Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/245

 Rh Page 47. The groundwork or motivating of this story is known to all European children, through Hans Andersen's tale of the "Travelling Companion."

[I have studied some of the features of this type of stories Arg. Tales, pp. 443-452.—A.N.]

Page 49. This legend of the alp-luachra is widely disseminated, and I have found traces of it in all parts of Ireland. The alp-luachra is really a newt, not a lizard, as is generally supposed. He is the lissotriton punctatus of naturalists, and is the only species of newt known in Ireland. The male has an orange belly, red-tipped tail, and olive back. It is in most parts of Ireland a rare reptile enough, and hence probably the superstitious fear with which it is regarded, on the principle of omne ignotum pro terribli. This reptile goes under a variety of names in the various counties. In speaking English the peasantry when they do not use the Irish name, call him a "mankeeper," a word which has probably some reference to the superstition related in our story. He is also called in some counties a "darklooker," a word which is probably, a corruption of an Irish name for him which I have heard the Kildare people use, dochi-luachair, a word not found in the dictionaries. In Waterford, again, he is called arc-luachra, and the Irish MSS. call him arc-luachra. The alt-pluachra of the text is a mis-pronunciation of the proper name, alp-luachra. In the Arran Islands they have another name,. I have frequently heard of people swallowing one while asleep. The symptoms, they say, are that the person swells enormously, and is afflicted with a thirst which makes him drink canfuls and pails of water or buttermilk, or anything else he can lay his hand on. In the south of Ireland it is believed that if something savoury is cooked on a pan, and the person's head held over it, the mankeeper will come out. A story very like the one here given is related in Waterford, but of a, or daraga dheel, as he is there called, a venomous insect, which has even more legends attached to him than the alp-luachra. In this county, too, they say that if you turn the alp-luachra over on its back, and lick it, it will cure burns. Keating, the Irish historian and theologian, alludes quaintly to this reptile in his, so finely edited in the original the other day by Dr. Atkinson. "Since," says Keating, "prosperity or worldly store is the weapon of the adversary (the devil), what a man ought to do is to spend it in killing the adversary, that is, by bestowing it on God's poor. The thing which we read in Lactantius agrees with this, that if an airc-luachra were to inflict a wound on