‘Life Giving Water From The Well Of The World’s End To The Ocean Of The
Streams Of Story’
th
A Talk for the 10 Annual Benedict Kiely Literary Weekend
Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland
Patrick Ryan, Ph.D., FEA
A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out
on the surface of the water, and their reverberation has an effect on the
water lilies and reeds, the paper boat and the buoys of the fishermen at
various distances. … In a short time countless events or micro-events occur
one after another. Even if a person had the time and desire, I doubt whether
all of this could be registered without missing some aspect of change.
It is not much different with a word, thrown by chance into the mind,
producing waves on the surface and in the depths. It provokes an infinite
series of chain reactions and, as it falls, it evokes sounds and images,
analogues and recollections, meanings and dreams, in a movement that
touches experience and memory, the imagination and the unconscious, and
it is complicated by the fact that the mind does not react passively, but
intervenes continually to accept and reject these representations, to connect
and censor them, construct and destroy them.
(Gianni Rodari)
Gianni Rodari’s metaphor will, I hope, help trace the thought processes of a
writer, processes mirroring the magical journeys taken by heroes and heroines
in the wonder tales Benedict Kiely references. Although, as Rodari says, it’s
impossible to register every ripple, the concept of a word dropped into the mind
being like a stone dropped into a pond helps us map some of the more traceable
thoughts of writers and readers when creating narratives. Reading and listening
are active, and interactive, experiences where the reader or listener re-creates
the story, even creating images different than those the narrator intended.
In ‘The Heroes of the Dark House’ Kiely references several storytellers and
folktales; these stories have variants in other languages and cultures, and
multiple versions in Irish folklore. Folklorists identify stories, compare and
analyse them, and trace their development and migration by indexing the motifs
common to several tales: details such as magic objects (like mirrors, rings,
animals and swords), repetitive actions such as impossible tasks and journeys,
and rhetorical devices providing common descriptions such as ‘hair black as
ebony, lips red as blood, skin white as snow’ (Ashliman, Zimmerman, Leach).
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These instantly trigger mental activity, imagery for listeners or readers. These
literary memes hint at thought processes taking place as the writer or teller
spins his or her ‘yarn’. With topoi such as these, the narrator stimulates thought
processes engaging readers and listeners so that they understand the story, but
are also immersed within it and emotionally moved by it (Lodge, Zipes 2006 and
2009, Ryan).
The wonder tales mentioned in Kiely’s story share similar structures and motifs,
and these are clues to his thinking, and to his intentions for readers’ responses.
One prominent motif is water or a magic well, common motifs in folklore and
mythology. It’s also a metaphor some cultures use when describing what stories
and storytelling are, and what happens when listeners or readers engage with
the art form.
The water metaphor is a powerful one. Without water we do not live, and the
human body is mostly water, as is our planet. Where there is human interaction,
there are stories. No society in human history has existed without narrative,
suggesting narrative is as life enhancing as water. Stories cross over continents
and between languages, fitting different contexts and purposes while uniting
individuals through social exchanges. Like water, words and narratives flow
from one place to another by the path of least resistance. Just as water easily fills
any container, stories fit any purpose: for pleasure, education, consolation or
inspiration. Narratives fit into different genre, media, and aesthetic styles.
Intuitively this knowledge of how narrative works informs our thoughts, speech
and literary art, as well as social interaction (Lodge).
This was recognised long ago. Kathá Sarit Ságara (The Ocean of the Streams of
Story) is one of the great narratives of India, a frame story that is the Indian
equivalent of The Arabian Nights. It influenced other Indian classics, like the
Panchatantra and the Mahabharata. Indian stories also influenced story
traditions in classical, medieval and modern periods, across Persia, China,
Arabia, the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe (Leach,
Philip). These ancient tales continue to inspire. A recent manifestation of Kathá
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Sarit Ságara is Salmon Rushdie’s children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(Rushdie).
