don’t mean place names. Irish land and its “energy” (for lack of a better term) and Irish language have shaped one another, and to know anything really about the place in all its dimensions, one must know Irish and know Irish well. Some people want to reconnect to ‘Eire’ and so learn Irish for that reason.
Because no state or corporation has ever used it, it is unlike most modern standard languages. It is not streamlined, slick and facile, and does not facilitate easy assumptions or consumption. Ads in Irish still seem odd and uncomfortable. It is not a language that has been formed more by face-to-face interactions than by the media.. It has not, until very recently cared much about what went on in offices or in boardrooms.
Some people just like languages, and Irish is a fairly unique one. It developed on the margins and possesses a long written record. It demonstrates fascinating developments in morphology, syntax and phonology, and it’s got palatalized consonants, all those prepositional forms and the weird VSO sentence structure. Some people learn Irish because it’s fascinating.
Traditional spoken Irish is a complex, apparently unnecessary language whose logic is not always superficially visible. It’s a language in which there are deep groves of silent trees still, places into which explorers from Google and Apple Corp may never come. It is a language formed by seasons and weather, by the human mind in face-to-face community, and by the necessities of physical existence. It and other languages like it are part of the Wild, and though Irish cannot offer physical refuge to modern people in our headlong rush to wherever it is we're going, it can offer intellectual, emotional and psychic refuge for a while longer.
But does any of this matter? I mean, is it worth getting all worked up about?
Maybe not. Nothing is permanent. So many people and cultures have already gone without a memory.
On the other hand…Some of us, cursed or blessed, cannot simply turn away, and let Irish and those other things pass away.
Not for its sake, but for our own.
Tá Mé ’mo Shuídhe
I am awake since the moon rose last night,
here kindling the fire restlessly, feeding it desperately.
The folk of the house are all stretched out and I am alone;
the cocks are crowing and all the world’s asleep, but for me.
Tá mé imo shuídhe ó d'éirigh an ghealach aréir,
ag cur teineadh sios, faraor, a's ag fadadh go géar.
Tá bunadh an toighe ina luíghe, a's tá mise liom fhéin,
tá na coiligh ag glaoch a's tá an tír ina gcodladh, ach mé.
Your mouth, your face are my soul’s desire,
your shining blue eyes for which I abandoned pleasure and rest.
In sorrow after you, I can’t see to walk the road,
and, oh, friend of my heart, the mountains stand between you and I.
Learned folk say that love is a mortal sickness:
I didn’t believe them, until it tore my own heart inside.
A desperate disease, it's my sorrow that I didn’t escape it:
it sends a sharp arrow, a hundred arrows through the center of my heart.
I met an elvish woman down at the hollow by the ford:
I asked her was there anything that would loose the fetters of love.
She said quietly, in a gentle fair voice,
“When once it goes into the heart, never, never will it loose its grasp.”
Not Sure
Hello Blogger is still preventing me from posting anything longer than three paragraphs. I will soon start a new ste on another platform, but things have been very busy and the host site requires a lot of work.
The new site will a;lso feature two bhooks to be published toward the end of April.
I apologize again for all this, though not for Blogger.
J. Callahan
Dangerous Sheep
Hello,
I am sorry, Blogger is only allowing me to post three paragraphs here, for some reason. I am trying to figure it out and fix it. I will start a new blog at a new venue on 3/17 to corresponf to the release of a book. Sorry again for the confusion.
As of 2/3/26, I still do not know what is going on with Blogger
As of 2/6, I am still unable to post it, even on a companion blog (Celtic Love Songs, on which I have not posted for many months. It is possible Blogger has decided I've written too much. I will keep investigating (it is very difficult to get an answer from Blogger) but will probably move to another platform in a week or so. I will post the address here.
I apologize for all this!
Má bhíonn
cú mhall subhasilceach féin, is minic go mbíonn sí déanach comh maith. Is
amhlaidh go bhfuil an diabhal le fuacht ar an nduiche sel le mí go leith, agus
tá brat trom sneachtaigh anois ann again leis, agus leanann a chuid dualgaisí
fuacht agus sneachta arpon. Rud eile, do bhí an bean agam breoite agus cat linn
breoite comh maith, i dtreo na raibh d’uaine agam féachaint ar am mblog go dtí
seo.
