First published in 1936, On Another Man’s Wound was written by Earnán Ó Máille and recounts his time as a guerrilla fighter during the Irish War of Independence in the nineteen twenties. It is generally considered to be the one bona-fide piece of literature to arise from that conflict. No dry military memoir, Ó Máille did not simply describe how the war was fought, but why it was fought. Ó Máille renders a country abandoned and betrayed by its own cultural elite and where the task of preserving the literary, linguistic and musical heritage of the nation has fallen to the common people. In vivid passages he describes the stories he hears as he moves in silent darkness from one tiny village to another, spreading revolution. He hears of fairy forts, death coaches pulled by headless horses, driven on by headless coachmen. And, in one passage:
“On the road to Kilrush was a figure with a long hand eight feet long. It followed travellers at night stretching out this long hand as it tried to grasp them by the back of the neck. On dark nights cycling without a light so as not to warn police patrols of my approach, I instinctively turned my head at times to ensure that the long clammy hand was not reaching out.”
It’s the certainty of it. “On the road to Kilrush was a figure”. Not, “I heard tell there was a figure”. Not, “It was said by some that on the road to Kilrush…”
No. It was there. It’s still there. It will always be there.
Anyone who has had to walk an Irish country road in the dead of night knows that feeling of certainty. The macabre in Irish folklore is rarely accompanied with screaming. More, a silent acceptance.
The horrific is common-place.
The unbelievable is undeniable.
It’s standing there on the road to Kilrush. That’s all there is to it. You get that streak of fatalism running through Irish folklore, broad as a river. I speak in generalities, obviously. We have our heroes. We have our heroic feats and battles won and happy endings.
But spend enough time in the lore and you start to get the sense of a people who know they are not in charge of their own destiny. There are empires in all directions. There are larger gods looming in the night sky above, unknowable and merciless. There is no bargaining. There is no winning.
The macabre in Irish folklore is rarely accompanied with screaming. More, a silent acceptance.The Children of Lir get turned into swans and are cursed to wander the skies for nine hundred years and then die.
They wander the skies for nine hundred years. And then they die.
The world continues on. Sin é.
It’s a happy marriage, horror and Irish folklore. When crafting Dracula, Bram Stoker anecdotally drew on his mother’s recounting of the days of terror and madness when Sligo was gripped by cholera in 1832. Charlotte Stoker told of a man dying from the disease, lying on the side of the road. The townspeople buried him before he could spread the plague, and before he had expired from it.
Then, 23 years later, things got bad.
When studying Irish Folklore in college sometime during the early Holocene I came across the story that would eventually form the basis of my own novel, Knock, Knock, Open Wide.
“Mac an Diabhail ina Shagart” (“The Devil’s Son as Priest”). A poor scholar, wandering a country road at night (where else?), encounters a corpse on the road. Unusually chatty for its class of person, the corpse asks the scholar to carry him to his destination. Terrified, the scholar complies and the unlikely pair come at last to a small farmhouse where the farmer and his wife are having a blazing row. The scholar and the corpse are given a bed to share and the scholar wakes in the night to find his bedmate gone. He hears the sounds of lovemaking in the next room and, glancing out the window, sees the farmer working in the field. The corpse returns to the bed and brags to the scholar that the farmer’s wife is now with child, that the child shall grow up to be a priest, and that all souls blessed by that priest shall belong to him. The scholar flees the house in terror.
This one stands out.
Even apart from the shocking transgressiveness of it, this story is unusual when considering that it exists within an explicitly Christian theology. Irish folklore, in stark contrast to its depictions of fairies, ghosts and the otherworld, usually portrays the Christian Devil as a comic figure. Less of an all-powerful malevolent force and more of a vainglorious braggart, an only semi-competent trickster who can be beaten by wilier human foes. The devil in “Mac an Diabhail ina Shagart” is a different beast entirely. The talking corpse is a clue. One appears in the adventure story “Echtra Nerai” (the adventures of Nera) which may have been first written down as far back as the eighth century and which the Irish folklorist Séamus Ó Duilearga described as “one of the oldest Irish folktales which has come down to us”. It seems likely that Mac an Diabhail ina Shagart is an older heathen tale re-contextualised for a Christian audience.
The talking corpse is not the devil.
It’s something older.
It’s something worse.
But the ending sets it apart too.
Years later the scholar returns to that part of the country and finds the whole town has gone to Mass. He enters the church and finds a novice priest about to bless the congregation for the first time. Realizing the truth, he stops the service and tells the unfortunate young cleric the grisly facts of his conception. After confronting his mother and learning the truth, the priest travels to Rome to seek the advice of the Pope. The Pope, not wishing to destroy the young man’s hope, makes him a deal. He takes a key from his pocket and tells the priest that he is going to hide it, and that if can find it, it is a sign from God that his soul has been saved and he may continue to be a priest. The Holy Father then leaves the room, hands the key to one of his servants, and instructs him to charter a ship to the remotest part of the ocean and drop the key overboard.
The young priest travels the world, desperately seeking the literal key to his salvation, to no avail.
He returns home after many years, his spirit broken, and sits down to the fish dinner that his mother has prepared.
You know what happens next, don’t you?
Yes, this one has a happy ending.
The source of the story was, of all people, Peig Sayers. For an American reader, imagine discovering that Mr. Rogers wrote Pet Semetary.
Peig was a seanachaí (storyteller) who lived in rural Co Kerry on the westernmost tip of the nation. Exactly the kind of person Ó Máille would have encountered as he made his midnight bicycle rides, dodging the clammy hand at his neck.
Many generations of Irish only knew her through her dictated biography Peig, which was used as a teaching text for the Irish language for many years and so came to be associated with the failure of Irish language policy. To put it bluntly, most Irish students hated this book.
It begins:
“Seanbean is ea mise anois go bfuil cos lei insan uaig is a cos eile ar a bruac.”
“I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge.”
The book begins as it means to go on. It is a tale of poverty and death, only slightly lessened with the comfort of absolute, implacable faith.
For Irish growing up in the 20th century, this was not who we wanted to be. This was the history we wanted to escape.
This is why it was such a shock to find Mac an Diabhail ina Shagart and to learn that Peig, of all people, was the source.
I take some comfort from knowing that a woman who lost five children in her lifetime could still believe in happy endings.
That horror can exist side by side with hope.
And that sometimes, once in a miraculous while, you will find the key to everything.
Hidden in the belly of a fish.
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