This article is taken from a lecture given to the Glens of Antrim Historical Society by Senator T. K Whittaker on Friday, 3rd April, 1981.
The man I commemorate tonight was one of yourselves – a man of these parts. He entered life here on the Antrim coast where, reputedly, the first man entered Ireland; he lived as a child in the Glens – but a child who “Knew the grace for light” 1; and he went forth to harvest the rich but fast perishing local tradition of simple Irish folk whose way of life had changed little over thousands of years.
James Hamilton Delargy was born in Cushendall on 26 May, 1899. His father died when he was only two and a few years later his mother brought him and his brother to live in Glenariffe. As he himself said “we left the old house which my grandfather, Captain James Delargy, had built in intervals spared from sea faring . . . I was between four and five years of age at the time, but I can still hear the grating of the wheels of the “long car” on the gravel outside my fathers door, and the crack of the whip of Davy Johnston, the driver, as the long unwieldy vehicle lumbered off, and the look we gave across our shoulders at the past we were leaving behind.” He also described to me the view from the little house in the Glens: “In front of us was the sea, and on stormy winter days the spray came whirling in before a north-easter to rattle on the window panes and the rain squalls shut out the as yet unspoilt vision of sheer beauty – Red Bay and the long sandy beach (An Traigh Bhan), the ruined castle of the MacDonnells at Uaimh an Deirg, and in the far distance the islands and headlands of Kintyre.”
These quotations, and others I shall use later, which reveal Seamus Delargy’s poetic feeling and love for the past and its people, are taken from the transcript of interviews I had with him during 1974, when he was already 75 years of age. Fearing that he would keep on postponing on account of his remarkable life and achievements, so intent was he still on bringing edited records of Irish folklore into print, I, with others of his friends, sought a way of coaxing from him a memoir of his early life while relieving him as much as possible of the effort involved. So I turned to the device of interviewing him, taking a tape recording of the conversation and having it typed. He willingly cooperated in the turning of the tables on himself – our foremost collector of folklore – and we spent many agreeable hours together in his home, with a hospitable glass of whiskey within reach, initially recording his reminiscences and subsequently checking and editing the typescript. One evening he produced a short autobiography, mainly of his boyhood years, which he had already committed to paper. It was agreed that I should thread this into the record at the appropriate points. The resultant typescript of forty-six pages leads up to his return to Dublin from Scandinavia and his version, as the mail boat came in, of his life’s vocation:
“I went right out to the bow and I saw the Irish Hills. That is a long time ago – in 1928 – and I said ‘the tradition of Ireland is behind those hills and we’ve got to rescue it before its trampled into dirt’ . . . Because it is a jewel of great price and one had to see that it was given a refuge and an appreciation by the Irish people.”
The little boy in the Glens heard his first folk tale from the village part-time barber. But let me draw upon his own account:
“He was a very knowledgeable man. He could build a boat and shoe a horse, and dance a jig, and had many other accomplishments. He was a friendly man and had a way with children, and my mother sent for him when she made the great decision to have my red hair cut for the very first time. He came with a smile on his face and a big pair of scissors in his hand and he frightened the life out of me, for I knew that something terrible and irredeemable was going to happen, and that I was drawing away my mothers apron-strings and about to take my first step into a strange world. So I cried and howled, and poor Jimmy stood there with the scissors in hand, and looked at my poor mother who felt half resentful herself and was on the brink of tears. I forget now which of them solved the difficulty, and stopped me from howling my lungs out. Anyway the upshot of it all was that if I stayed quiet and let him cut my hair he would tell me a story. That’s how I heard my first folk-tale.”
What might have been a nightmare became a longed-for ritual, for every time Jimmy came to cut my hair he brought with him a new story. It might be a tale about the fairies in Tiveragh, the fort on the hill above the village where the “wee folk” lived, and rode around the country on the yellow ben-weed which made the finest horses that you ever could see, much finer than the shaggy ‘Shilty’ ponies which we children saw the farmers driving in flocks off the hills of Glenariffe and Garron to the fair at Cushendall. Or it might have been the story of the ‘grogach’ a wee hairy fairy who used to help the farmers in old times to thresh their corn but had a great dislike for anyone who offered to reward him.
When I look back on the road that I have travelled and count the milestones, and think of some of the strange things that have happened to the little red-haired boy who lived long ago – and long ago it is – in the Glens, I think that these tales told by the long dead part-time barber gave a twist to the road that lay ahead. If that be so, soft may the sod lie on Jimmy’s head, and God give him peace, for those tales have indeed brought me into pleasant paths and friendly company, not only in the Glens of Antrim, but through most of Ireland and many other land beside.”
