Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/248

 186 Page 79. The "big black dog" seems a favourite shape for the evil spirit to take. He appears three times in this volume.

Page 81. The little man, with his legs astride the barrel, appears to be akin to the south of Ireland spirit, the clooricaun, a being who is not known, at least by this name, in the north or west of the island. See Crofton Croker's "Haunted Cellar."

Page 87. "The green hill opened," etc. The fairies are still called by the older peasantry, and all the early Irish literature agrees that the home of the  was in the hills, after the Milesians had taken to themselves the plains. Thus in the story of the "Piper and the Pooka," in the, not translated here, a door opens in the hill of Croagh Patrick, and the pair walk in and find women dancing inside. Dónal, the name of the little piper, is now Anglicised into Daniel, except in one or two Irish families which retain the old form still. The coash-t'ya bower, in which the fairy consorts ride, means literally "the deaf coach," perhaps from the rumbling sound it is supposed to make, and the banshee is sometimes supposed to ride in it. It is an omen of ill to those who meet it. It seems rather out of place amongst the fairy population, being, as it is, a gloomy harbinger of death, which will pass even through a crowded town. Cnoc Matha, better Magha, the hill of the plain, is near the town of Tuam, in Galway. Finvara is the well-known king of the fairy host of Connacht. In Lady Wilde's "Ethna, the Bride," Finvara is said to have carried off a beautiful girl into his hill, whom her lover recovers with the greatest difficulty. When he gets her back at last, she lies on her bed for a year and a day as if dead. At the end of that time he hears voices saying that he may recover her by unloosing her girdle, burning it, and burying in the earth the enchanted pin that fastened it. This was, probably, the slumber-pin which we have met so often in the "King of Ireland's Son." Nuala, the name of the fairy queen, was a common female name amongst us until the last hundred years or so. The sister of the last O'Donnell, for whom Mac an Bhaird wrote his exquisite elegy, so well translated by Mangan—

"Oh, woman of the piercing wail, That mournest o'er yon mound of clay"——

was Nuala. I do not think it is ever used now as a Christian name at all, having shared the unworthy fate of many beautiful Gaelic names of women common a hundred years ago, such as Mève, Una, Sheelah, Moreen, etc.