I have called the present volume "Legends of Saints and Sinners," which to a certain extent it is; but I mean it for a book of Irish Christian folk-lore. My idea in compiling it has been to give for the first time a collection of genuine Irish folk-lore which might be called "Christian." By this I mean folk-stories and folk-poems which are either entirely founded upon Christian conceptions, or else are so far coloured by them, that they could never have been told—at least in their present shape—had not Christianity established itself in Ireland. Every one of these stories conforms fairly to this standard, except one or two, which I give as necessary corollaries. They are all translations from the Irish. I have found hardly any such stories in English. They were mostly collected by myself from the mouths of native speakers, but three or four of them I have taken from Irish MSS. in my own possession, and a few more were given me by my friends. Not one of these stories was ever translated into English before, with the exception of those which I have taken from my own "Religious Songs of Connacht."[1] Many of these I decided to republish here, as they were practically lost amongst the heterogeneous mass of poems, prayers, charms, etc., in which they were embedded; and, as the Religious Songs are little known, these stories which I have excerpted from them will be new to nineteen-twentieths of my readers. Several of these pieces have never been printed even in Irish, but I hope to shortly publish the original text of these, especially the Adventures of LÉithin, which seems to belong to a strange and weird cycle of beast and bird-lore, now lost or almost lost, but of which we find hints here and there though we know nothing certain.

Most of these pieces may be said to be in a true sense "folk-lore," seeing that they have almost all lingered more or less vividly in the memory of people who for the most part could neither read nor write. Some of them obviously come from Continental sources, though how they first found their way into Ireland is obscure, and the derivation of some of them cannot now be traced; others, however, are of a purely native invention; while a third class engrafts native traits and ideas upon foreign subject matter.

The stories in this collection cover a good deal of ground and present many various aspects of folk tradition and folk belief. Of native Saints we find legends concerning Patrick, Columcille, Deglan, Moling and Ciaran; of foreign Saints we find legends of St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Martin; of unknown or mythical characters we find tales of Grainne OÏgh, Friar Brian, The Old Woman of Beare, and Mulruana. Of other well-known names, OisÍn and Oscar and Solomon appear. Curiously enough I have not chanced upon any folk-tale told about Saint Brigit, the "Mary of the Gael." There is, for some reason or other, a distinct predominance of Petrine stories among these legends.

When we consider the collection as a whole, we find that its purely Irish aspect is apparent in many ways, and in none more than in the very characteristic dovetailing of what is Pagan into what is Christian. But its omissions are even more distinctly Irish than its inclusions.

In most countries, for instance, the Devil is the great outstanding anthropomorphic conception added to the folk-lore of Europe by the introduction of Christianity; and later the belief in Witches, who trafficked directly or indirectly with the Evil One, became extraordinary prevalent and powerful. Now the most striking fact about our collection is that the Devil personified rarely appears in it at all, and Witches never. The belief in Witches, and in Witches' Sabbaths, with which other nations were positively obsessed, and which gave rise to such hecatombs of unhappy victims in almost all the Protestant and in some of the Catholic countries in Europe, as well as in America, never found its way into native Ireland at all, or disturbed Gaelic sanity, although a few isolated instances occurred amongst the English settlers. The Highland Gaels, to whom the idea of witches was more familiar owing to their proximity to the Scottish Lowlands, which was one of the most witch-ridden Countries in Europe, simply borrowed the English Word for witch under the form "buitseach," and from that they coined the word "buitseachas" for witchcraft.

The Irish, however, did not borrow even the name—they had never heard of the thing itself, and had naturally no name for a class of creatures with whom they had no acquaintance.

It is true that the Evil Eye was known in Ireland, and I have found one or two prayers or charms against it;[2] but so far as I have collected, I have not been able to find it made the basis of any story.

In ancient times, however, there were creatures known in Ireland who appear to have had some of the characteristics of the Christian witches, but their conception is purely Pagan and owes nothing to Christianity. Their Irish name was amait, and it was applicable to both sexes. In the old translation of the "Cath catharda" (the Irish version of Lucan's Pharsalia), Medea is called the chief amait or witch of the world. In the "Agallamh na Senorach" or Dialogue between St. Patrick on one side, and OisÍn and Caoilte[3] on the other, we read of nine women amaits who were engaged in "amaidecht," and who used never allow a man or woman to escape them. "And they were not long there," says the thirteenth (?) century text," until they saw the nine black gloomy witches (amaits) coming to meet them; and if the dead ever arose out of the ground the yells which they used to utter round them on all sides would have brought them forth [from their tombs]. And Patrick takes the holy water and sprinkles it on the amaits, and they fled away from him until they reached Inis Guil, which is called the island of the shrine or the White Lake of Ceara.[4] And it was there they heard the last cry from them. And the people seated themselves on the sodded sward, and the King of Connacht spake then, 'that is the chasing of a good-cleric that thou hast given to the demons,' said he.'"