The school in the Glen, with a mossy well beside it on the roadside, had the distinction of being No.1 on the official lists, the school in the native glen of Sir Alexander MacDonnell, Commissioner for National Education, the number one school in Ireland to its proud pupils. “The school is now gone but the well remains. It was there when I visited the Glen in 1944 after almost 20 years’ absence, the same mossy well, the same limpid ice-cold water, the same violets and primroses. And my mind went back to the days of my youth, and to my own people who sleep in the only land I own, the graves in the churchyard at the end of the Bay.”
In 1907 the Delargy family left the north forever. The two brothers were first sent to a convent school in Kilcool, Co. Wicklow, and later Castleknock College, near Dublin, “from which in due course my brother went to sea, and I, a transgressor to tradition, to the University where I stayed.”
It was at Castleknock that the young Delargy fell in love with the Irish language. The Irish teacher was Frank Fahy, many years afterwards Ceann Comhairle (Speaker) of Dáil Éireann, who encouraged his interest, gave the boy extra lessons an threw open a cupboard of Irish books for him to read. Then on holidays with his aunt Mrs McDonnell, in his native Cushendall at the age of sixteen he made his first trip to the Gaeltacht. His aunt had given him a half-sovereign to bring him to Rathlin Island to attend a summer school of Coláiste Comhaill in Belfast, which was in charge of a Miss Haverty, a “good woman and true Gael.” His account of the voyage is amusing but too long to retell tonight. He remembered that it was Paddy McQuilkin from Rathlin, who owned a ferry, a sailing boat, and that he paid a shilling to go across. The rest of the fare was paid in kind – passengers had to pick up the big stones from the foreshore and put them in the boat as ballast. He saw the irony of the pupils being taught at the summer school from the Munster Irish texts of An t Athair Peadar (Fr. Peter O’Leary) although the language of the islanders was much closer to Scottish Gaelic than Irish. He describes a pamphlet called Scéaltan Reachreann as a not very reliable collection of tales by an eccentric Gaelic leaguer named Aoidhmin McGréagóir “who wore only a Gaelic League clothes, Gaelic league boots and all that.” It was, however, this little book, which gave him a longing to visit Rathlin Island.
I have beside me as I write ten pages of notes in a careful school boy hand taken down during the first visit to Rathlin, when he stayed with Dan and Jane Craig for three shillings a week. Some of them are proverbs in Rathlin Irish – Mar san is téinne an gad, san is dóiche a bhriseadh (the tighter the knot the nearer the breaking point); some are common expressions – chan fhiach duit do shaothar ag teacht (its not worth your while coming) – but even at this early stage, differences of pronunciation, grammar and idiom are being noted. He returned to Rathlin in 1916, 1918 and possibly in 1920.
The interest awakened in Castleknock and nurtured in rathlin brought him to the Arran Islands and Donegal in 1918 and to the Hebrides in 1919 and 1922. Meanwhile, the Glens were not forgotten. On holiday with his aunt in Cushendall he searched out the last speakers of Antrim Irish of which he had been unaware when he went to school in Glenariffe. Irish had been ebbing out of the Glens – out of Glenballyeamon and Layde and Glenariffe – but a brother of the last great story teller of Glenariffe was still living in Waterfoot, Jimmy McAuley. Every evening Jimmy went to Red Bay pier to fish and the young man from Dublin, whose grandfather was himself a native Irish speaker, went with him to fish and listen. It was on Red Bay pier that he took down his first tale in Antrim Irish in an “exercise book” with 1920 on the cover, which I have by my side.
It begins “Innsidh mé scéal beaug dúit a chaula mé vón tsean mhúintir tiomailte air rud a thachair uair amháin ann áite abheir said Cloch Corr air. Bhí coinfheasgar amháin agu bhí sééagsúil ceodhach: Chan fhaiceas tú do fhaird féin roimhe leat agus díreach an t-am is measa a bhy sé shiubhal duine beag asteach ‘un a taighe agus ghuidh sé orra fasgadh na h-oích do” . . .Another story, recorded in September 1920 from the same man deals with hunting down the last wolf in Ireland – “mhairbh siad an faolchúfá dheire a bhí in Eirinn ann garrdha m’athar . . . stróich (na madaí é óna mhullach go dtí shál.” In 1920 and 1921 also he took down stories from Barney bhriain MacAuley of Glenariffe and visited Marie Mhór MacCormack on the roads to Cushendall and the McKay sisters and brother at the top of Glenariffe. He had photographs taken of them all and encouraged Eamonn O Tuathail; later Professor of Irish at Trinity College Dublin, to record their voices on the old Ediphone. He mentions with respect Father Dan Tohill who was himself interested in all these old people and their heritage and who brought out an edition of the Imitation of Christ in County Down Irish. This priest had once asked the Delargy boys, as they played on a low wall in Glenariffe, whether they knew any Irish and when they said “no”, told them they should be ashamed of themselves. Apparently the rebuke had a good effect!
