Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/474

 440 Collectanea.

" tribe " in 1586. She next got into trouble for raiding Aran (an O'Brien settlement) in Galway Bay, at the instigation of the O'Flaherties, her first husband's kindred. It was proved, however, that she did not know that peace was made, and the government overlooked her mistake, and, with fatal weakness, let 0' Flaherty seize the Aran Isles from their consistently loyal ally, O'Brien, whose family, from 1380, had kept Galway Bay clear from pirates.^ The merchants of Galway vainly peti- tioned to have their friend and protector restored, for they feared the O'Flaherties above all their neighbours, and cut a prayer over their west gate: " From the bloodthirsty O'Fla- herties good Lord deliver us."

In 1593 she went to England as a humble suppliant to the queen for her O'Flaherty son and grandson and her two sons by Bourke. Her son, Owen, by her first husband, Donnell " Ichoggy " O'Flaherty, was killed, it seems, on a false alarm that he was about to be rescued, but her second son, Murrogh, and his son, Donnell, were alive. Her petition tells much about her wild and checkered career and (naturally) emphasizes her services to the Crown. 2 The other numerous allusions to Grainne tell us little of interest, and the dates of her birth and death are unrecorded. Her son, Theobald or " Tibbot " Bourke, called " na long " (of the ship), was knighted and was a person of influence in his remote district in the reign of James I. He left a long line of descendants in the Earls of Mayo.^

Turning to her legends, the agreement with and divergences from her history are very instructive, none the less that they lie about as far from her period as the introduction of Christianity into Ireland does from the tales in the earliest sagas relating to Tara and Munster in the second century, though in earlier times the existence of a professional class of " druids and historians " favoured clear recollection had we only the tales as told in the fifth century. Still, in the more recent instance


 * See James Hardiiiian's Hislory of Galway.

~Cal. State Prs. Irld. 1593, No. 62.

■^See paper by Mr. Hubert T. Knox, Galway Archccol. and Hist. Soc. vol. iv. p. 65.