W. B. Yeats, ed. & sel., Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) [13]

[See Contents, supra.]

Editorial Remarks

Page numbers in the original appear at the head of each page and are indicated here by bow brackets (e.g., {155}). The footnote method of the original cannot be reproduced here since it is conducted entirely by means of asterisks in the body text linked to finer lines at the bottom of the page (but not in the page footer). In all available digital versions, the notes have been reproduced using a continuous series of footnote numbers from 1 to 73 and assigned in groups to the relevant stories.    That method has been adopted in the present text with the variation that the notes are gathered at the end of each file. While every effort has been made to build each file from a single section of the book itself, some of these are so short and others so long that there is no practical option to breaking them and rejoining them in roughly equal proportions. It is neverthless possible to proceed from file to file (and hence story to successive story) using the “next” button at the bottom of each file. In the event that anyone wanted to read the footnotes as a single document, these could easily be compiled in a word-process using the mouse “select” action in conjunction with the “copy” and “paste” commands. In first attempting to edit this text, I was struck by the irrationality of the footnote system which sometimes gives the sources of a give item in the title-heading, and more often consigns that information to a footnote. As regards such notes, the information is scanty at best - though the closely contemporary character of the titles references in them amply excuses the rather familiar method of reference involved. Similarly, the citation of such titles as Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland and Patrick Kennedy’s Legendary Fictions of the Ancient Celts without any mention of publication dates suggests a greater familiarity and an easier method of access - presumably through a friendly bookseller, if not the compliant desk-clerk in the British Library - than the modern reader can expect. It would be an impertinence, in fact, to meddle with such methods of referencing since they themselves are little monuments to the nexus of literary and cultural relations in which this text, as a whole, came to birth and has its being. Accordingly, I have used superscript notes for the references that fall in chapter titles (i.e., story names) and numbered footnotes in square brackets when the references fall in the course of body text. It would be equally possible to change all of these to superscript notes but the practical effect would be to deepen the lineation where those notes occurred, and I would prefer to avoid a visual disruption of that kind in the resultant screen-text. A further group of “Notes” is packaged in the final pages of the text (i.e, pp.319-25) and these stand in a more complicated relation to the body text than the others insofar as there is no pointer from the body text to these notes, which must therefore be read as free-standing texts, or appendices, each with a page reference to the moment in the body text where its additional ounce of fairy-lore might be supposed to bear weight. Since the additional notes have, in any case, the character of afterthoughts, there independent standing is perfectly natural. In historical terms, they may be compared with the array of footnotes and glossary terms which make up the apparatus of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent - that is to say, a profoundly non-standard, dilettante-ish and, ultimately, loveable abstention from professional methods of annotation. (God be with the days ...!) I have treated these notes in the simplest fashion by tying each by means of hypertext links to the corresponding story-title in the body text, or the nearest identifable paragraph to which the notes refer according to their own page-indicators and (more speculatively) their subjects. It is therefore for the reader to travel back via hypertext link to the relevant story in the body-text - just as the original reader had to do. Attempting to link forward from the text to the “Notes” section would significantly distort the reading experience and misrepresent the way in which the text has been constructed. In addition to the extra detail “information” and comment supplied in those notes, the Note section of the book is the place where the author and the publisher have chosen to place the musical scores that might otherwise have adorned the stories. This is obviously a matter of publisher's convenience - though credit is due for reproducing the little sign or diagram by which Daniel O'Rourke delineated the handle that attached him to the moon — i.e, . (I am grateful to the Gutenberg editors and their successors at Sacred Books for supplying this and other scanned images inserted in the text. How Yeats appears as editor in the text is an interesting question. The title page asserts that the whole compilation was “selected and edited” by him - with apparent emphasis on selection over editing. He nevertheless added the footnotes, and added, also, those section introductions which set the tone for the stories and serve to convey the rationale (such as it is) for his own taxonomic ordering of the stories. In most instances it is quite apparent who wrote the stories from the title-heading and the by-line - though no authors are actually named in the table of contents, giving the whole the appearance