My typescript contains some hero-tales concerning the Delargys themselves – the sea captains whose vessels were familiar with Shanghai and San Francisco and the tea-trade and the voyage or “immram” of one such ship which becalmed somewhere in Polynesia and whose captain and crew “ended up in a stewpot and were eaten by cannibals”. There is also an account of an earlier confrontation, averted only by the intervention of a Yankee Clipper, between the reckless Captain Delargy and a British gunboat in Shanghai harbour over the flying of a Fenian flag.
But the bravado always tends to subside into nostalgia. “Tradition’s voice was stilled when Gaelic died in the Glens.” “The dead words on a manuscript page are poor substitute for the haunting beauty of the language which lingered and died on the lips of my old friends.” A stanza of William Rooney’s was often cried.
For the olden memories fast are flying from us
O, that some kind hand would come and bind them in a Garland
Ere the present hardens and the past grows cold and dumb.
In his Sir John Rhys memorial lecture to the British Academy in 1952, Delargy has a footnote deploring the loss of the oral literature of the counties of Down and Antrim of which only a few fragments have been preserved. This area of East Ulster, he recalled, had ancient traditional links with the Isle of man and through Galloway and the west of Scotland with the culture of the Norse Kingdom of the Isles. In his conversations with me in 1974 he mentioned the preservation of a lost link of the pedigree of the O’Neills in the memory of an old woman in Glenariffe – Peggy Carnagie – and the value placed by that other scholarly Glensman, the late professor Eoin MacNeill, on this crucial supplement to the genealogical records.
I have dwelt on Delargy’s affection and respect for his native place because this was an integral part of the character of the man and I am certain he would wish me to convey something of his life-long Heimweh for the Glens.
After Castleknock he had entered the Vincentian Fathers’ novitiate in Blackrock and begun his university studies. He did not stay long as a novice and indeed, suffered his first major illness in his second year of University College. Depressed and short of money he was about to give up his studies and look for a job when, through the kind and discreet intervention of the formidable but shy Professor of Old Irish, Osborn Bergin, he was enabled to stay. After gaining an M.A. in Celtic studies in 1923 he was engaged as an assistant to Dr. Douglas Hyde, the professor of Modern Irish at University College, Dublin. In 1923, also on Bergins advice, he went to Ballinskelligs in West Kerry and there met the seventy year old monoglot Irish speaker whom he describes as follows in his Rhys Memorial Lectures:
“The first story-teller I ever met in the south was a certain Seán O’Conaill, a farmer-fisherman of the tiny mountain hamlet of Cillrialaig, in the south-west corner of Kerry. Seen from the sea, one has the impression that this cluster of six houses hangs between the sea and the sky, clinging to the precipitous slopes of Bolus Head, 300 feet above the sea. It is a lonely; windswept place, where man has farmed here and there out of the rocks and boulders and rough mountain land and crazy quilt of tiny fields to grow his oats and rye, hay and potatoes. Past the houses the rocky road winds like a ribbon along the side of the hill to reach here at journeys end the last of all inhabited places on this edge of the known world. The little village of Cillrialaig will never fade from the fond eye of memory, for here I met the man in whose tales and traditions I found the inspiration to collect or have collected, in so far as in me lay, the unwritten traditions of the people of Ireland.”
“In the collections of folk lore which I took down from Seán O’Conaill, there is for the first time in one book all the material recorded from a single Irish story teller. The book contains 396 pages of Irish text alone, exclusive of notes and English summaries, divided as follows: Marchen 51 (pp 1-197); Irish Finn – and hero tales 7; shorter anecdotes of mythological, religious, historical, or socio-historical character 42; fairy-tales 45; tales of eighteenth and nineteenth century Gaelic poets 41; a few songs and song fragments, and a collection of various smaller items of prose and verse conclude the volume.”
This one book alone stands as a monument to Delargy’s prescience and perseverance as the guardian of a dying heritage.
Seán O’Conaill was, however, only the first of a line of revered story tellers, at whose firesides Delargy sat, and this Kerry collection only the beginning of a lifetime’s work for which he equipped himself by acquiring further competence in Gaelic and French Languages, by learning German, and by gaining access, thorough learning Swedish and Icelandic, to the scholarship as well as the rich folk-lore of Scandinavia. “The scientific collection, classification and comparative study of folk-lore is an off-shoot of nineteenth century German linguistic science, and reached maturity after 1885 in the work of the Finnish and Scandinavian schools” (Professor Michael Tierney). From being interested in oral tradition primarily from a linguistic and literary standpoint, Delargy was drawn to it as a scientific study in its own right and an indispensable aid to social and historical studies when, by good fortune, he was introduced in July, 1927, at a lecture given by Reidar Christiansen of Oslo, to a Swedish folklorist who had been learning Irish on the Great Blasket. The unlettered countryman, Seán O’Conaill, the erudite Swede, Professor Wilhelm von Sydow, share the credit for transforming enthusiasm into sustained and ordered zeal which, in the nick of time, brought safely into a scholarly archive an incalculable wealth of tradition doomed otherwise to oblivion.
