UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI

FAKULTETA ZA DRUŽBENE VEDE

The storytelling traditions of Ireland:

the mythological and religious connotations of fairy tales

Vjera Šestan
Cultural studies, 4th year
21140887
vjerashestan@gmail.com
Table of Contents
1. Introduction...............................................................................................................3
1.2 Research questions................................................................................................................3
2. Context of history of fairy tale research......................................................................4
1.1 Folklore, fairy tale and myth..........................................................................................5
3. History of Irish fairy- tales.........................................................................................6
3.1 Irish mythological cycles................................................................................................6
3.1.1 The Irish manuscripts............................................................................................................................7

4. The Irish storyteller....................................................................................................8

5. Fairy tales and fairy- faith..........................................................................................9
6. Conclusion...............................................................................................................11
7. Sources....................................................................................................................13

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 1. Introduction

In this paper I researched the vast body of folklore in Ireland with a focus on a particular
narrative form called fairy tale. The term “fairy” seemed to be broad and problematic,
appearing in collections of folklore, as well as in vast amount of post-romanticism fictional
literature and scientific work of psychic studies - where the search for scientific evidence
appeared to be even more vague than the term itself. Therefore, the scope of a mythological
and religious approach proved to be most fruit bearing.
Ireland has one of the most abundant folklore traditions in the world. The tradition of
storytelling, conceived in the earliest forms of myth creating hunter- gatherer societies has
preserved its high esteemed role in Ireland and is preserved with great respect among the
Irish people untill now. Even today, we can experience this fondness that Irish people hold
for their oral traditions on events devoted to the art of seanchaí, yet the main body of this
paper confines itself to a historical overview of it instead.
I begin this research paper providing an informative overview of the study of fairy
tales in Europe which provided me with a theoretical background for describing the origins of
Irish fairy tales specifically. Moreover, as storytelling seems to be the flagship of Ireland and
the longest surviving tool of maintaining the historical record of Ireland, I dedicated the last
part of the research to the role of storytelling itself.
As the term fairy kept appearing in the interweaving discourses of fairy tales, fairy lore
and fairy- faith, the scientific inquiry of these correlated folkloristic phenomena in Ireland
demanded a broadest focus of connecting the fairy tales with fairy-faith.

1.2 Research questions

When choosing an appropriate topic for this assignment within the subject of
Civilisations, I decided that I want to find out more about the Irish belief in fairies and all that
encompasses it. Soon enough, the terminology of fairies and all of it epistemological
connotations brought me to the question of fairy tales. This is why my first research question
had to be:
1. What is the context of the beginnings of scientific interest in fairy-tales?
On the grounds that I was interested in Irish tradition precisely, my next question was:

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 2. What is the history of Irish fairy tales? What are their mythological connotations?
As I mention above, I already knew that Ireland has one of the richest oral traditions, and
someone had to disperse its wealthy fairy lore, so I also asked:
3. Who were Irish storytellers?
Finally, as the body of Irish fairy tales seemed to be ever more connected to some sorts of
belief, I asked:
4. What is the connection between fairy tales and fairy-faith?

2. Context of history of fairy tale research

According to Goljevšček (1991) the interest in research of fairy tales in Europe began
with the discovery of America, which brought up certain changes in the European worldview.
These changes were built through comparison of the known European world with the
unknown world of a newly discovered continent and expressed themselves through the need
for reconsideration of the foundations of Europe’s boastful civilisation, demanding change
and renewal of old values.
The result of such a zeitgeist was the devaluing of all that was perceived as civilised or
coming from civilisation in contrast to what is closely related to nature. The embodiment of
such ideas was brought forward through the construction of the myth of the good savage
(Goljevšček, 1991). The good savage became a symbol of political and cultural dissent,
standing for all that is human and humane in nature. The construction of the myth of the good
savage in Europe sparked an interest towards non-European cultures which paved the path for
the beginnings of ethnologic research. The researchers of that time were interested in
customs, beliefs, social structures and undoubtably, the relationship with nature, that formed
various humanities, thus reassessing the concept of cultural history.
During the period of scientific romanticism, the apparent uniqueness of every culture
(derived from its customs, beliefs, etc.) with respect to the new understanding of cultural
history, demanded a redefinition of the relationship between tradition and nation.
Consequently, the study of folklore flourished and became a tool of politics and self-
affirmation of nations.

