Storytelling was a great part of Irish life for centuries. Bards, a sub-set of the old Druidic order, entertained the rich and powerful, whether Celtic kings or Norman lord. The highest rank of that order was ollave or master. They played harps and snag or recited the Irish epic tales. Seannachies (which means booth storyteller and historian) kept the history and folklore of the place, and many a night was spent in a tavern listening to the village storyteller regaling the assemblage with the old stories of heroes and the local kings. They kept tradition alive, because writing was rare in ancient Ireland before the coming of St. Patrick. Many of the tales would have been lost if the monks hadn’t written hem down. Still, the oral tradition survived which allowed those early folklorists like Lady “Esperanza” Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde, and Lady Augusta Gregory (both, by the way, Irish Nationalists at the turn of the century) to collect fragments and folk beliefs and old legends and preserve them for future generations.
Having grown up with this oral tradition, it isn’t surprising that the handful of fantasy stories I wrote in the 80s were based on Irish folk motifs. I come by it honestly. You might say it’s in my blood. Faerie blood at that, because legend says it runs in my the family of my father, the Fitzgeralds.
The Fitzgeralds are Norman Irish whocame over with Strongbow in the 12 the century, Family myth claims they were originally Gerardini from Florence who for some reason had to leave Italy (I’ve always suspected the original got caught with a higher-ranking noble’s wife—or else they displeased the current Pope). They ended up in Normandy where joined William the Conqueror’s doughty warriors in 1066. They won titles and gained land on the Welsh Border, where one of them, Gerald de Windsor, fathered a son with the Welsh Princess Nesta (a woman who was famed for her beauty and the fact that three lords carried her off and had children with her). That son, Mauice Fitzgerald (Maurice Son of Gerald) went to Ireland with Strongbow, and he and his descendants gathered land and power. Some became the Earls of Kildare (the British title today is “Duke of Leinster”), the Earls of Desmond and the Knights of Glyn. It is said they ruled like High Kings in their day. Every Fitzgerald in Ireland is a descendant of Maurice Fitzgerald. And, more importantly, they became, as the Irish say, more Irish than the Irish, honoring the old Celtic ways.
Which is why they include in their fabulous (in the sense of resembling a fable or being astonishing ) history a faerie queen, a wizard earl and a banshee. Yes, you heard it. I am the descendant of a faerie queen and a wizard, and we have a banshee. That ancestry is as good an explanation as any for why the handful of short stories I published in the 80s in anthologies and magazines like Dragon and Fantasy and Science Fiction, had their roots in Irish myth and legend. It is literally in my blood!
The faerie queen is Aine, once a goddess, now simply a local faerie monarch. She was a swan maiden, and very beautiful. As she sat combing her long hair, Gerald, the Earl of Desmond, spied her and fell instantly in love. Instead of wooing her—always a rather iffy and often dangerous thing with the Fey—he stole her swan cloak, and thus gained control of her. She agreed to marry him, and the marriage was a happy one. But like any union of mortals and faeries, there was a catch, a geas: the Earl must never show any surprise at anything their son might do, for their children would inherit some of their mother’s powers. One day, the son was showing off his facility with magic for some local girls, and made himself small enough to jump into a bottle. His startled father let out a cry of surprise and his happiness was over. Earl Gerald promptly turned into a goose and was seen swimming away. Aine simply disappeared, presumably to make her home in the mountain named after her, Every year at Midsummer, fires are lit ion her honor, and she is considered to be another form of Anu the Goddess. You can find this in Katherine Briggs’s The Encyclopedia of Fairies. As for her husband, in some versions of the legend he sleeps in his castle, from which he emerges to ride his silver-shod horse around Lough Gur every seven years. According to the legend as told by Yeats in his Irish Faerie and Folk Tales, this is one version of the famous Wizard Earl.
There is a competing candidate, however, the eleventh Earl of Kildare. His father was Garret Og, Henry VIII’s justicar in Ireland, and his brother Silken Thomas, whose ill-planned but wildly romantic rebellion led to his own death and that of much of his family. Young Gerald was 12 at the time and escaped with the help of his aunt Eleanor who hid him from the British, eventually sending him to Europe where he was educated and learned the ins and outs of the politics of the day. When he finally returned to Ireland, he took up the family title and ruled from Maynooth and Kilkea Castle. His interest in astronomy, metallurgy and alchemy, a fashionable pursuit among many British and European scholars (including Isaac Newton), is likely what gained him his nickname. Legend says Earl Gerald’s wife asked him to prove his powers to her, because she has heard so many tales He agreed, but with the geas that she must show no fear, for if she does, he will vanish forever from her sight. She swore that she would not be afraid no matter what he did, so he agreed to test that claim. He showed her many wonders, from the stream below the castle rising at his call to making the spirit of a dead man appear, and she remained calm. At the last he turned himself into a blackbird—and when a black cat appeared, his wife screamed a warning. Whether she screamed because she feared the cat would attack the blackbird that was her husband, or whether she viewed the cat as the devil appearing out of nowhere, since black cats were often associated with the devil, we cannot know—but her husband vanished in a puff of smoke, never to be seen again—except when he rides on his silver-clad horse (that part doesn’t change, whichever Earl is the rider)..
Now for the banshee. I don’t have a source for this, because I read the bit of story years ago—and most of my books on Irish myth and history are in boxes in the garage. But I do remember it clearly. There was a Fitzgerald descendant serving as an officer in the British army. One night as he kept watch, the keening wail of a banshee (a spirit in the form of a woman who announces the death of someone in the family to which she is attached) was heard by the garrison. A fellow officer shivered and wondered aloud for whom she cried. Fitzgerald told him not worry about his fate, because he had seen as well as heard her, and it was his own death she foretold. Apparently she doesn’t wail for my branch of the family, because she failed to cry the night before my Dad had his fatal heart attack.
So there we are. My family can claim descent from a faerie queen, formerly a Goddess, and a Wizard Earl—two of those. And supposedly for some of us, there’s a banshee foretelling death. I could have gone into long detail about my family’s history. If there was a rebellion, they were in the thick of it, usually losing and dying heroically. Someday I’ll write that diary but it will take much more space and a lot more research and access to the books packed away.
I’ll leave you with an interesting tidbit of lore for those of you who think the creatures of myth and legend have disappeared in Ireland. Years ago, I got the idea for a story about a banshee,in this case a fairy woman who causes the needless death of a mortal love and is condemned to announce deaths until she ;learns to share the grief of the family’s women. I set in the recent Troubles in Northern Ireland, and based Eamonn, the hero, on a pair of I.R.A. men. He is the only one in all her years who can see her when she’s not proclaiming death, and she keeps in company when he’s imprisoned in the Maze. When he’s released, he turns from violence to music, but he’s the target of British officer who is determined to p[ut him away for good, even though he’s become non-violent. Just after I finished the story, I was talking to someone from the North, and he laughed and asked if Eamonn was a Belfast man. I told him he was. He said, “the First Battalion of the Belfast Brigade is said to have a banshee”. So there it is: legend is alive and well in Ireland, and so may it ever be, preferably without a war to keep it going.
I'll leave you with G.K. Chesteron's "Toast to the Gaels":
"“For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.”
Happy St. Patrick’s day from an Irish Wiccan witch—and my ye be in heaven an hour before the devil knows your dead! This Shamrock American will be spending her evening watching The Quiet Man and listening to Irish folk music while consuming an unholy amount of Knappogue whiskey. Hey, I only do this once a year!