![]() ![]() 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. 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 Pope, not wishing to destroy the young man’s hope, makes him a deal. After confronting his mother and learning the truth, the priest travels to Rome to seek the advice of the Pope. Realizing the truth, he stops the service and tells the unfortunate young cleric the grisly facts of his conception. He enters the church and finds a novice priest about to bless the congregation for the first time. Years later the scholar returns to that part of the country and finds the whole town has gone to Mass. It seems likely that Mac an Diabhail ina Shagart is an older heathen tale re-contextualised for a Christian audience. 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”. ![]() The devil in “ Mac an Diabhail ina Shagart” is a different beast entirely. 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. Irish folklore, in stark contrast to its depictions of fairies, ghosts and the otherworld, usually portrays the Christian Devil as a comic figure. The scholar flees the house in terror.Įven apart from the shocking transgressiveness of it, this story is unusual when considering that it exists within an explicitly Christian theology. 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. He hears the sounds of lovemaking in the next room and, glancing out the window, sees the farmer working in the field. The scholar and the corpse are given a bed to share and the scholar wakes in the night to find his bedmate gone. 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. Unusually chatty for its class of person, the corpse asks the scholar to carry him to his destination. A poor scholar, wandering a country road at night (where else?), encounters a corpse on the road. “ Mac an Diabhail ina Shagart” (“The Devil’s Son as Priest”). 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. The townspeople buried him before he could spread the plague, and before he had expired from it. Charlotte Stoker told of a man dying from the disease, lying on the side of the road. 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. It’s a happy marriage, horror and Irish folklore. They wander the skies for nine hundred years. The macabre in Irish folklore is rarely accompanied with screaming. It will always be there.Īnyone who has had to walk an Irish country road in the dead of night knows that feeling of certainty. Not, “It was said by some that on the road to Kilrush…” 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 followed travellers at night stretching out this long hand as it tried to grasp them by the back of the neck. “On the road to Kilrush was a figure with a long hand eight feet long. He hears of fairy forts, death coaches pulled by headless horses, driven on by headless coachmen. In vivid passages he describes the stories he hears as he moves in silent darkness from one tiny village to another, spreading revolution. 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. No dry military memoir, Ó Máille did not simply describe how the war was fought, but why it was fought. It is generally considered to be the one bona-fide piece of literature to arise from that conflict. 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. ![]()
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