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 1.1 Folklore, fairy tale and myth
Folklore is the study of traditional practices, customs, beliefs and arts. These last include
music, drama, poetry, narrative, both fictional and legendary, and traditional crafts with the
mystique and customs attached to them (Briggs, 1978: 27).
Soon, stories and fairy tales started getting more attention than other narrative forms, possibly
due to their common appearance in multiple different societies (nations) but mostly also
because they were most preserved in oral traditions. At the frontiers of its early stage, the
folkloristic work was carried out by anthropologists, ethnologists, researchers of religion,
writers, poets and enthusiastic laics.
In the 19th century, the biggest achievement in the discourse of fairy tales was made
by brothers Grimm who collected, researched and published human prose which they have
also analysed in an attempt to obtain some understanding of their nature, source, essence and
function. To them, fairy tales were forgotten myths, a document of priceless historical value
containing the values of cultural ancestral knowledge such as to-day living paganism
(Goljevšček, 1991:15).
The work of brothers Grimm popularized fairy tales into the fields of both written
literature and science, with the latter being divided in three groups based on the definition of
fairy tales. This division is still visible in modern folkloristic work and can be explained
through the relation of fairy tale and myth. A group of researchers admit the Grimm’s theory,
another body of researchers claim fairy tales to be older than myth and to be in fact the oldest
form of story, while others argue fairy tales to be complex artistic creations made up by poets
and professionals which gave this cultural wealth to the ordinary folk (Goljevšček, 1991).
I believe all three theories to be true when relating the origins of fairy tales to myth in
the case of Ireland. I will try to illuminate this point in the next chapter as I shall seek to
answer my second research question.
Furthermore, another connection of fairy tales with myth must be pointed out related to
elaborating the essence of fairy tales. Two separated schools of thought rose in attempt to
explain the essence of fairy tales. The mythological school interpreted fairy tales as allegories
of natural phenomena, which could not be comprehended by the primitive man, such as
weather conditions or movement of the sun and moon. Opposing them, anthropo-ethnologic
school of thought interprets the essence of fairy tales connecting their content with customs,
rituals, thought patterns and dream states (Evans Wentz, 2011).

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 3. History of Irish fairy- tales

Evans Wentz is to be thanked for an immense contribution to the structural analysis of the
fairy faith in Ireland. He obtained his work from written research on the topics of fairy lore
and Celtic religion and from his own collecting of fairy tales based on the storytelling among
contemporary Irish folk. Oral tradition is the broadest and longest existing form of fairy tale
transmission among the Irish folk which I will explore through the role of storytelling in the
end of the paper but before that let me offer a contextual classification of the early folk tales
of Ireland.

3.1 Irish mythological cycles

Irish history found in literature brought to us in forms of manuscripts is romantic,
idealistic, stylized and yet, vividly concrete. Most of all, it exemplifies the tension between
reality and fantasy that characterizes all Celtic art, most particularly in the sagas and myths
that survive in Irish manuscripts dating back to the twelfth century. These stories originated
in the mists of Irish prehistory and are developed through the course of centuries until
reaching their present manuscript state; ergo they manage to be both archaic & contemporary
because their setting is both historical Ireland and the mythic otherworld of fairies. This
tension between reality and fantasy is not accidental to the circumstances of literary
transmission and formation but rather an innate characteristic, a gift of the Celts (Carrassi,
2016).
Convention and tradition have classified the early Irish tales into four groups, called
cycles. This classification is useful but also modern because no particular arrangement is
apparent in the manuscripts, while it seems that storytellers regrouped the tales by type:
births, deaths, cattle raids, destructions, visions, etc. The material of these tales encompasses
both the impacted myth and corrupted history (Gantz, 1981).
Each of these cycles, with its own stories, reflects frameworks, worldviews, systems
of beliefs and values, so as one might find in them traces, signs and figures referring to the
past, or better, to the pasts that have followed and overlapped. It is exactly in this
overlapping, spatial and temporal, that the domain of fairy tale can be identified.
Consequently, the fairy tale is conceivable as a sort of intermediate or neutral space whose
boundaries act as a wide frontier of transition that makes possible the encounter between the
several and varied elements scattered by the ages, contexts, peoples and societies that, along

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with their mythological, ideological, philosophical, ethical and religious paradigms, have
given rise to the complex and layered cultural identity of Ireland (Carrassi, 2016).