In 1899,
Seoirse MacConmara, a doctor in Corofin, north Clare, noticed a child playing
with the leather cover of a manuscript on the floor of a house. He saved the
manuscript, passed it on to Douglas Hyde, who then passed it on to Seamus O
Duilearga who published a tale from it in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie,
no 17, 1928 . (The Germans were the first to take an interest in Old Irish
language and Literature in the 20th century.) The tale was entitled
Tóruigheacht (i. e. Tóraíocht) Duibhe Lacha Láimh-Ghile (The Quest for Black
Duck with White Hands) there and it is one of the few copies of a tale usually
entitled Serc Duibhe Lacha do Mhongán (Dubh Lacha’s Love for Mongán). (The main
other known copy is in the Book of Fermoy, compiled in the14th century
to 16th centuries.)
It’s
an interesting enjoyable story. Here is a translation of a snippet from the
beginning, Mongán’s father, Fiachna, king of Dál nAraidhe in what is now county
Antrim, has been forced to fight with Ularg, king of Lochlainn (Norway, but
often just the Otherworld) in order to fulfill a vow . Things are not going
well until a mysterious stranger appears: (my translation)
A Quick Pilgrimage in Search of Oats
It used to be accepted as an obvious fact that the Irish and the Highlanders were people given to wandering, and that they are all born with an itch in their feet that can only be cured by travel and emigration.
For proof, you only had to look in any big English,
American, or more recently, Australian town. There were Irish all over the
place! Highlanders were more often out in the countryside and so drew less
attention to themselves, but they were there as well. And wasn’t it those crowds
of Irish monks that saved civilization or something back in the eighth and
ninth centuries? There wasn’t an Italian, French or German monastery where you
wouldn’t hear a brogue back then, and they left graffiti in Gaelic in all the
manuscripts.
It's obviously something in the genes.
Fewer people care about such things anymore. For one thing,
the Irish are less visible in foreign places today, maybe partly because they
are less obviously different. (Irish in 19th century America were
apparently only one step above Native Americans, and even in 1950s and early
1960s England they were awkwardly old-fashioned.) Irish or Celtic wanderlust
may die an intellectual natural death, like some old writer long gone out of fashion
and reduced to boring strangers in late-night bars. Or maybe not.
Since last week was even busier than the one before, and I
have still not had time to write about oats and vegetables, I’d like to look at
the genesis of the wanderlust idea and do my small part to help it expire.
Fil suil nglais There
is a blue eye
Fégbas Erinn dar a hais: that
will look back at Ireland:
Noco n-aceba iarmo-thá never
more shall it see
Firu Erenn nach a mná. the
men of Ireland or its women.
12th century: attributed to Colm Cille as he left
Ireland in 563 A.D. (“fil” used as the independent verb “to be” in Middle
Irish. Lenition not shown.)
Robads mellach, a meic mo Dé, It would be pleasant, oh son of my God
(dingnaib réimenn) in
wondrous voyages
ascnam tar tuinn topur ndílenmnm to
travel over deluge-fountained waves
dochum nErenn… to
Ireland…
Rom-lín múich i n-ingnais Eirenn Sorrow filled me, away from Ireland
Díamsa coimsech, though I was powerful,
‘san tír ainéoil conam-tharla making me in the foreign land
Taideóir tuirsech. Tearful
and sad,
Poem from about 100 A.D, also attributed to Colm Cille,
The continent was attractive in some ways since that was
where Christianity came from and there were monasteries and manuscripts and
relics and so on, besides all the strange, unpleasant, foreign places and
people, but it was still considered a kind of martyrdom to leave Ireland.