This idea that we exist in an ocean of stories, and that there are streams of
stories flowing into one another and into and out of each of us, links us to the
metaphor of the well at the end of the world and the water of life it gives. Kiely
links these when describing Owen Roe Wade, one of Broderick’s informants, who
‘Paralysed in his garret he travelled as he talked to find life-giving water in the
well at the world’s end.’ This is the place our stone drops and makes some
ripples we can map. That Owen Roe is paralysed but uses stories and
storytelling to live, to travel in his imagination, expresses concepts around Kathá
Sarit Ságara.
When exploring Kiely’s use of folk tales, I’m not claiming that he always
consciously used folklore elements, or that he necessarily interpreted them
exactly as I do now. Nor am I making a Freudian analysis, where the folk
elements found in his work hint at dark psychological meanings. Writing, and
our comprehension of writing processes, is more complex than this. The writing
process is a mixture of the author’s knowledge and experiences, with influences
from other literary sources and art forms. Through conscious and subconscious
mental activities, words chosen express the writer’s thoughts but also prompt
readers’ thinking. Narrative becomes more than the sum of its parts.
For example, scholars love to emphasize Synge’s reliance on his collected
folklore and dialect, and the influence of his sense of the medieval grotesque on
his work, but as one academic warned: ‘Any study of Synge’s work concerning
questions of source and literary influence is dogged by three major difficulties.
First, life, not literature, was his primary source; second, his originality obscures
direct links with the traditions within which he was writing; and finally, his
intimacy with so many folk tales confounds attempts to identify possible
influences from their literary analogues’ (Johnson). This is equally true with
Kiely who, I believe, chose folk tale titles and storytelling informants’ names
because these prompted certain thoughts, images, and memories as he created
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his narrative. These were drawn from local knowledge and life experience,
sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously. And equally, both
consciously and subconsciously, his eye and ear told him which word evoked
certain thought processes in his and his readers’ minds. Stories, as well as who
tells them and the context in which they’re told, provide insights into how the
mind constructs meaning when interacting with narration.
Consider the real Owen Roe Ward—Eoghan Ruadh Mc an Bhaird, born in 1550 to
a family of hereditary Donegal poets, died around 1630, chief poet to Red Hugh
O’Donnell who, after the Flight of the Earls, served Rory and then Niall Garbh
O’Donnell (Ulster Historical Circle). It’s no coincidence that Kiely named this
informant after the famous bard. It might be. It might be Kiely liked the sound of
the name, or chose it because it’s common to the story’s locale and he knew
someone by that name. A writer familiar with local legend chose the name
deliberately, particularly as his early works included a significant study of
William Carleton who reported on and incorporated local lore in his own writing.
Any reader knowing of the bard Owen Row will experience a frisson of
recognition, connecting history and myth with the contemporary fiction and real
life, making a more complex response to this piece.
The reason for his paralysis tells us Kiely’s Owen Roe is not the O’Donnell’s bard,
and simultaneously evokes more thoughts and stories. ‘Hewing trees for hire in
a tangled plantation whose wood had once paid for the travels and other
activities of D’Orsay and Lady Blessington, Owen brought down on his hapless
spine a ton-weight of timber.’ The notorious Lady Blessington, an adventuress
from Clonmel, married young to an army captain who soon died bankrupt, then
four months after wed an Irish aristocrat seven years her senior, the first Earl of
Blessington. They toured Europe living an expensive, wasteful lifestyle,
befriending Lord Byron, and forming a ménage à trois with Count D’Orsay. After
the Earl’s death D’Orsay and Lady Blessington continued their dissolute life
(Cousin, Gardiner).
Again, those familiar with their notoriety will find that image juxtaposed with
images of the overgrown timber plantation, ravaged inheritance, and a paralyzed
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Owen Roe in a garret. These references neatly indicate Brokerick’s age: Owen
Roe, the informant, is connected with the notorious Regency couple, so the
collector and informant possibly cover a span of 100 to 150 years between them.
