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tales will survive the voices of their narrators. Inea Bushnaq notes: ‘It is a wistful moment when interest in recording an oral tradition wakens.’ It means that the culture of the illiterate, that is, the poor, is no longer being taken for granted. Sometimes it means that it has started to die. As the voices fall silent, one by one, so we lose irreplaceable parts of our past.
    Robert Darnton, the historian, says (in his essay, ‘Peasants Tell Tales: the Meaning of Mother Goose’) that folktales ‘provide a rare opportunity to make contact with the illiterate masses whohave disappeared into the past without leaving a trace.’ This is rather an apocalyptic way of putting it. We may not know much about the lives of those ‘illiterate masses’ but most of us are directly descended from them, and we retain, if we have lost everything else from the oral tradition, a complicated folklore of family.
    Besides, a flourishing illiterate culture has always wonderfully nourished the productions of the literati. Henry Glassie reminds us in his introduction to
Irish Folk Tales
that James Joyce named
Finnegans Wake
after a Dublin street song, even borrowed the plot.
    But Ireland is a special case. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory went out on purpose to listen to country storytellers, to strive consciously to reach out to those who had slipped through the huge holes in the net of history down which the common people vanish – to reconstruct from the mouths of the poor the basis for an authentically Irish literature, a project that bore abundant fruit. (It is interesting to read, in Inea Bushnaq’s book, that there is ‘a lively folklore department in the university at Bir Zeit,’ on the debated West Bank, and an increasing interest is the collection and preservation of Palestinian culture.)
    The stories assembled by Henry Glassie include some from those collections made by Yeats and his friends nearly a century ago, some from other nineteenth-century collections, others recorded far more recently by the editor himself and by other collectors currently working in Ireland, a nation which no longer contains a significant proportion of illiterates, but is, folklorically, far from a worked-out seam.
    An American academic who has made the English language folklore of Ireland his special study, he is scrupulous about notes and sources; his bibliography is enormous and comprehensive; his
Irish Folk Tales
is both scholarly reference book and a pleasure to browse in – but the spare fluidity of the language of his informants has not rubbed off on him, alas.
    He is grievously afflicted with fine writing (‘Pure darkness welcomes the winds that skim off the ocean’, etc.), and embarrassingly lyrical about his informants. ‘They call him eccentric . . . they call him a saint,’ he says of one. What does his informant call Henry Glassie?
    But here are stories about Finn MacCumhail and the Fenians, as Jeremiah Curtain noted them down in Donegal in 1887; stories about St Finbar, and St Brigit, and St Kevin who made apples grow on a willow tree; stories about true folk heroes – Robert Burns, Daniel O’Connell. Yes, indeed; here is an Irish Cinderella (in which the three sisters are called, Fair, Brown, and Trembling). And a giant who opines of a visitor: ‘I think you large of one mouthful and small of two mouthfuls.’
    There are also some moving examples of legendary history. For example, how Cromwell possessed a black Bible that was so big ‘it would take a horse to draw it’. When his servant opened up this Bible on the sly, lots of little men came out of it and ran around until the servant cried: ‘Off ye go in the name of the Divell!’
    The circumstances of life in these stories are universally harsh and the happy endings few and far between. A good breakfast is a pot full of boiled turnips. Drink is a curse.