3.1.1 The Irish manuscripts

The non-literate folk of early Irish paganism, as well as the people living in the time
of Celtic druidism, share the same myths composing their worldview which were transmitted
exclusively through storytelling.
In contrast to this rich body of oral tradition, the educated and literate people
responsible for establishing Christianity in Ireland composed the manuscripts which are the
first written bodies of Irish literature. The goal of the manuscripts was to collect and write
down the history of Ireland, which was in majority comprised of fairy tales denoting a firm
belief in fairies by the Irish storytellers. The purpose of the manuscripts was to gradually
implement Christian thought in the Irish worldview which is why those who wrote them
(mainly Christian monks) deviated heavily from the original stories of Irish peasantry as told
by the storytellers. Moreover, the Christian writers of these manuscripts took the liberty of
adjusting the stories to their own agendas.
This proved to be a pivotal moment in the course of fairy tales in the manner of
historical documentation of Irish pre-Celtic times as the old pagan gods of Ireland were
substituted by Christian saints. The deities and heroes in the stories that once composed the
body of Celtic religion as told by Druid storytellers suffered the same fate which marked a
time in Ireland known as the age of saints (Conroy, 1992).
The creative aspect of composing a unified body based on storytelling can be manifested in
two forms regarding the presentation of evidence of what is being shared in the stories: one
aims at preserving all of the original material in its given form, the other takes the liberty of
interpretation and reinventing new evidence (Ross, 1970).
Finally, the Irish Fairy lore that we can observe today is composed of such unified
bodies which were at some point either (presumably) experienced or made up within the
discourses of three streams of faith: paganism, Celtic druidism and Christianity. Now, it is
beyond the scope of this research to compare the tales in order to find out what parts of these
tales were made up and which tales were actually experienced. My intention was to
investigate the origins of Irish fairy tales, a term I intentionally used throughout this paper,
which in this chapter signified the evidence for supporting all three theories of fairy tales in
connection to myth. In the last part of this paper, I shall illuminate this decision in providing

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necessary explanation of such terminology in the search of answering my third research
question.

4. The Irish storyteller

In a time of diversification of Irish language from other Celtic languages, the Irish literature –
meaning whatever was written down in Irish – encompassed a broad area, including history,
genealogy and law tracts; but it is poetry and narrative prose that are relevant to the early
Irish fairy tales. The earliest form of transmission must have been oral, as pre-Celtic Irish
folk was illiterate hence no written document of any kind was found from that period in Irish
history. Though literate, the Celts held a strong stand against writing.

As highlighted by Gantz (1981), the Irish Celts, much like their pagan predecessors,
did not care to commit their laws, history, poetry or religious concepts to writing. They
regarded them in a semi-sacred light. There is no doubt, however, that the Celtic druids were
unwilling that their traditional lore and learning should become available to outsiders; the
secrets of their knowledge was jealously guarded by those responsible for their preservation
and perpetuation. Moreover, the cultivation of an oral memory is one of the most
characteristic components of their culture, and still persists and is in high honour in the
Celtic-speaking areas of the modern world.
All these traditional disciplines, then, were required to be handed on orally from master to
pupil, from generation to generation. Pupils of these sorts were Druid Celts, who put
themselves in position of guardians of knowledge of the Irish.
A druid elect, that is the storyteller, took some twenty years to master and fully assimilate the
secrets of his calling. The master sang what was to be learned, the class intoned it until it
knew it off by heart. And although the literature was orally transmitted, there is little
evidence for improvisation. Even today in an Irish speaking gathering, any change in a single
word by the storyteller is noticed and commented on by the avid listeners, as familiar with the
tale as the teller himself (Ross, 1970).
Another term for the storyteller found in literature is fili (seer, poet), bard and
seanachaí. In the Celtic society, bards were held in high esteem, second only to kings. They
memorised vast amounts of poetry which they performed live.
In his work, Evans Wentz (1991) describes the hierarchy of Irish bards depending on
the type of a symbolic branch of Sencha which they carried on with, hence the name

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seanachaí. The Anradhs, or poets of the second order, carried a silver branch, but the
Ollamhs, or chief poets, carried a branch of gold. All other poets bore a branch of bronze.
Bards evolved into seanachaí, who were traditionally servants to the chiefs of the tribe
and kept track of important information for their locality. It was undoubtably a position of
prestigious authority and esteem. They were the living bodies of information about the
culture’s past and its most important memories and traditions. Over time, many seanachaí
became nomads, wondering musicians that belong to no one community. Instead they
travelled from one community to another sharing the proficiency of storytelling which was
usually in exchange for food and shelter. This could be hard to imagine for us today as it
might have been seen as awkward for the rest of the Europe of that time, as well. However,
let us not forget that the Irish oral tradition was the only form of attained history. Because of
the exhausting schooling the seanachaí went through, they could recite any ancient lore and
tale. This makes the Irish storyteller a unique source of information and an educator about all
things considered Irish.

