Page:Celtic Fairy Tales.djvu/283

 Rh i. 241, as well as the Polyphemus one, ibid, 265. One-eyed giants are frequent in Celtic folk-tales (e.g. in The Pursuit of Diarmaid and in the Mabinogi of Owen).

Remarks.—Thackeray's reference to the "Arabian Nights" is especially apt, as the tale of Conall is a framework story like The 1001 Nights, the three stories told by Conall being framed, as it were, in a fourth which is nominally the real story. This method employed by the Indian story-tellers and from them adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all European literatures (Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally thought to be peculiar to the East, and to be ultimately derived from the Jatakas or Birth Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in former incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also in "The Story-teller at Fault" in this collection, and the story of Koisha Kayn in MacInnes' Argyllshire Tales, a variant of which collected but not published by Campbell has no less than nineteen tales enclosed in a framework. The question is whether the method was adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign influences. Confining ourselves to "Conal Yellowclaw," it seems not unlikely that the whole story is an importation. For the second episode is clearly the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which was known in Ireland perhaps as early as the tenth century (see Prof. K. Meyer's edition of Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis, Pref. p. xii). It also crept into the voyages of Sindbad in the Arabian Nights. And as told in the Highlands it bears comparison even with the Homeric version. As Mr. Nutt remarks (Celt. Mag. xii.) the address of the giant to the buck is as effective as that of Polyphemus to his ram. The narrator, James Wilson, was a blind man who would naturally feel the pathos of the address; "it comes from the heart of the narrator;" says Campbell (l.c., 148), "it is the ornament which his mind hangs on the frame of the story."

VI. HUDDEN AND DUDDEN.

Source.—From oral tradition, by the late D. W. Logie, taken down by Mr. Alfred Nutt.

Parallels.—Lover has a tale, "Little Fairly," obviously derived from this folk-tale; and there is another very similar, "Darby Darly." Another version of our tale is given under the title "Donald and his Neighbours," in the chapbook Hibernian Tales, whence it was reprinted by Thackeray in his Irish Sketch-Book, c. xvi. This has the incident of the "accidental matricide," on which see Prof. R. Köhler