Even without detailed knowledge, this passage establishes in reader’s minds
Broderick’s relationship to his folk studies and his community, providing insight
to this main character.
So, what of Owen Roe’s story, the ‘King of Green Island’? There are many
variations, one made famous by Jeremiah Curtin, an American anthropologist
who learned Irish to gather folklore in the late 19th Century. For those knowing
of Curtin, with their awareness of when Broderick most likely collected from
Owen Roe, this title conjures up the Irish Literary Renaissance, as does the
unnamed folktale with the magic well at the world’s end, an image central to this
talk.
Multiple versions of ‘The Well at the World’s End’ exist in Ireland, notably one by
Douglas Hyde and another by Seamus McManus, both closely associated with the
Gaelic revival. Their versions closely resemble Grimms’ ‘The Water of Life’ and a
Scottish tale from John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands.
McManus, from Mount Charles, was another Ulsterman with Donegal stories
from around the Blue Stacks and the Laggan. Folklorist, writer and poet,
McManus popularized Irish legends in America as children’s literature. He began
hanging around the fringes of the Celtic Twilight with James Stephens and
Padraic Colum, who all followed Yeats, AE and that crowd, but like Colum,
McManus made more of a name for himself in America. The Green Island and The
Well O’ the World’s End’ are ‘fair-to-middlin’’ distant cousins, both telling of long
impossible journeys made by a king’s son, with magic objects and helpers, a
princess bride, and insurmountable tasks completed by hero and heroine.
Curtins’ story tells of a son of a king in Erin who loses a bet playing hurly when
tricked by a stranger, who sets him on a journey to find Green Island. Helped by
three giants, he flies there on a golden eagle and wins the love of the youngest
daughter of the King of Green Island. Her father sets him three impossible tasks
to win three magic objects. The princess does the work and she and the king’s
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son elope. Pursued by her family, they throw the magic objects that change into
obstacles, allowing their escape. Once home, the king’s son forgets about his
princess when he’s kissed by his dog, and she must work as a servant until
getting the chance to prove her identity, so that the king’s son remembers her
and they are wed.
McManus’s ‘Well O’ The End of the World’ tells of Conor, son of a King in Ireland,
whose wicked stepmother tricks him into fetching three bottles of the magic
water of life from the well at the end of the world. Hindered by two cowardly
stepbrothers who are turned to stone, and helped by three magical old men who
provide a magic horse; he gets to the well, in a fortress impossible to breach,
guarded by warriors with flaming swords and fierce animals, and ruled by a
beautiful queen. But every 700 years all within the fortress sleep for one hour,
and Conor has arrived at naptime. He’s warned to get the water and not dally,
but he goes exploring, takes magic objects from the castle for his own future use,
and then kisses the beautiful queen, leaving a broken ring as love token shared
between them. He escapes just in time to avoid death and rewards the old men
with the magic objects, and they restore his stepbrothers to life. The stepmother
is so furious at his success she drops dead, but his father is happy.
Meanwhile, the queen awakes and tells her ladies she dreamt of an Irish prince
kissing her, leaving a broken ring as love token. Seeing the broken ring, and that
the water has been stolen, and she realises it was true and pursues Conor to keep
her honour. The three old men help her and on arriving in Ireland, the
stepbrothers claim to be her prince, but can’t produce the love token. When
Conor does so, they are wed.
Two folk tales with similar elements: magic objects; impossible tasks and
journeys; elders challenged and usurped by the young; and, finally, interesting,
active roles for women. The writer’s intent is to provide chances for readers to
engage intellectually and emotionally, thus sharing the writer’s thoughts when
relating the narrative. Even if readers know nothing of the tales, local history, or
local characters, their mention provides enough description and musical
language to establish images of green mountains, rocky sea shores, landscapes
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shrouded in mist and quaint old villages peopled with eccentrics, all in contrast
to the newness and strangeness of the occupying forces and the young upstart.