5. Fairy tales and fairy- faith

According to Carrassi (2016) the concept of fairy tale, more than those of wonder and
magic tale, has a clear analytic value by which one can encompass both tales about fairies
and fairy tales. In his writings, just as in this paper, and idea of fairy is not just a mere
synonym for wonder and magic but is interpreted in its broader and deeper meaning, allowing
to go beyond the traditional dichotomy between wonder/magic and belief in order to build a
bridge between the canonical notions of the fairy tale (Märchen) and legend (or Sage).
One may not conceive the ideas of magic, wonder and above all, fairy, separated from
some sort of belief, all the more in the living historical and cultural context of storytellers,
their listeners and the larger folk society – unlike what happens when folk narratives are
removed from their original contexts and re-framed in a literary sphere, where they become
self-referential and purely aesthetic items (Carrassi, 2016:71).
Fairy tales embody one of the techniques of civilisation: they strengthen the
connections between members of localities, regions and nations. (Goljevšček, 1995: 104)
According to the druidic doctrine reproduced through the act of storytelling, the fairy-
faith attains the terms fairy and fairyland in their broadest meaning. To the storyteller, the
universe is divisible into two interrelating parts or aspects: the visible world which we

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experience and the invisible, which is fairyland or the otherworld of Irish fairy-tales (Evans
Wentz, 2011).
As mentioned above, Ireland has no classical texts to aid its archaeological repertoire
in a study of religion but it has its vernacular literature. As a result of this lack of direct
textual evidence on the part of pagan and early Irish Celts themselves, we are driven to seek
elsewhere for such information as we can assemble. When we find that the various sources of
information combine to support each other we are on comparatively safe ground (Ross,
1970).
In one sense, the most reliable of the sources is archaeology but this is essentially
limited and lacks the detail provided by the written world. Such sources include various
megalithic structures divided into menhirs, dolmens, cromlechs and tumuli (Evans Wentz,
2011).
Another source, the classical writers, provides fascinating commentaries on aspects of
pagan and Celtic religious life but it cannot always be clear to what period they are referring
or whether they are going by hearsay alone or have had actual experience of the practices
they record (Ross, 1970).
However, there seems to be enough evidence for fairy- faith to allow a fairly
comprehensive and convincing picture to be constructed from the numerous fragments of
information at my disposal. This evidence can be found in the storyteller’s fairy tales
collected by Yeats, Evans Wentz and Lyasaght among others.
The fairy- faith originated from the most educated and scientific Celts (storytellers) rather
than from the uneducated peasants. The background of fairy-faith is animistic and has grown
up in ancient times into its traditional form. The living fairy- faith depends not so much upon
ancient traditions, oral or recorded, as upon recent and contemporary psychical experiences,
vouched for by many “seers” (Evans Wentz, 2011).
The “seers” and poets of today Ireland are contemporary storytellers, which do not
hold the same positions of power as the seanachaí of the past, nor do they travel around
Ireland in order to educate the Irish folk about Irish history and inform them about the
happenings in distant areas they travelled through. Yet, their role is important as they allocate
the vast body of fairy lore and help maintain the fairy- faith alive. This makes them the third
source for a study of religion in Ireland on the subject of fairy- faith.
According to Klotz (Klotz, 1985, p. 142, found in Goljevšček, 1991, p. 31), fairy tales carry
on a world which is historically already surpassed, force old social structures, roles and
values, encourage passiveness and daydreaming meaning that they divert people from acting
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by constructing such illusions. They are the real “opium” of the people that in reality
quenches their every need for changing the existing state of things.
Precisely this critic of fairy-tales exhibits the state of Ireland, where folkloristic studies can
find fairy tales as building stones for a living fairy-faith which still maintains a part of Irish
everyday life. Such evidence is collected through storytelling more than through customs of
religious practice comparable to church-going of Christianity or pagan rituals and invocation
of deities characteristic for the Celtic Druidry.

