Book: Irish Fairy Tales

J >> James Stephens >> Irish Fairy Tales




"How I flew through the soft element: how I joyed in the country
where there is no harshness: in the element which upholds and
gives way; which caresses and lets go, and will not let you fall.
For man may stumble in a furrow; the stag tumble from a cliff;
the hawk, wing-weary and beaten, with darkness around him and the
storm behind, may dash his brains against a tree. But the home of
the salmon is his delight, and the sea guards all her creatures."



CHAPTER IX

"I became the king of the salmon, and, with my multitudes, I
ranged on the tides of the world. Green and purple distances were
under me: green and gold the sunlit regions above. In these
latitudes I moved through a world of amber, myself amber and
gold; in those others, in a sparkle of lucent blue, I curved, lit
like a living jewel: and in these again, through dusks of ebony
all mazed with silver, I shot and shone, the wonder of the sea.

"I saw the monsters of the uttermost ocean go heaving by; and the
long lithe brutes that are toothed to their tails: and below,
where gloom dipped down on gloom, vast, livid tangles that coiled
and uncoiled, and lapsed down steeps and hells of the sea where
even the salmon could not go.

"I knew the sea. I knew the secret caves where ocean roars to
ocean; the floods that are icy cold, from which the nose of a
salmon leaps back as at a sting; and the warm streams in which we
rocked and dozed and were carried forward without motion. I swam
on the outermost rim of the great world, where nothing was but
the sea and the sky and the salmon; where even the wind was
silent, and the water was clear as clean grey rock.

"And then, far away in the sea, I remembered Ulster, and there
came on me an instant, uncontrollable anguish to be there. I
turned, and through days and nights I swam tirelessly,
jubilantly; with terror wakening in me, too, and a whisper
through my being that I must reach Ireland or die.

"I fought my way to Ulster from the sea.

"Ah, how that end of the journey was hard! A sickness was racking
in every one of my bones, a languor and weariness creeping
through my every fibre and muscle. The waves held me back and
held me back; the soft waters seemed to have grown hard; and it
was as though I were urging through a rock as I strained towards
Ulster from the sea.

"So tired I was! I could have loosened my frame and been swept
away; I could have slept and been drifted and wafted away;
swinging on grey-green billows that had turned from the land and
were heaving and mounting and surging to the far blue water.

"Only the unconquerable heart of the salmon could brave that end
of toil. The sound of the rivers of Ireland racing down to the
sea came to me in the last numb effort: the love of Ireland bore
me up: the gods of the rivers trod to me in the white-curled
breakers, so that I left the sea at long, long last; and I lay in
sweet water in the curve of a crannied rock, exhausted, three
parts dead, triumphant."



CHAPTER X

"Delight and strength came to me again, and now I explored all
the inland ways, the great lakes of Ireland, and her swift brown
rivers.

"What a joy to lie under an inch of water basking in the sun, or
beneath a shady ledge to watch the small creatures that speed
like lightning on the rippling top. I saw the dragon- flies flash
and dart and turn, with a poise, with a speed that no other
winged thing knows: I saw the hawk hover and stare and swoop: he
fell like a falling stone, but he could not catch the king of the
salmon: I saw the cold-eyed cat stretching along a bough level
with the water, eager to hook and lift the creatures of the
river. And I saw men.

"They saw me also. They came to know me and look for me. They lay
in wait at the waterfalls up which I leaped like a silver flash.
They held out nets for me; they hid traps under leaves; they made
cords of the colour of water, of the colour of weeds--but this
salmon had a nose that knew how a weed felt and how a
string--they drifted meat on a sightless string, but I knew of
the hook; they thrust spears at me, and threw lances which they
drew back again with a cord. "Many a wound I got from men, many a
sorrowful scar.

"Every beast pursued me in the waters and along the banks; the
barking, black-skinned otter came after me in lust and gust and
swirl; the wild cat fished for me; the hawk and the steep-winged,
spear-beaked birds dived down on me, and men crept on me with
nets the width of a river, so that I got no rest. My life became
a ceaseless scurry and wound and escape, a burden and anguish of
watchfulness--and then I was caught."



CHAPTER XI

"THE fisherman of Cairill, the King of Ulster, took me in his
net. Ah, that was a happy man when he saw me! He shouted for joy
when he saw the great salmon in his net.

