Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/256

194 It is Donal's courage which saves him from the ghost, just as happens in another story which I got, and which is a close Gaelic parallel to Grimm's "Man who went out to learn to shake with fear." The ghost whom the hero lays explains that he had been for thirty years waiting to meet some one who would not be afraid of him. There is an evident moral in this.

Page 162. Long teeth are a favourite adjunct to horrible personalities in folk-fancy. There is in my "Leabhar Sgeuluigheachta," another story of a hag of the long tooth; and in a story I got in Connacht, called the "Speckled Bull," there is a giant whose teeth are long enough to make a walking-staff for him, and who invites the hero to come to him "until I draw you under my long, cold teeth."

Loughlinn is a little village a few miles to the north-west of Castlerea, in the county Roscommon, not far from Mayo; and Drimnagh wood is a thick plantation close by. Ballyglas is the adjoining townland. There are two of the same name, upper and lower, and I do not know to which the story refers.

[In this very curious tale a family tradition seems to have got mixed up with the common belief about haunted raths and houses. It is not quite clear why the daughters should be bespelled for their father's sin. This conception could not easily be paralleled, I believe, from folk-belief in other parts of Ireland. I rather take it that in the original form of the story the sisters helped, or, at all events, countenanced their father, or, perhaps, were punished because they countenanced the brother's parricide. The discomfiture of the priest is curious.—A.N.]

Page 168. I have no idea who this Granya-Öi was. Her appearance in this story is very mysterious, for I have never met any trace of her elsewhere. The name appears to mean Granya the Virgin.

[Our story belongs to the group—the calumniated and exposed daughter or daughter-in-law. But in a German tale, belonging to the forbidden chamber series (Grimm's, No. 3, Marienkind), the Virgin Mary becomes god-*mother to a child, whom she takes with her into heaven, forbidding her merely to open one particular door. The child does this, but denies it thrice. To punish her the Virgin banishes her from heaven into a thorny wood. Once, as she is sitting, clothed in her long hair solely, a king passes, sees her, loves