West and north provided a more immediate break with the
known world, since it was mostly ocean. Irish monks trusted to God to steer
their tiny boats, and they were in Iceland before the Norse, and on all kinds
of tiny islands and rocks, but I suppose others starved or drowned before
finding a retreat. West and north may
have had their own lesser, maybe subconscious, attraction though: there were
older traditions of Otherworld islands
out there, and these traditions gave rise mostly Christianized tales like that
of Bran and Mael Dúin.
The important point was that perigrinatio was intended to be difficult and unpleasant, and leaving Ireland was suffering. There are poems whose whole point is that and the assumed composers talk about how difficult it was and how much they miss Ireland.
Later travelers made the same point.
Diombáidh trial ó
thulchaibh Fáil, A
sorrow to travel from, the hills of Ireland,
Diombháidh iath
Eireann d’fhághbháil, a
sorrow to leave the lands of Ireland.
Iath milis na
mbeann mbeachach, Sweet
lands of bee-filled mountains
Inis na n-eang
n-óigheachach. Island
of fields of young horses.
Cé tá mo
thriall tar sál soir, Although
I travel east over the sea,
Ar dtabhairt
cúil d’iath Fhiontain, When
I turned away from Ireland,
Do scar croidhe
fan ród rinn— my
heart left me as I traveled--
Níor char fód
eile acht Eirinn. It
loves no land but Ireland,
Fód is truime
toradh crann, Land
of heaviest tree fruit.
Fód is
fearuaine fearann: land
where grass is greenest:
Sanchar
braonach beartach, the
ancient plain with its streams and
sheaves
An tír
chraobhach chruithneachtach… the
green-branched land of wheat.
Three verses of seven composed by Uilliam Nuinseann from Delvin, County Westmeath (born 1550) as he was about to go to England in the mid-sixteenth century. He got home again, but lost his lands for having fought with O Neill against Queen Elizabeth and the rest.
(For more about him and his Anglo-Irish family, see Eigse, #6,
1949 , Poems of Exile by Uilleam Nuinseann by Gerard Murphy.
Nineteenth century immigrants didn’t want to leave either,
but they had no choice because they could no longer get access to land, and
there was no other way to feed themselves and their families.
From Duanag do’n
Mhorbhairbe (A little song to Morvern, Highlands of Scotland)
Tha clann
Aonghuis air am fuadach The
Macleods of Fuinary are banished
‘s gann tha
duine san Leth-uachdraichach, and
hardly a man left in the Upper Part:
claidhe is ballachan fuara stone
wallss and bare house walls are
suaithnicheas
na tím chaidh seachad. a
symbol of the time that has passed.
An oidhche
roimhe, bha mi bruadar I
dreamed last night
Bhith mar
abhaist an Rathuaidhe. That
I was in Rahoy as I used to be.
Nuair a dhúusg
me -- fáth mo chruadail – when I woke – reason for my
misery --
E cho fada
bhuainn ‘s a’ ghealach,,, it
was as far from me as the moon.
And from Oran
úr mu Sgrios nan Croitearan (A new song about the destruction of the crofters.)
Fhad ‘s bhios cridhe bláth ‘nam chum, As long as I have live heart in my chest
Is teanga am
bheul gu cainnt, and
tongue in mouth with which to speak,
bidh an tír ‘san
d’fhuair mi árach óg the
land in which I was nourished young
le sólas tighinn am chuimhne. Will come with joy in my
memory.
Mar is fhaide
théid mi om dhuthaich, The
farther I go from my land
‘s ann as
dlúithe an dáimh, Love/loyalty
are all the firmer
‘s cha
díochuimhnioch mi an taigh dubh and
I will never forget the little house
‘san d’rugadh
me sa ghleann. In
which I was born in the glen
Ged tha ‘n
duine bochd fo tháir Though
the poor man is despised
Am beachdan árd
luchd -uaill, in
the opinion of the great and proud,
An inbhe mhór, am bósd
‘s an cliú their
high rank, their boasts and reputation
tha leams’ ‘na
mhasladh buan: I
think it a great insult
a liuthad
gleann ‘s a chuir iad fás considering
all the glens they cleared
le feidh an
áite an tsluaigh, and
put deer in place of the people
san tigh ‘s
nach cuireadh iad an coin, and
the house into which they would not
put the dogs
tha an croitéir
bochd gun truan. There
is the poor crofter unpitied.
