Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/484

 442 The Ancient Hymn-Charms of Ireland.

This is a Mayo version. Another from Aran is more familiar, —

" Four posts around my bed, Four angels have it spread, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Keep me, O God, till day shall dawn "

which is very nearly the common English version.^'^

The immense number of native words in Irish and Scotch Gaelic relating to spells, charms, and divination show the prevalence of these ideas and the care with which one charm was distinguished from another. The most interesting to us is the spell called faeth-fiadha, (modern Irish, feth-fia, Scotch Gaelic, fatJi-fidhe or fa' fithe), the name given to St. Patrick's Lorica and usually translated " The Deer's Cry," in allusion to the tradition that, when St. Patrick and his followers were escaping from King Laery, they were changed into a herd of deer and so rendered invisible to him and to his hosts. It was a charm rendering the user of it invisible, but its original meaning has become con- fused with the Gaelic word for a deer {fiadJi), with which it has nothing to do, and this story, combining the two ideas of invisibility and of the deer, has evidently been invented by mediaeval writers to support this explanation. The learned guesses of modern philologists have not tended to make the matter clearer. But the fatJi-fidhe is still well-known in Scotland, and has been applied in quite recent times to decidedly practical purposes. A hunter poaching in his landlord's ground could, under the protection of this charm, come from the forest laden with the spoils of the chase, without any danger of being seen, or a smuggler could carry on his trade under the very eyes of the excise officer, safe from all chance of detection. Thus the composition of this Hymn was -a faeth-fiadha or protective charm or word-

2^ Cf. article on "The White Paternoster" in the Countess Martinengo- Cesaresco's Essays in the Study of Folksongs, pp. 203-213.