This word amait, though lost in folk-speech, and never now used in the sense of witch, has nevertheless perpetuated itself in an extraordinary tradition in parts of Connacht. The appellation for the Fairy Palace, where the Good People or Tuatha De Danann dwell, is bruidhean (pronounced Breean with the b broad), and there is a belief that there is a denizen of the bruidhean called "amadÁn na bruidhne," which seems to mean the "fool of the palace" whose lightest touch is death. From the other creatures of the bruidhean one may escape scatheless, but never from the "amadÁn." This "amadÁn" I take to be a folk perversion or a diminutive of amait, and to have nothing at all to say to the word "amadÁn," "a fool."

The amait owes nothing to Christianity, but her equivalent in modern folk-lore would rather be found in the Story of "Conn among the goats," where the woman whom all thought dead comes back from the grave, and kills her husband, or in the story of the Priest and Bishop, where the hanged woman comes back as a malevolent spirit to claim the priest; or in some of the stories that Curtin collected around Dingle.

It is quite true that there are many current tales or beliefs concerning more or less malignant old women who steal butter from their neighbours' churns by charms or exorcisms, who turn themselves into hares and suck the cows, and who are supposed to possess certain more or less supernatural powers. These old women, however, seldom or never figure in regular stories, nor have they given rise to a type or even to a common appellation. They are just known as "cailleacha" or hags. There is absolutely nothing in Irish folk-lore, so far as I am acquainted with it, to suggest the disgusting and obscene orgies of the witches' sabbaths, as we find them in other countries, or of incubi or succubi, or of intercourse with the devil, or of riding on broomsticks to keep appointments with the Evil One, or of conjuring up the dead, or even of producing wasting diseases in enemies, or making, waxen or clay images of those whom they wished to injure.[5]

The Devil, too, in so far as he comes into Irish folk-lore, is a much less grotesque figure than the usual mediaeval conception of him, such as we see with horns and hooves in Albrecht DÜrer's pictures. He is usually designated as the "Old Devil" or the Aidhbherseoir, often contracted to Airseoir from the Latin Adversarius. He does not generally appear as roaming through the world seeking whom he may devour, but mostly keeps to his own abode in the Infernal Regions, where he must be sought. We meet him in both forms, as a wandering person and as king of the Lower Regions in my late friend's, Mr. Larminie's, very curious and interesting story of the woman who went to hell. He is not the popular or common character in our folk-lore that he is in Teutonic legend. He does not construct bridges, nor hold high festival on hill tops, and few or none of the curious freaks of nature as seen in rocks, chasms, and the like are attributed to him. The Devil's Bit and the Devil's Punch Bowl, so common in Anglo-Irish nomenclature, do not always correspond to the original Irish appellation.

When the survivors of the old Fianna, OisÍn (or Ossian), Caoilte and the rest, were told about Hell and the Devil by St. Patrick and his clergy, they could not, according to the Ossianic legends, comprehend it in the least, and the misunderstandings which the doctrine gave rise to were taken full advantage of by the composers of the Ossianic ballads. The idea of bringing the last great figure of Paganism, the warrior and poet Ossian, into contact with the first great Christian figure in Ireland, St. Patrick, was a brilliant one, and it gave birth to whole volumes of badinage and semi-comic wrangling in the popular ballads which told of the warrior and the cleric. These ballads used to be in great vogue at one time, and any seanchuidhe worthy of the name used to be able to repeat by heart many hundreds of lines of the dialogue between Patrick and OisÍn. This is now nearly a thing of the past, but the poems exist in numberless manuscripts, and are not yet forgotten by the older Irish speakers, though the only specimen I have given in this volume is the Baptism of OisÍn, and it is in prose. St. Patrick displays in places an excess of priestly rigour, but this is always done to set off the naÏvetÉ of OisÍn's answers.