Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/518

 476 Collectanea.

A Folklore Survey of County Clare (continued).

IX. Supernatural Animals.

There is a rich fauna of supernatural animals in the county, even snakes being represented in it. There can be little doubt that the highly imaginative early Irish personified the more terrifying powers of nature, such as the sea, the storm, and the thunder. The roaring, writhing waves in a sea creek or river swirl may have suggested some great creature, (too great to be natural), wallowing under the waters, and so given rise to the endless p'eist names and legends, in which a distinction is never drawn between the spectral and the natural.

Feists. — Ireland, although free from serpents at all times known to science, was yet much dominated by them mentally. Probably no lake of any importance in Clare was untenanted by a serpent, a wonderful animal, or a city. A peist could, however, be chained or slain by a hero or saint, and the majority of the pels ts were believed to have been eliminated by such warriors in the same way as the bear and, later, the wolf were cleared away by ordinary mortals. jPeist only meant beast, and seems to mean no more in many place-names not belonging to lakes or river pools. Cappanapeasta near Inchicronan need not imply a monster, but Poulnapeasta we may always venture to translate as "water dragon's lair." There are many examples in tradition of the " dweller in the waters," " the serpent-god of this hallowed stream." In the Hunting of Sliabh Truim we find a peist with "ears as large as the gate of a Cathair " (stone fort) and "tusks as big as a tree." ^ The saga of Da Dergas Hostel brings into one the Norse, Irish, and Hebrew beliefs of the peist, Midgard Snake, and Leviathan by its tale of the " Leuidan, that surrounds the globe and strikes with its tail to overturn the world." ^ The Feis tighe chonain and Hunting of Sliabh Trui7n are full of allusions, and contain a dialogue with a Grecian peist, and tell how Finn slew spectres, arrachs, and aimids (women bugbears), and " banished from the raths (earth forts) each peistr Even in a nearly contemporary history of a hero of the time of Canute, a

1 Op. cit., p. 115. "^ Revue Celtiqtie, vol. xxi., p. 54.