Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/39

Rh had. These last we have just been examining. Most of the longer tales about the Fenians, and all those stories which have long inflated passages full of alliterative words and poetic epithets, belong to this class. Under the other head of stories that were never consciously invented on Irish ground, we may place all such simple stories as bear a trace of nature myths, and those which appear to belong to our old Aryan heritage, from the fact of their having parallels amongst other Aryan-speaking races, such as the story of the man who wanted to learn to shake with fear, stories of animals and talking birds, of giants and wizards, and others whose directness and simplicity show them to have had an unconscious and popular origin, though some of these may, of course, have arisen on Irish soil. To this second class belong also that numerous body of traditions rather than tales, of conversational anecdotes rather than set stories, about appearances of fairies, or "good people," or Tuatha De Danann, as they are also called; of pookas, leprechauns, ghosts, apparitions, water-horses, &c. These creations of folk-fancy seldom appear, as far as I have observed, in the folk-tale proper, or at least they only appear as adjuncts, for in almost all cases the interest of these regular tales centres round a human hero. Stories about leprechauns, fairies, &c., are very brief, and generally have local names and scenery attached to them, and are told conversationally as any other occurrence might be