"I was still in the water as he hauled delicately. I was still in
the water as he pulled me to the bank. My nose touched air and
spun from it as from fire, and I dived with all my might against
the bottom of the net, holding yet to the water, loving it, mad
with terror that I must quit that loveliness. But the net held
and I came up.

"'Be quiet, King of the River,' said the fisherman, 'give in to
Doom,' said he.

"I was in air, and it was as though I were in fire. The air
pressed on me like a fiery mountain. It beat on my scales and
scorched them. It rushed down my throat and scalded me. It
weighed on me and squeezed me, so that my eyes felt as though
they must burst from my head, my head as though it would leap
from my body, and my body as though it would swell and expand and
fly in a thousand pieces.

"The light blinded me, the heat tormented me, the dry air made me
shrivel and gasp; and, as he lay on the grass, the great salmon
whirled his desperate nose once more to the river, and leaped,
leaped, leaped, even under the mountain of air. He could leap
upwards, but not forwards, and yet he leaped, for in each rise he
could see the twinkling waves, the rippling and curling waters.

"'Be at ease, O King,' said the fisherman. 'Be at rest, my
beloved. Let go the stream. Let the oozy marge be forgotten, and
the sandy bed where the shades dance all in green and gloom, and
the brown flood sings along.'

"And as he carried me to the palace he sang a song of the river,
and a song of Doom, and a song in praise of the King of the
Waters.

"When the king's wife saw me she desired me. I was put over a
fire and roasted, and she ate me. And when time passed she gave
birth to me, and I was her son and the son of Cairill the king. I
remember warmth and darkness and movement and unseen sounds. All
that happened I remember, from the time I was on the gridiron
until the time I was born. I forget nothing of these things."

"And now," said Finnian, "you will be born again, for I shall
baptize you into the family of the Living God." --------------
So far the story of Tuan, the son of Cairill.

No man knows if he died in those distant ages when Finnian was
Abbot of Moville, or if he still keeps his fort in Ulster,
watching all things, and remembering them for the glory of God
and the honour of Ireland.




THE BOYHOOD OF FIONN




He was a king, a seer and a poet. He was a lord with a manifold
and great train. He was our magician, our knowledgable one, our
soothsayer. All that he did was sweet with him. And, however ye
deem my testimony of Fionn excessive, and, although ye hold my
praising overstrained, nevertheless, and by the King that is
above me, he was three times better than all I say.--Saint
PATRICK.




CHAPTER I

Fionn [pronounce Fewn to rhyme with "tune"] got his first
training among women. There is no wonder in that, for it is the
pup's mother teaches it to fight, and women know that fighting is
a necessary art although men pretend there are others that are
better. These were the women druids, Bovmall and Lia Luachra. It
will be wondered why his own mother did not train him in the
first natural savageries of existence, but she could not do it.
She could not keep him with her for dread of the clann-Morna. The
sons of Morna had been fighting and intriguing for a long time to
oust her husband, Uail, from the captaincy of the Fianna of
Ireland, and they had ousted him at last by killing him. It was
the only way they could get rid of such a man; but it was not an
easy way, for what Fionn's father did not know in arms could not
be taught to him even by Morna. Still, the hound that can wait
will catch a hare at last, and even Manana'nn sleeps. Fionn's
mother was beautiful, long-haired Muirne: so she is always
referred to. She was the daughter of Teigue, the son of Nuada
from Faery, and her mother was Ethlinn. That is, her brother was
Lugh of the Long Hand himself, and with a god, and such a god,
for brother we may marvel that she could have been in dread of
Morna or his sons, or of any one. But women have strange loves,
strange fears, and these are so bound up with one another that
the thing which is presented to us is not often the thing that is
to be seen.

However it may be, when Uall died Muirne got married again to the
King of Kerry. She gave the child to Bovmall and Lia Luachra to
rear, and we may be sure that she gave injunctions with him, and
many of them. The youngster was brought to the woods of Slieve
Bloom and was nursed there in secret.