Kiely’s intention is that elements in the folktales underscore situations in the
main narrative regarding Broderick and his manuscript, whose achievements are
usurped by a younger upstart folklorist: this meeting of an old man and a young
could lead to benefits or prove an obstacle; the tales’ impossible
accomplishments mirror deeds of real warriors in both ’98 and World War Two;
and the transformations in the folktales foreshadow those in the short story,
with characters seeming to be one thing then appear in a different guise.
Over afternoon tea, Broderick relates contemporary news—the sudden, recent
redeployment of American forces garrisoned nearby, gone to fight on mainline
Europe. Then Broderick segues into the origins of his drawing-room table, made
of a blacksmith’s bellows destroyed by British yeomanry fighting the rebels of
1798. He doesn’t exchange wonder tales or experiences in his folklore collection,
as might be expected. Kiely knew his stuff; this is an accurate depiction of typical
encounters when doing fieldwork. I remember every time I visited the late John
Campbell, renowned storyteller from South Armagh: each visit started with a
walk across Slieve Gullion and much discussion and admiration of John’s herd of
rare sheep, and only then did we settle in the front parlour to exchange old
wonder tales, all narratives framed by news of names, places and experiences we
had in common. Many who romanticize storytelling activities forget that they
are firmly embedded in everyday life, with exchanges of real local news and
current events that link stories of the imagination to goings on in the world.
Responses to such stories bring discussions back to the here and now of practical
matters, like chores to do, or social courtesies such as cups of tea, or a pint or
whiskey.
As in the fairy tales, Broderick doesn’t at first appear helpful to the young man.
Yet discussing present and past armies introduces thoughts of real life warriors,
linking them with mythological counterparts. Like their literary representations,
the modern heroes travel across seas to dangerous kingdoms, facing impossible
tasks and terrible monsters. Like the fictional heroes, their deeds transform
them.
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Kiely has chosen to reference folktales with women in active roles. His female
informant, Maire John, the frisky old woman who enjoys hugging men as though
she’s still twenty, has, like Owen Roe, an interesting connection and tells
archetypal narratives*. By design or coincidence, Maire John’s name is
reminiscent of John Le Maire, a French poet born in1473 whose most famous
work is The Three Stories of Cupid and Fate. Maire John narrates the Hound of the
White Mountain. This is a variant Cathleen and the Greyhound, a story made
popular today by well-known teller Liz Weir, and all three of these, as Kiely
points out, are versions of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche.
A king of Ireland has a magic wishing chair and three daughters. Forbidden
access to the chair, the daughters disobey and use it to make wishes, the eldest
two wanting handsome princely husbands, while the third sensibly decides a dog
would be better company than a man. To her surprise, her wish is granted and
she has a dog by day who turns to a handsome prince by night: the best of both
worlds, perhaps. Soon they have three children, each stolen by magic forces
immediately after birth, but the mother is never allowed to weep for their loss.
On a visit home, her sisters trick her into revealing her husbands’ true form,
causing the separation of the heroine and her canine husband. She pursues him,
with the usual magic helpers and hospitality on the long journey, finally
completing impossible tasks to break an evil witch’s spell, restoring her husband
and children.
Owen Roe and Maire John’s heroines suffer, working hard and patiently while
abused, their true worth unrecognised. They prefigure the incident Kiely relates
when Broderick and the publican, Patrick, witness the gallantry of the American
soldier towards a local girl of low reputation. When the cynical publican is
shocked by the unmanly courtesy of the Yank in uniform towards a slattern,
Broderick chides him.
But, Patrick, child, it’s idyllic. Deirdre in the hero tale couldn’t have been
more nobly treated by the three Ulster brothers, the sons of Uisneach. Hitler
*
After presenting this paper at the 10th Annual Benedict Kiely Literary Weekend, I was informed
that Maire John was a real person and well known storyteller in Donegal, whom Kiely would have
met and likely heard tell stories when on holidays as a boy. Seán ÓhEochaidh, a Donegal man
who worked for the Irish Folk Lore Commission from 1934 to 1974 knew her and collected her
stories.