Duncan MacPherson was born in Rahoy in Morvern in the 1830s
and ended up in New Zealand. He is one the local poets in The Gaelic Bards of
Morvern, self published by Iain Thornber (Morvern), 1985, and no one has ever
heard of him.
It might be worth mentioning that today, there is probably no one in Morvern whose family was there a hundred years ago. Everyone who is there is there because work on the estate or tourist trade, etc. etc. brought them.
It wasn’t only going to a foreign land that was horrible:
even leaving one’s native village was terrible. The people were part of their
place in a way moderners can hardly imagine, and their people before them had been forever. Leave? Was it even possible?
Maybe not, but they had no choice.
There are many stories about starving people carrying their
dead child or spouse who died insan Droch-Shaoil many miles so that the dead
one could rest in the graveyard of their native place among their kin and
neighbors.
There are many stories of people out at night meeting ghosts
who are traveling there. Here are two from Seanchas Amhlaoibhh Uí Luínse,
Comhairle Bhéaloideas Eireann, 1980. He was a Mid-Cork storyteller who died in
1947.)
Bhí feirmeoir áirithe n-ar (i.e. gur) ghlaoig fear siúil chuige i gcóir
na hoíche. Ach do ráinig gur cailleag (cailleadh) an fear siúil i dtigh an fheirmeora. (There was a particular farmer to whom a begger came for the night. But it
happened that the begger died in the farmer’s house.)
An oíche a bhíothas á thórramhj, do bhuail chútha isteach
seana-bhean (agus thosnaigh sí ag caoine an fear siúil) (The night he was being
waked, a little old woman came in.)
Mo chara thú is
mo rún,
Is níl agum bád
ná lúng
A bhéarfadh tú
chun siúil
Go teampall
Acha’n Dúin.
(My kinsman and
my love,
I am without a
boat or ship
To take you
away
To the church
of A. an D.)
The man of the
house asks where Acha’n Dúin is. She tells him, but then he asks “Ca bhfios dom
canad (ce'n ait) ann go gcuirfí é? (How would I know where in the graveyard he would be
buried?)
“Ní ghá dhuit ach é a bhreith go dtí geata na reilige, agus tógfar dhíot a chúram ansan.” (You only need to carry him to the gate of the cemetary and the matter will be taken off you.)
Bhí sé déanach um thráthnóna nuair a shroiseadar Acha’n Dúin. Nuair a chuadar go geata na reilige, bhí ceathrar fear anso rómpu. Thógadar an chora amach as an dturcail agus riug leo ar a nguaillibh isteach geata na reilge. Níor labhradar féin…”
The second story concerns a man from the storyteller’s village who was buried in another place, “though he should have been buried in his place.”. He appears to his kin when they are milking out in the pasture and asked them to bring his body to Baile Mhúirne. They don’t bother to do that, thinking it's just a passing thing.
He soon appears to them again and when asked, tells them
that in the foreign cemetery, he is “mar a bheadh gé iasachta idir scata
géanna: prioc agus giub age gach éinne orm,” (like a foreign goose among a
flock of geese: every one of them and a push and a beak at me.”
His relations go and bring his body to his home place.
There were many such stories and I’d leave them here, only it would seem repetitious and, yes, I’m very busy.
At any rate, the renowned Gaelic wanderlust had very
specific causes, and in its more modern form, was born of necessity. The Irish
and Highlanders left home only when forced to, and dreaded leaving.
The assumed wanderlust is an example of lazy, shoddy
thinking of which there is plenty in the world today
However…having dismissed the idea of Gaelic wanderlust, I’ve
got to admit that some of the Irish emigration of the 1980s and later was aided
by the fact that, despite U2 and James Joyce, a lot of twentieth century Irish
knew that America etc and its way of life and culture were much! better than
dingy old Ireland, so why not go where life was good?
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