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Three times, with your eyes shut_
Mothuighim boladh an Éireannaigh bhinn bhreugaigh faoi m'fhóidíndúthaigh.
_And you will see
What you will see_
Last year, in giving the young ones a volume of English Fairy Tales, mydifficulty was one of collection. This time, in offering them specimensof the rich folk-fancy of the Celts of these islands, my trouble hasrather been one of selection. Ireland began to collect her folk-talesalmost as early as any country in Europe, and Croker has found a wholeschool of successors in Carleton, Griffin, Kennedy, Curtin, and DouglasHyde. Scotland had the great name of Campbell, and has still efficientfollowers in MacDougall, MacInnes, Carmichael, Macleod, and Campbell ofTiree. Gallant little Wales has no name to rank alongside these; inthis department the Cymru have shown less vigour than the Gaedhel.Perhaps the Eisteddfod, by offering prizes for the collection of Welshfolk-tales, may remove this inferiority. Meanwhile Wales must becontent to be somewhat scantily represented among the Fairy Tales ofthe Celts, while the extinct Cornish tongue has only contributed onetale.
In making my selection I have chiefly tried to make the storiescharacteristic. It would have been easy, especially from Kennedy, tohave made up a volume entirely filled with "Grimm's Goblins" à laCeltique. But one can have too much even of that very good thing, andI have therefore avoided as far as possible the more familiar"formulae" of folk-tale literature. To do this I had to withdraw fromthe English-speaking Pale both in Scotland and Ireland, and I laid downthe rule to include only tales that have been taken down from Celticpeasants ignorant of English.
Having laid down the rule, I immediately proceeded to break it. Thesuccess of a fairy book, I am convinced, depends on the due admixtureof the comic and the romantic: Grimm and Asbjörnsen knew this secret,and they alone. But the Celtic peasant who speaks Gaelic takes thepleasure of telling tales somewhat sadly: so far as he has been printedand translated, I found him, to my surprise, conspicuously lacking inhumour. For the comic relief of this volume I have therefore had toturn mainly to the Irish peasant of the Pale; and what richer sourcecould I draw from?
For the more romantic tales I have depended on the Gaelic, and, as Iknow about as much of Gaelic as an Irish Nationalist M. P., I have hadto depend on translators. But I have felt myself more at liberty thanthe translators themselves, who have generally been over-literal, inchanging, excising, or modifying the original. I have even gonefurther. In order that the tales should be characteristically Celtic, Ihave paid more particular attention to tales that are to be found onboth sides of the North Channel.
In re-telling them I have had no scruple in interpolating now and thena Scotch incident into an Irish variant of the same story, or viceversa. Where the translators appealed to English folklorists andscholars, I am trying to attract English children. They translated; Iendeavoured to transfer. In short, I have tried to put myself into theposition of an ollamh or sheenachie familiar with both forms