Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/389

 Collectanea. 365

CouNTv Clake P'olk-Tales and Myths, III. {continued from

p. 2X2.).

(With Plate VII.).

6. The Danish Wars and King Brian.

In the district that produced The Wars of the Gaedhil with the Gall as a pcean on the winning of its hard-won independence one would expect a mass of stories relating to the Danes and Norse. But this is so far from being the case that the very phrase " Danish forts " is rarely used among the peasantry, though common in the mouths of "half-read" persons. The "forts," in fact, are traditionally the homes of the De Danann, of the contemporaries of Fergus and Diarmuid, and of the early Dalcassians. Rarely indeed do we meet the term Caher Lochlannach or " Norse fort," {not Danish), nor have I found the name in any Clare record before the Book of Distribution and Survey in 1655 (if, even there, " Caherloglin " be not some such name as " Cathair lochlain "). I found the name in use only near Lisdoonvarna, where it was unmistakably Caherlochlannach. At Kiltumper the base of a little kerbed cairn called "Tumpers Grave," between Kilmihiland Doolough, was reputed in 1839 to be the grave of a Danish chief chased by a Dalcassian army from the stone ring fort of Caher- murraha (or Cahermurphy) to the Kiltumper ridge, slain, and buried there.^ The " heathen Danes " or " black Danes " appear vaguely enough; they were "great druids" (magicians), "made the heather into beer,"^ and smoked the "Danes' pipes. "^ I hardly like to repeat a legend at Attyflin, before 1870, that "they (the Danes) rode eight-legged horses," yet where could the peasantry of County Limerick at that date have heard of Sleipnir ? Even the gentry, I believe, were unacquainted with tales from the Edda, which I first heard of in 1878; at the earlier date I was also told about the Danes that " they used to swim in the ditches round the forts." In 1877 a retainer of the Morelands of Raheen on Lough Derg, and an old fisherman, on my first visit to Iniscaltra (Holy Island) in that great lake, told me of the Danes. No one would

^ Ordnance Sw-vey Lettrrs (Co. Clare) (Ms. Royal Irish Acad.), vol. ii., p. 46. '•*So at Lough Graney in 1893. * Really seventeenth-century tobacco pipes.