Blair Collection > Beside the fire

liv POSTSCRIPT.
and there remains a fairy tale to charm the East ; but it would need to be
reduced to a skeleton, and reclothed with new flesh before it could charm
the folk of the West.
To bring home yet more clearly to our minds this necessity for romance to
conform to convention, let us ask ourselves, what would have happened if one
of the Irish story-tellers who perambulated the Western Isles as late as the
seventeenth century, had carried with him a volume of Hakluyt or Purchas, or,
supposing one to have lingered enough, Defoe or Gil Bias ? Would he have
been welcomed when he substituted the new fare for the old tales of " Finn and
the Fians ? " and even if welcomed, would he have gained currency for it ?
Would the seed thus planted have thriven, or would it not rather, fallen upon
rocky places, have withered away ?
It may, however, be objected that the real difference hes not so much in
the subject-matter as in the mode of transmission ; and the objection may
seem to derive some force from what Dr. Hyde notes concerning the preva-
lence of folk-tales in Wicklow, and the nearer Pale generally, as con-
trasted with Leitrim, Longford, and Meath (p. xii.). It is difficult to
over-estimate the interest and importance of this fact, and there can
hardly be a doubt that Dr. Hyde has explained it correctly. It may,
then, be urged that so long as oral transmission lasts the folk-tale
flourishes ; and only when the printed work ousts the story-teller is it that
the folk-tale dies out. But this reasoning will not hold water. It is absurd
to contend that the story-teller had none but a certain class of materials at
his disposal till lately. He had the whole realm of intellect and fancy to draw
upon ; but he, and still more his hearers, knew only one district of that
realm ; and had it been possible for him to step outside its limits his hearers
could not have followed him. I grant folk fancy has shared the fortunes of
humanity together with every other manifestation of man's activity, but always
within strictly defined limits, to transgress which has always been to forfeit
the favour of the folk.
What, then, are the characteristic marks of folk-fancy ? The question is
of special interest in connection with Gaelic folk-lore. The latter is rich in
transitional forms, the study of which reveal more clearly than is othenvise
possible the nature and workings of the folk-mind.
The products of folk-fancy (putting aside such examples of folk-wisdom
and folk-wit as proverbs, saws, jests, etc.), may be roughly divided among
two great classes :
Firstly, stories of a quasi-historical or anecdotic nature, accepted as actual
fact (of course with varying degrees of credence) by narrator and hearer.
Stories of this kind are very largely concerned with beings (supernatural, as
we should call them) differing from man, and with their relations to and deal-