of a collection of canonical tales rather than authored writings. However, the introduction is sufficient to disabuse any reader who might be inclined to take such a naive view since Yeats distinctly indicates that the narrative style of many of the stories is associated with a variable relation between the Gaelic originals and the Anglo-Irish writers who purveyed them in the English literary market place. This is not, then, the simple transliteration of a folklore corpus so much as a source book, or - rather - a space-marker for a more authentic literature that Yeats hopes will come into existence, carrying the materials of Gaelic folk-lore into a contemporary (modern) literary setting. The inherent weaknesses of that project are obvious from the outset and, in the main, effectively doomed it from the start. What remains is a kind of postcolonial handbook in which the troubled and troubling question of auto-exoticism, colonial condescension, and social-consciousness (reflected in questions of dialectic and accent) effective mar the supposition of a pristine form of imagination underneath the narratives of the various authors showcased here. One of the most interesting examples of the benefits of an informal method of annotation is the treatment of the title of the story of “Countess Kathleen O’Shea” - an obviious precursor for the Countess Kathleen in Yeats's play of that name. We know from his own testimony that this was written for Maud Gonne; it comes as a surprise (in a restrospective arrangement) to find that the original heroine shared a name with the mistress and afterward (briefly) wife of Charles Stewart Parnell. It might be inferred that Yeats actually wrote it with Parnell in mind - making it a species of allegory in which his mistress served as the symbolic counterpart of the man himself. Literary Parnellism could hardly be taken further. The oddity of the text, in its anthology form, is that Yeats purports in an economical footnote to have found it in a disremembered newspaper. On stylistic evidence alone, it is clearly his own writing with no trace of any anterior version other than, perhaps, the story line. It should be noted that there are some marked differences in the font and lineation of the introductory item in each section of the book as named in the table of contents and the actual stories which comprise the bulk of the compilation - all of which are produced in a uniform font. E.g., the introduction to the section on “The Pooka” (p.[94]) is printed in a smaller font and with more generous line-spacing than the preceeding story (“Far Darrig in Donegal”) which appears on its verso, or the ensuing item (“The Piper and the Puca”) which commences on the facing page.  Curiously, while both the author, Douglas Hyde, and the source, his Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta, are cited in the heading of the second-named story, the source of other stories in the volume, if notarised at all, is invariably consigned to a footnote on the opening page, as we have seen. More strangely still, an earlier reference to Hyde’s LS in the volume is spoken of in the corresponding footnote as being about to appear rather than already published, suggesting a time lapse in the setting of the various parts of the book in hand. E.g., *None of Mr Hyde’s stories here given have been published before. They will be printed in the original Irish in his forthcoming Leabhar Sgealaigheachta (Gill, Dublin). [p.16; footnote to title of “Teig O’Kane (Tadhg Ó Cáthán) and the Corpse”. The use of italics for Irish words, both in text and footnotes, is erratic in the original as deriving from the various authors of the tales and their publishers. I have tended to italicise all Irish words when the appear in their linguistically distinct form. Hiberno-English phonetic renditions of the same are treated as in the source. It may well be worth compiling an edition in which a standardised method of typography is introduced in conjunction with a further set of notes offering adequate philological notes and, where apposite, commenting on the notes of the originals.  Here, in particular, the apparent inconsistency of editorial styles in “Anglo-Irish” literature when it engages (or indulges) in dialect writing - and most glaringly evident in the editions of Carleton - is directly at issue as being a phenomenon if cultural significance in itself.  The Irish orthography has been corrected only to the extent that my own mediocre schoolboy Irish admits and in some places not corrected at all - e.g., tu for tú in Yeats's transcription of Hyde's notes on Tir na nOg. [See Notes, supra.] Recurrent scanning errors in all previous digital copies such as com for corn and foment for H.E. fornent [i.e., near/against - var fornenst] have been silently corrected. I have introduced standard indents (or blockquotes) for quoted matter in verse or prose (e.g., epistolary text). In one case only (“The Banshee of the MacCarthys”) have I introduced paragraph breaks where they are not in the original since the first paragraph is unnecessarily long and particularly unsuited to screen-reading. BS / Jan. 2012. (P.S. I soon intend to revisit the text and reinstate all misorthographies in the original, bassed on the page-image supplied in the Internet Archive; ditto all paragraph-breaks especially around speech marks - although the present layout suggests room for an entirely new edition in which these matters will be suitably modernised with a record of the original - for good or ill - in the annotations.)