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and Hirohito had to bring the doughboys over here before one of the Banty
Mullins was handled like a lady.
Through interaction with foreign warriors, a kind act transforms Miss Banty
Mullins: just as the princess of the Green Island became a servant until finally
remembered by the king’s son and was transformed by his love, and just as
kindness and patience in the face of tortuous work restored the third sister’s
handsome dog-husband and her status.
Another French connection comes from the tale by Peadar Haughey of Creggan
Cross. Haughey’s Giant of Reibhlean, which is better known in France than
Ireland, as it was collected and translated from Irish over a hundred years ago by
Henri-George Dottin, French professor of Celtic Languages descended from an
Irish family. His collection of Irish tales included Le Petit Garçon et le Grand
Géant, which is Haughey’s tale.
Here a king of Erin has a daughter and three sons, who love each other dearly.
The princess marries, and she, the three brothers and new husband all are
affectionate to each other. The princess has a son. But when the husband,
brothers and son are off hunting, the Giant steals away the wife because no man
was there with her. The men return and then party for a year and a day before
the husband notices his wife is missing. In turn, husband and then each brother,
goes one at a time year after year to rescue the princess, encountering the giant’s
henchmen, and then the giant, who always passes through fire and ash, roaring
like another fairy tale giant:
Fee Fi Fo Fire,
I smell an Irish liar,
an Irish cheat,
in my yard and in my castle
he’ll make my meat!
Each man is turned to stone. At last after 5 years of relatives disappearing one
by one, the little boy finally notices his mother, father and uncles are gone and
goes to search for them. Instead of doing as his elders did, treating the giant’s
men politely and doing their bidding, the little boy chops off their heads. While
the men hid, the boy confronts the giant when the monster roars his rhyme,
fighting fiercely. In the end, the boy knocks off the giant’s head; the head tries to
reattach to the neck but the boy beats it away. At last the head gives up, saying it
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was good he fought so hard for if the head and body rejoined then never would
any man of Erin vanquish him. (This is a very common trope in Irish fairy tales).
The lad frees his mother, brings his father and uncles back to life, and they take
the giant’s fortune back to Ireland where they live happily until they die.
Finally, another important strategy Kiely uses, consciously or not, to link the
mythical and real is to provide readers a sense of both real Irish places as well as
an authentic feeling of the ‘once upon a time’ or ‘fado fado fado’ in Irish folklore.
Kiely does this not by spouting generic, ‘Oirish-y’ clichés resulting in a
stereotypical, sentimental and predictable stylised writing—which is often what
results when less talented writers seek short cuts to express ‘Irishness’, as in
American and British films set in Ireland. Rather, Kiely’s carefully, economically
crafted observations establish an authenticity linking mythical and real to
elucidate Broderick’s character, and both that character’s and the writer’s
thoughts about the world.
With the informants Haughey and Pat Moses Gavigan, Kiely uses local geographic
connections and family names to trigger local readers’ knowledge, and suggest
mythological connections with real landscapes for general readers. The
Haugheys were a large clan from townlands near Carrickmore, where one finds
landmarks like the Creggan Cross, and Dun Ruadh, or Red Fort, near
Sixmilecross: places, as locals know, holding standing stones and other ancient
features. Kiely highlights the self-referential aspects in his writing by using Pat
Moses Garigan, a character also in in ‘The White Wild Bronco’, the story
preceding ‘Heroes of the Dark House.’ By doing so he communicates to readers
that there is a connectedness between stories, and between the stories and
Kiely’s own life and environment. Other associations between the universal and
local that Kiely makes occur when he uses local family names or transfers a myth
from one locale to another.
