From The Irish Fireside, Volume 1, Number 24, December 10, 1883
These little Hibernian relatives of Arial and Puck have a weird attractiveness for the student of Irish folk lore, for many reasons and especially because the traditions connected with them explain almost all those superstitious peculiarities which are observable among the Irish peasants. It is the duty of the poet to express in rhythmical periods the aerial origin of what are sometimes called `those grovelling superstitions of the Irish,' but for us it is only left to place before our readers in round quotidianal prose some few of the countless happy and poetic traits peculiar to our Irish elves.
The Irish word `sig' of `sighe,' pronounced `shee,' is the usual generic title applied to this class of preternatural beings. The `feas-shee' and the `ban-shee' belong to this category, meaning respectively man and woman fairy.
The terror with which the name of the banshee is still received by peasants throughout the length and breadth of the land, show us clearly how widely-spread and how deeply-rooted was once the belief in the `good people.'
Thousands of lovely, sensible Irish maidens tremble nightly at their ruddy hearths when the whining of some `moon-baying' mongrel re-echoes in the night air; and stalwarth bouchils, whose brawny frame and supple limb bespeak Sampsonian prowess, grow pale at the mention of the Banshee--the wailing prophetess of anticipated death.
So widespread a feeling as this would justify us in writing a volume, if by doing so, while retaining the antique and the poetic portion of the tradition, we succeeded in eradicating the foolish superstition.
Our senses, as several able metaphysicians argue, give no evidence directly of the existence of the outer world, but only of our own material organism as extended in plain words, we often seem to see and to hear when there is neither sight nor sound presented to us.
This we are especially prone to when in an excited state of mind.
The poor, dreadful banshee, then, to the philosophical mind, is a fraud, but yet no philosopher would be justified in annihilating what by a little skill may be metamorphosed into a very beautiful and harmless myth.
How poetically have our fathers called the whirlwind the sheegavithe, as if it were raised by the wings of the passing fairy host.
To our mind, Aeolus in his Liparian caverns is an unpoetic personification, compared with this Hibernian conception. What a delightful fairy colony are not the sheogues of East Ulster, immortalised by Francis Davis in his `Fairy Serenade'--
`Oh, broad are the lawns of your airy fairy king:
And we'll o'er them glide on the watery wing
Of a lovesick maiden's sigh.
And thy crown I'll plume
With the golden bloom
Of the blue-robed violet's eye;
And we'll fill our glass
From a blade of grass,
And we'll drink to its emerald dye;
While we dance those springs
The young daisy sings,
When she's kissed by the twilight fly.'
Truelove's Journal: A Bookshop Novella
From a sad, comfortless childhood Giles Truelove developed into a reclusive and uncommunicative man whose sole passion was books. For so long they were the only meaning to his existence. But when fate eventually intervened to have the outside world intrude upon his life, he began to discover emotions that he never knew he had.
This is a story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
Annals of the Famine in Ireland
Annals of the Famine in Ireland, by Asenath Nicholson, still has the power to shock and sadden even though the events described are ever-receding further into the past. When you read, for example, of the poor widowed mother who was caught trying to salvage a few potatoes from her landlord's field, and what the magistrate discovered in the pot in her cabin, you cannot help but be appalled and distressed.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger
This book, the prequel to Annals of the Famine in Ireland cannot be recommended highly enough to those interested in Irish social history. The author, Mrs Asenath Nicholson, travelled from her native America to assess the condition of the poor in Ireland during the mid 1840s. Refusing the luxury of hotels and first class travel, she stayed at a variety of lodging-houses, and even in the crude cabins of the very poorest. Not to be missed!
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Henry Ford Jones' book, first published in 1915 by Princeton University, is a classic in its field. It covers the history of the Scotch-Irish from the first settlement in Ulster to the American Revolutionary period and the foundation of the country.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Join our mailing list to receive updates on new content on Library, our latest ebooks, and more.
You won't be inundated with emails! — we'll just keep you posted periodically — about once a monthish — on what's happening with the library.