It is likely the women were fond of him, for other than Fionn
there was no life about them. He would be their life; and their
eyes may have seemed as twin benedictions resting on the small
fair head. He was fair-haired, and it was for his fairness that
he was afterwards called Fionn; but at this period he was known
as Deimne. They saw the food they put into his little frame
reproduce itself length-ways and sideways in tough inches, and in
springs and energies that crawled at first, and then toddled, and
then ran. He had birds for playmates, but all the creatures that
live in a wood must have been his comrades. There would have been
for little Fionn long hours of lonely sunshine, when the world
seemed just sunshine and a sky. There would have been hours as
long, when existence passed like a shade among shadows, in the
multitudinous tappings of rain that dripped from leaf to leaf in
the wood, and slipped so to the ground. He would have known
little snaky paths, narrow enough to be filled by his own small
feet, or a goat's; and he would have wondered where they went,
and have marvelled again to find that, wherever they went, they
came at last, through loops and twists of the branchy wood, to
his own door. He may have thought of his own door as the
beginning and end of the world, whence all things went, and
whither all things came.

Perhaps he did not see the lark for a long time, but he would
have heard him, far out of sight in the endless sky, thrilling
and thrilling until the world seemed to have no other sound but
that clear sweetness; and what a world it was to make that sound!
Whistles and chirps, coos and caws and croaks, would have grown
familiar to him. And he could at last have told which brother of
the great brotherhood was making the noise he heard at any
moment. The wind too: he would have listened to its thousand
voices as it moved in all seasons and in all moods. Perhaps a
horse would stray into the thick screen about his home, and would
look as solemnly on Fionn as Fionn did on it. Or, coming suddenly
on him, the horse might stare, all a-cock with eyes and ears and
nose, one long-drawn facial extension, ere he turned and bounded
away with manes all over him and hoofs all under him and tails
all round him. A solemn-nosed, stern-eyed cow would amble and
stamp in his wood to find a flyless shadow; or a strayed sheep
would poke its gentle muzzle through leaves.

"A boy," he might think, as be stared on a staring horse, "a boy
cannot wag his tail to keep the flies off," and that lack may
have saddened him. He may have thought that a cow can snort and
be dignified at the one moment, and that timidity is comely in a
sheep. He would have scolded the jackdaw, and tried to
out-whistle the throstle, and wondered why his pipe got tired
when the blackbird's didn't . There would be flies to be watched,
slender atoms in yellow gauze that flew, and filmy specks that
flittered, and sturdy, thick-ribbed brutes that pounced like cats
and bit like dogs and flew like lightning. He may have mourned
for the spider in bad luck who caught that fly. There would be
much to see and remember and compare, and there would be, always,
his two guardians. The flies change from second to second; one
cannot tell if this bird is a visitor or an inhabitant, and a
sheep is just sister to a sheep; but the women were as rooted as
the house itself.



CHAPTER II

Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking? Fionn would not know.
This was the one who picked him up when he fell, and that was the
one who patted the bruise. This one said: "Mind you do not
tumble in the well!"

And that one: "Mind the little knees among the nettles."

But he did tumble and record that the only notable thing about a
well is that it is wet. And as for nettles, if they hit him he
hit back. He slashed into them with a stick and brought them low.
There was nothing in wells or nettles, only women dreaded them.
One patronised women and instructed them and comforted them, for
they were afraid about one.

They thought that one should not climb a tree!

"Next week,' they said at last, "you may climb this one," and
"next week" lived at the end of the world!

But the tree that was climbed was not worth while when it had
been climbed twice. There was a bigger one near by. There were
trees that no one could climb, with vast shadow on one side and
vaster sunshine on the other. It took a long time to walk round
them, and you could not see their tops.

It was pleasant to stand on a branch that swayed and sprung, and
it was good to stare at an impenetrable roof of leaves and then
climb into it. How wonderful the loneliness was up there! When he
looked down there was an undulating floor of leaves, green and
green and greener to a very blackness of greeniness; and when he
looked up there were leaves again, green and less green and not
green at all, up to a very snow and blindness of greeniness; and
above and below and around there was sway and motion, the whisper
of leaf on leaf, and the eternal silence to which one listened
and at which one tried to look.

When he was six years of age his mother, beautiful, long-haired
Muirne, came to see him. She came secretly, for she feared the
sons of Morna, and she had paced through lonely places in many
counties before she reached the hut in the wood, and the cot
where he lay with his fists shut and sleep gripped in them.

He awakened to be sure. He would have one ear that would catch an
unusual voice, one eye that would open, however sleepy the other
one was. She took him in her arms and kissed him, and she sang a
sleepy song until the small boy slept again.

We may be sure that the eye that could stay open stayed open that
night as long as it could, and that the one ear listened to the
sleepy song until the song got too low to be heard, until it was
too tender to be felt vibrating along those soft arms, until
Fionn was asleep again, with a new picture in his little head and
a new notion to ponder on.

