[1] And "Teig O'Kane," which I translated for Mr. Yeats nearly twenty years ago.
Most of these pieces may be said to be in a true sense "folk-lore," seeing that they have almost all lingered more or less vividly in the memory of people who for the most part could neither read nor write. Some of them obviously come from Continental sources, though how they first found their way into Ireland is obscure, and the derivation of some of them cannot now be traced; others, however, are of a purely native invention; while a third class engrafts native traits and ideas upon foreign subject matter.
The stories in this collection cover a good deal of ground and present many various aspects of folk tradition and folk belief. Of native Saints we find legends concerning Patrick, Columcille, Deglan, Moling and Ciaran; of foreign Saints we find legends of St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Martin; of unknown or mythical characters we find tales of Grainne Oïgh, Friar Brian, The Old Woman of Beare, and Mulruana. Of other well-known names, Oisín and Oscar and Solomon appear. Curiously enough I have not chanced upon any folk-tale told about Saint Brigit, the "Mary of the Gael." There is, for some reason or other, a distinct predominance of Petrine stories among these legends.
When we consider the collection as a whole, we find that its purely Irish aspect is apparent in many ways, and in none more than in the very characteristic dovetailing of what is Pagan into what is Christian. But its omissions are even more distinctly Irish than its inclusions.
In most countries, for instance, the Devil is the great outstanding anthropomorphic conception added to the folk-lore of Europe by the introduction of Christianity; and later the belief in Witches, who trafficked directly or indirectly with the Evil One, became extraordinary prevalent and powerful. Now the most striking fact about our collection is that the Devil personified rarely appears in it at all, and Witches never. The belief in Witches, and in Witches' Sabbaths, with which other nations were positively obsessed, and which gave rise to such hecatombs of unhappy victims in almost all the Protestant and in some of the Catholic countries in Europe, as well as in America, never found its way into native Ireland at all, or disturbed Gaelic sanity, although a few isolated instances occurred amongst the English settlers. The Highland Gaels, to whom the idea of witches was more familiar owing to their proximity to the Scottish Lowlands, which was one of the most witch-ridden Countries in Europe, simply borrowed the English Word for witch under the form "buitseach," and from that they coined the word "buitseachas" for witchcraft.