6. Conclusion

My initial enthusiasm for the Irish belief in fairies proved to be an overwhelming task to
research because of the bits of information found scattered in little scientific work outside of
folklore and psychic studies, which I intentionally ignored in this research. Although much of
the Irish fairy lore is connected with what we today know of the Celtic religion, the
terminology of fairies, fairy tales and fairy faith proved to be numerous and exhaustingly
different from one another.
However, I was lucky enough to find good scientific background on the context of fairy tales
in the work of Goljevšček (1991) which helped me contextualise the interest in fairy tales
within the scope of the subject of civilisations.
My first research question is answered through a chronological overview of scientific
interest in fairies until the time of brothers Grimm, who popularized fairy tales and brought
them to the scope of science. The context of the beginnings of scientific interest in fairy tales
is marked with the discovery of America and the construction of myth of the good savage.
This myth was reapplied to societies as a whole which influenced the reassessment of cultural
histories. Finally, the result of this was a blooming of folkloristic studies, part of which is
concerned with the research of fairy tales in their broadest meaning.

The second research question demanded most theoretical work to be answered, mainly
because a lot of literature was concerned more with describing the tales of Irish mythological
cycles than in explaining their significance for Irish history or the essence of these tales.
Through the paper, I highlighted the notion that the Irish had no pre-Christian written history,
which satisfies to conclude that much of its history comes from the myth making hunter-
gatherer societies.

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While answering the first question, I presented three categories of researchers elaborating the
connection of fairy tale and myth. When drawing the pillars of history of Irish fairy tales I
came to the agreement with all three categories. Fairy tales of Ireland proved to be forgotten
myths, as no myth was even written so it depended solely on the oral tradition. They also
proved to be older than myth, as the heroes of these tales were pagan gods that themselves
lived in Ireland in form of animistic deities. Finally, the fairy tales proved to also be made up
by professionals and artist, such as monks who wrote the Irish manuscripts.
The most interesting part of this paper for me was to seek for an answer to my third research
question. The Irish storytellers are living fossils in my eyes, as they carried out immense
work of documenting Irish history and educating the Irish folk about it through oral tradition
alone. This is supported by their role in Irish society in Celtic times as highly respected and
powerful intellectuals hierarchically less relevant only than the king. Although the bards or
seanachaí do not exist in the same form today, Irish storytelling still pertains and is still
regarded in high esteem.

Finally, the work of Vito Carrassi (2016) gave me an opportunity to find the missing link in
the connection of fairy tales and fairy-faith with pointing out that fairy tales of Ireland should
be researched respectfully to their cultural context. This context is featured by overlapping of
fantasy and reality thus making the difference between “magic” or “wonder” tales as specific
bodies of fairy tales obsolete. Notably, as these tales construct the only scarce source of Irish
history, they are inevitably demanding some sort of belief. Thus, the whole body of Irish lore
is possible to observe through the scope of fairy- faith.
To conclude, I did not expect to find answers to all of my research questions but the vast
and proud oral tradition of Ireland proved to be a heavy subject for a scientific research. The
first problem is the defining of a fairy tale which varies depending on the theoretical
standpoint and discourse of any given researcher. The researchers of the 19 th century focused
on the origins and the significance of fairy tale and in the body of research from 20 th century
onward was more concerned with the essence, structure and function of the fairy tales.
Equally problematic was the term of fairy, which to Irish concerned researchers proved to be
different than to the rest of the world, making the task for searching appropriate sources in
literature quite a heavy one. Finally, although I proved that fairy- faith holds tremendous
value for Irish culture (through history, lore and overlapping of religions), it yielded much the
same problematic as the term fairy tale and fairy. The term fairy and all connotations of the
very term (fairy lore, fairy tales, fairy- faith) appear to be too vast for a scientific approach
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unless the researcher manages to find bits of correlating information with the same use of
abovementioned terms, which by my opinion was achieved.

7. Sources

1. Briggs, K. (1978). The Vanishing People: Fairy lore and legends. New York:
Pantheon Books
2. Carassi, V. (2016). A broader and deeper idea of fairy tale: reassessing concept,
meaning, and function of the most debated genre in folk narrative research. Folklore:
Electronic Journal of Folklore, 65:69-88
http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2016.65
3. Conroy, Brian J. (1992). Evidence of religious influence on the folk and fairy tales of
Ireland (Master’s Theses). Retrieved from:
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=etd_theses
4. Evans – Wentz, W.Y. (2011) Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries [Gutenberg project].
ISO-8859-1
5. Gantz, J. (1981). Early Irish myths and sagas. London: Penguin Classics
6. Goljevšček, A. (1991). Pravljice, kaj ste? Ljubljana: Založba Mladinska knjiga
7. Lyasaght, P. (1995). Traditional beliefs and narratives of contemporary Irish
tradition bearer. Retrieved from:
http://www.folklore.ee/rl/pubte/ee/usund/fbt/lysaght.pdf
8. Ross, A. (1970) Everyday life of Celts. London: B. T. Batsford LTD

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