The mother of himself! His own mother!

But when he awakened she was gone.

She was going back secretly, in dread of the sons of Morna,
slipping through gloomy woods, keeping away from habitations,
getting by desolate and lonely ways to her lord in Kerry.

Perhaps it was he that was afraid of the sons of Morna, and
perhaps she loved him.



CHAPTER III

THE women druids, his guardians, belonged to his father's people.
Bovmall was Uail's sister, and, consequently, Fionn's aunt. Only
such a blood-tie could have bound them to the clann-Baiscne, for
it is not easy, having moved in the world of court and camp, to
go hide with a baby in a wood; and to live, as they must have
lived, in terror.

What stories they would have told the child of the sons of Morna.
Of Morna himself, the huge-shouldered, stern-eyed, violent
Connachtman; and of his sons--young Goll Mor mac Morna in
particular, as huge-shouldered as his father, as fierce in the
onset, but merry-eyed when the other was grim, and bubbling with
a laughter that made men forgive even his butcheries. Of Cona'n
Mael mac Morna his brother, gruff as a badger, bearded like a
boar, bald as a crow, and with a tongue that could manage an
insult where another man would not find even a stammer. His boast
was that when he saw an open door he went into it, and when he
saw a closed door he went into it. When he saw a peaceful man he
insulted him, and when he met a man who was not peaceful he
insulted him. There was Garra Duv mac Morna, and savage Art Og,
who cared as little for their own skins as they did for the next
man's, and Garra must have been rough indeed to have earned in
that clan the name of the Rough mac Morna. There were others:
wild Connachtmen all, as untameable, as unaccountable as their
own wonderful countryside.

Fionn would have heard much of them, and it is likely that be
practised on a nettle at taking the head off Goll, and that he
hunted a sheep from cover in the implacable manner he intended
later on for Cona'n the Swearer.

But it is of Uail mac Baiscne he would have heard most. With what
a dilation of spirit the ladies would have told tales of him,
Fionn's father. How their voices would have become a chant as
feat was added to feat, glory piled on glory. The most famous of
men and the most beautiful; the hardest fighter; the easiest
giver; the kingly champion; the chief of the Fianna na h-Eirinn.
Tales of how he had been way-laid and got free; of how he had
been generous and got free; of how he had been angry and went
marching with the speed of an eagle and the direct onfall of a
storm; while in front and at the sides, angled from the prow of
his terrific advance, were fleeing multitudes who did not dare to
wait and scarce had time to run. And of how at last, when the
time came to quell him, nothing less than the whole might of
Ireland was sufficient for that great downfall.

We may be sure that on these adventures Fionn was with his
father, going step for step with the long-striding hero, and
heartening him mightily.



CHAPTER IV

He was given good training by the women in running and leaping
and swimming.

One of them would take a thorn switch in her hand, and Fionn
would take a thorn switch in his hand, and each would try to
strike the other running round a tree.

You had to go fast to keep away from the switch behind, and a
small boy feels a switch. Fionn would run his best to get away
from that prickly stinger, but how he would run when it was his
turn to deal the strokes!

With reason too, for his nurses had suddenly grown implacable.
They pursued him with a savagery which he could not distinguish
from hatred, and they swished him well whenever they got the
chance.

Fionn learned to run. After a while he could buzz around a tree
like a maddened fly, and oh, the joy, when he felt himself
drawing from the switch and gaining from behind on its bearer!
How he strained and panted to catch on that pursuing person and
pursue her and get his own switch into action.

He learned to jump by chasing hares in a bumpy field. Up went the
hare and up went Fionn, and away with the two of them, hopping
and popping across the field. If the hare turned while Fionn was
after her it was switch for Fionn; so that in a while it did not
matter to Fionn which way the hare jumped for he could jump that
way too. Long-ways, sideways or baw-ways, Fionn hopped where the
hare hopped, and at last he was the owner of a hop that any hare
would give an ear for.

He was taught to swim, and it may be that his heart sank when he
fronted the lesson. The water was cold. It was deep. One could
see the bottom, leagues below, millions of miles below. A small
boy might shiver as he stared into that wink and blink and twink
of brown pebbles and murder. And these implacable women threw him
in!

Perhaps he would not go in at first. He may have smiled at them,
and coaxed, and hung back. It was a leg and an arm gripped then;
a swing for Fionn, and out and away with him; plop and flop for
him; down into chill deep death for him, and up with a splutter;
with a sob; with a grasp at everything that caught nothing; with
a wild flurry; with a raging despair; with a bubble and snort as
he was hauled again down, and down, and down, and found as
suddenly that he had been hauled out.

