Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/223

 Collectanea. 187

as their war-goddess,2i so, before the baptism of King Cairthinn, (first Christian Prince of his House, about a.d. 430), the ancestors of the Dalcassians may have worshipped Aibhinn on her holy hill, and her equally lovely sister Aine, crowned with meadowsweet, on the tamer mound of Knock- aney. Whether, if so, they found her already enthroned at Craglea on their conquest of the district, or whether the conqueror Lugad consecrated the mountains to his patroness, it is now impossible to guess. Aibhill, as banshee, held her own. We find her even usurping the place of the " Sybil " in a translation of the Dies IrcB^^ in unwonted companionship with Kmg David, and she was a commonplace of local threnodies during the eighteenth, and even the nineteenth, century. In the lake below Rathblamaic in Inchiquin she has down to recent years been seen, with the twenty-five other banshees of Clare that call her their queen, washing clothes before any impending disaster. 2

The next appearance of a banshee in local history is of a very different spirit three centuries later. The Cathreim Thoirdhealbhaigh ("Triumphs of Torlough ") was written pro- bably about A.D. 1350 by Seean mac Craith, the hereditary histonan.23 n contains accounts of three spirit women,— one, the "Sovereignty of Erin," being of surpassing loveliness, and the' two others, (if not the same,— " Dismal" and "Water Dismal") of loathsome hideousness. The hags, however, probably survive while the "Sovereignty" has perished. Bronach ("the sorrowful or dismal one ") of Ceann Boirne was known as the " Hag of Black Head" from the modern name of the older Ceann (or Rinn) of Burren. She was in full repute in 1S39, and I have heard of her vaguely about 1885 or 1887. In August, 1317, she

^^Cf. Revue ArchMogujue, N.S., vol. xviii. (1868), p. i; Sir Samuel Ferguson s paper, from the Irish point of view, in Dublin University Magazine, Oct 1834. p. 463; W. M. Hennessy, "The War Goddess of the AncienJ Irish, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. x., p. 425.

22Mss., Royal Irish Academy, 23.M.47.

2^ As yet only in manuscript, -one copy of A.D. 1509, and another probably from one of 1449. For its age see Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxxii., p. 139. ■''