For example, Fionn McChumhail and the Salmon of Knowledge, attributed to
Gavigan, is set it in the Camown River at Cranny, Omagh. This might really be a
local legend, but most Salmon of Knowledge stories state the salmon is in the
Boyne or the Suir, or in pools or rivers near Croagh Patrick. Transferring a myth
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to a local river avoids stereotype, making the universal specific. Garigan’s King of
Antua (Antua being a river in Portugal) fought with Macan Mor (or Big
McCann….leader of an ancient clan that ruled from Donegal to Dundalk).
However, I can’t help but wonder if Kiely was thinking of, another Macan Mor:
Frank McKenna, renowned Tyrone storyteller but a long time resident in
Scotland (Ballard). Placing characters and locales and combining fact and fiction
in more than one story, the author strengthens the idea that imagined characters
and places are real.
Mixing mythology, fiction, and real history, Kiely engineers it so separate
streams flow together, so sparking the mental journeys he desires for his
readers. As Broderick’s friends, Kiely names real men, significant in Ulster’s
recent history, that set Broderick on his mental journey: as his employer, Sir
Horace Plunkett, politician and agricultural reformer; as his friend Thomas
Andrews, builder of the Titanic; and the unnamed canon, a hero turned to stone,
whose statue reminds Broderick of their own good deeds. These men provided
Broderick’s living, gave him the discipline and methodology for his fieldwork, or
provided a purposeful communal social life that supplied a rich network of
informants, kinship ties, and local geography. These give meaning to Broderick’s
life. Kiely stresses, ‘Plain and mountain and river-valley, the places he knew
were sombre with the sense of family, and folk-tales grew as naturally there as
grass. Heroes, princesses, enchanters good and bad, he had marshalled them off
right to left, made his roll-call, described them in that high-spined handwriting
he had studied so laboriously in the old manuscripts. …. He called them his
children.’
Broderick’s life has informed his understanding of the stories and their
importance, while his desire to publish his folktale collection is an attempt to tell
the world about his life, to confirm his sense of identity.
He sent them out to the ends of the earth, to magazine editors and
publishing houses. They came back rejected to him…. Then one day in the
smoky room under the power of squabbling enchanter jackdaws he had the
bitterness of discovering that this children had betrayed him. In a Dublin
newspaper he read the review of the young scholar’s book…
His stories will betray him twice, but neither time causes him to destroy his
manuscript. Nor do these betrayals cause him to reject his community or way of
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life.
Mr. Broderick couldn’t blame the three princesses for leaving the wishing
chair and making off with a younger man. That scholar, wise head on his
young shoulders, could be Cupid, more beautiful than the sun and the moon;
he might even be that enigmatic character, The White Hound of the
Mountain.
He invites the young folklorist to see him, showing no bitterness. (Unless it’s
achieved through passive/aggressive revenge, by keeping the lad in a smoky
room that clearly discomforts him, and relating true war stories instead of the
old wonder tales any folklorist prizes and expects. But this is typical for those
wise old helpers of heroes, delaying journeys with opaque advice or obscure
magic objects.) Broderick becomes the helper, not the monster king or giant or
witch, through the manifestation of wonder, that is, the transformations in both
stories and real world.
Jack Zipes, a world expert on fairy tales, claims that authentic wonder tales are
expressions of utopia. Fairy tales are not escapism, but a way to experiment with
reality, turning things upside down and trying out new ways of living, new
societies where the underdog is empowered, where power and tyranny are
challenged (Zipes 2006, 2009). Broderick’s transformation comes about through
reminiscence, which finds expression in his own storytelling, hospitality and gift
giving. Broderick gives his stories to the young usurper, he grants magic objects
to the modern warriors. Carving bog oak souvenirs that the publican sells to
visiting American soldiers, these talismans remind soldiers of their adventures in
foreign lands as tokens of shared experiences and landscapes.