Fionn learned to swim until he could pop into the water like an
otter and slide through it like an eel.

He used to try to chase a fish the way he chased hares in the
bumpy field--but there are terrible spurts in a fish. It may be
that a fish cannot hop, but he gets there in a flash, and he
isn't there in another. Up or down, sideways or endways, it is
all one to a fish. He goes and is gone. He twists this way and
disappears the other way. He is over you when he ought to be
under you, and he is biting your toe when you thought you were
biting his tail.

You cannot catch a fish by swimming, but you can try, and Fionn
tried. He got a grudging commendation from the terrible women
when he was able to slip noiselessly in the tide, swim under
water to where a wild duck was floating and grip it by the leg.

"Qu--," said the duck, and he disappeared before he had time to
get the "-ack" out of him.

So the time went, and Fionn grew long and straight and tough like
a sapling; limber as a willow, and with the flirt and spring of a
young bird. One of the ladies may have said, "He is shaping very
well, my dear," and the other replied, as is the morose privilege
of an aunt, "He will never be as good as his father," but their
hearts must have overflowed in the night, in the silence, in the
darkness, when they thought of the living swiftness they had
fashioned, and that dear fair head.



CHAPTER V

ONE day his guardians were agitated: they held confabulations at
which Fionn was not permitted to assist. A man who passed by in
the morning had spoken to them. They fed the man, and during his
feeding Fionn had been shooed from the door as if he were a
chicken. When the stranger took his road the women went with him
a short distance. As they passed the man lifted a hand and bent a
knee to Fionn.

"My soul to you, young master," he said, and as he said it, Fionn
knew that he could have the man's soul, or his boots, or his
feet, or anything that belonged to him.

When the women returned they were mysterious and whispery. They
chased Fionn into the house, and when they got him in they chased
him out again. They chased each other around the house for
another whisper. They calculated things by the shape of clouds,
by lengths of shadows, by the flight of birds, by two flies
racing on a flat stone, by throwing bones over their left
shoulders, and by every kind of trick and game and chance that
you could put a mind to.

They told Fionn he must sleep in a tree that night, and they put
him under bonds not to sing or whistle or cough or sneeze until
the morning.

Fionn did sneeze. He never sneezed so much in his life. He sat up
in his tree and nearly sneezed himself out of it. Flies got up
his nose, two at a time, one up each nose, and his head nearly
fell off the way he sneezed.

"You are doing that on purpose," said a savage whisper from the
foot of the tree.

But Fionn was not doing it on purpose. He tucked himself into a
fork the way he had been taught, and he passed the crawliest,
tickliest night he had ever known. After a while he did not want
to sneeze, he wanted to scream: and in particular he wanted to
come down from the tree. But he did not scream, nor did he leave
the tree. His word was passed, and he stayed in his tree as
silent as a mouse and as watchful, until he fell out of it.

In the morning a band of travelling poets were passing, and the
women handed Fionn over to them. This time they could not prevent
him overhearing.

"The sons of Morna!" they said.

And Fionn's heart might have swelled with rage, but that it was
already swollen with adventure. And also the expected was
happening. Behind every hour of their day and every moment of
their lives lay the sons of Morna. Fionn had run after them as
deer: he jumped after them as hares: he dived after them as fish.
They lived in the house with him: they sat at the table and ate
his meat. One dreamed of them, and they were expected in the
morning as the sun is. They knew only too well that the son of
Uail was living, and they knew that their own sons would know no
ease while that son lived; for they believed in those days that
like breeds like, and that the son of Uail would be Uail with
additions.

His guardians knew that their hiding-place must at last be
discovered, and that, when it was found, the sons of Morna would
come. They had no doubt of that, and every action of their lives
was based on that certainty. For no secret can remain secret.
Some broken soldier tramping home to his people will find it out;
a herd seeking his strayed cattle or a band of travelling
musicians will get the wind of it. How many people will move
through even the remotest wood in a year! The crows will tell a
secret if no one else does; and under a bush, behind a clump of
bracken, what eyes may there not be! But if your secret is legged
like a young goat! If it is tongued like a wolf! One can hide a
baby, but you cannot hide a boy. He will rove unless you tie him
to a post, and he will whistle then.

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