And these modern warriors even provide one last chance for Broderick’s wish to
come true. A US army major offers to publish his folktales to cement cultural
relations between the US troops and the Ulster locals. Intriguingly, Kiely has the
officer claim that Broderick’s fairy stories are ‘real contemporary,’ and surely
this is Kiely’s aim, to help modern readers see ancient tales remain relevant. The
promised book never materializes. Broderick leaves the Major, taking the train
home from Belfast, and that very night the troops depart, vanishing by morning,
gone so quickly it was as though they were never there.
The heroes had gone, but the heroes would stay with him for ever. His
children would stay with him for ever, but, in a way, it was a pity that he
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could never give his stories to all those fine young men.
In the end, Broderick welcomes his fellow folklorist, proud that a local youth has
gone away and come back successful, like his beloved mythical heroes.
Eventually, Broderick does notice the smoke, asking does the young fellow mind
it. He opens the door so smoke bellows out, just as the stories flow out in to the
world.
My poor stories. My poor heroes. They went away to the well at the world’s
end but they always came back. Once they came very close to enlisting in the
US army. That’s a story I must tell you sometime.
Like many Irish writers and poets, Kiely drew upon folklore and myth as easily
and readily as one draws breath, or water. As many have already pointed out,
consciously or subconsciously, inspired by his life and the lives of others, and
relying on the landscape with its layers of history, legend, and remembered
dreams, Kiely used these to guide both his writing and his readers responses to
his work. He actively involves readers, who must not be passive, merely
absorbing the musicality of the language and allowing the images words create
to play across their minds. Readers must work: each iteration of a story title,
place-name, character name, or historic fact triggers ideas, emotions, and images
so that readers create the legends, myths and wonder tales anew. In their minds,
the real and the imagined, the historic and the fantastic, the personal and the
commonly shared, all mix together, just as do the many life-giving waters flowing
from the well at the world’s end into the streams of the ocean of stories.
In ‘The Heroes of the Dark House’, Kiely tells us of the transformative power of
stories when related to real experience, and acknowledges the universal and
never-ending phenomenon of heroes who always must journey to seek lifegiving water that just might bring about some better world. Kiely leaves his two
folklorists sitting by the fireside, sharing old and new stories between them.
‘Around them in the smoke were the grey shadows of the heroic eighteenthcentury men who, to fight tyranny, had forged steel pikes. And eastwards
the heroes had swept that earth-shaking summer, over the treacherous
mined sea, over the seven miles of spiked strand, over the seven and seventy
miles of burning mountain.’
REFERENCES
Asliman, David, Folk and Fairy Tales, a handbook Westport, Connecticut and
London: Greenwood Press, 2004
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Ballard, Linda Collected Folktales, Northern Ireland, unpublished manuscripts of
transcripts and notes, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum Library, 1970s.
Carleton, William Traits & Stories of the Irish Peasantry Dublin: William Cury,
Jun., and Co., 1854
Cousin, John William A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature,
London: J M Dent & Sons, 1910
Curtin, Jeremiah ‘The King’s Son in Erin and the King of Green Island’ in Jeremiah
Curtin’s Irish Folk-Tales, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1964
Gardiner, Marguerite (Lady Blessington), The Idler in France, 1841 (available
Project Gutenberg)
Hyde, Douglas Beside the Fire, a collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories, London: Nutt,
1890
Johnson, Toni O’Brien The Medieval and the Grotesque Gerrards Cross: Colin
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Kiely, Benedict ‘The White Wilde Bronco’ and ‘The Heroes of the Dark House’ The
Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely, Boston: David R Godine, 2005
Kiely, Benedict Poor Scholar, a study of William Carleton 1794-1869, Dublin:
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Leach, Maria (ed.) Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, New York: Funk
& Wagnalls Company, 1950
Lodge, David, Consciousness and the Novel, London: Secker & Warburg 2002
MacManus, Seamus The Well O’ The World’s End New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1939
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