Delargy himself, having referred to the written literature of medieval Ireland, goes on to say:
“In the unwritten literature and traditions of the Gaelic speaking countryman are echoes out of the vast silence of a still more ancient time, of which hitherto the archaeologist has been only a chronicler. This venerable body of tradition survived in most parts of Ireland until the great famine of 1846-47 and the succeeding period of unprecedented evictions and emigration. . . The scholars and literary men of Ireland, both Irish and Anglo Irish, who wrote exclusively in English, were in the main completely ignorant of Irish, and contemptuous of the language and the people who spoke it . . . the loss of the language over most of Ireland brought about the destruction of the oral literature enshrined in it, leaving a gap in our knowledge of Irish folk-lore which can never be filled.”3
The foundation of a cooperative effort to save as much as possible of that dying oral tradition were laid as early as 1927, when the Folklore of Ireland Society was formed and the publication of the “Béaloideas” was commenced. Delargy was to edit the journal for forty-six years. In 1930 the Irish Folklore Institute was established with a small state grant and was later materially helped by the Rockafeller Foundation and the Carnegie United Kingdoms Trust. The Institute gave way in 1935 to the Irish Folklore Commission, more securely endowed from public funds, and Delargy continued as its honorary Director on the basis of his lectureship and (from 1946) professorship at University College, Dublin. He assembled a group of distinguished and dedicated collaborators, including Seán O’Súilleábhain, Caoimhín O’Danachar and Máire McNeill, and a team of able collectors with modern recording apparatus. Delargy himself continued to collect – in Clare, Connemara and Kerry – as well as to direct and assess. He helped Robert Flaherty to produce in 1934 the first ever sound film in Irish – Oíche Sheanchais. Even as the “eleventh hour chronicler of and older world”, as he described himself, he achieved wonders. The ‘meitheal’ he directed brought home a rich harvest – two million pages or more of manuscript, together with sound recordings, photographs, sketches and numerous other reminders of tradition.
Delargys successor in the chair of Irish Folklore, Bo Almqvist, has described, in a 1977 lecture, the achievement and legacy for the Irish Folklore Commission. The Commission as such was wound up in 1971 when, with its library and garnered treasure, it was subsumed into the Department of Irish Folklore of University College Dublin. A Chromhairle Bhéaloideas Eireann, of which I am now chairman, now has the particular duty to promote, in association with the Department of Irish Folklore, the cataloguing, editing and publication of material from the collections. It has already, under the sign of the Harvest Knot, published a number of books and pamphlets and republished the famous Leabhar Sheáin I Chonaill, of which an English translation by Máire MacNeill will shortly appear.
I was privileged to become a friend of Seamus Delargy in his later and lonelier years, when his wife had died, his son had become a priest and his daughter was married. I was glad to play a part in arranging the transfer of the archive to University College Dublin. We travelled to Iceland together, he for his farewell visit, I for my first. I spent happy days fishing with him in Erris and pleasant nights chatting with him by his fireside at 28 Kenilworth Square. I accompanied him on a last sentimental journey along the course of the River Inny, near the lodge in the Mayo bog land where folklore collection was housed for safekeeping during the war years. We revisited house after house, finding inevitably that many of his friends had gone on “slí na fírinne”. It was brought home to me that his life task had more than its share of sadness, as, indeed, is evident from his poignant introduction to Leabhar Sheain I Chonaill. In my few remaining words I shall be drawing on the appreciation I wrote for The Irish Times on the morrow of his death on 25th June, 1980.
I referred to the Pauline zeal with which he travelled widely, bringing his gospel and encouragement in person and by letter to remote parts – the Hebrides, Iceland, Corsica, The Shetlands, The Faroes. He tried in vain to interest The Vatican in organising the collection of folk-life material in mission lands. Invitations crowded on him to lecture at eminent universities. Honours for the pioneer came in numerous doctorates and in decorations from the King of Sweden and the President of Iceland. An emotional man, he appreciated this acclaim and treasured the thousands of letters from those he helped and inspired. His greatest respect and reverence was, however, always reserved for those who had confided in him to their immemorial and treasured lore.
So I salute, a remarkable man who had the vision, the training, the warm humanity, the unflagged zeal and the organisational capacity to collect and safeguard the dying heritage of Ireland’s oral tradition before it was too late. By very few in our history – apart, perhaps, from the scribes and illuminators of our greatest manuscripts and that other Northerner, Bunting – has as great a cultural service been rendered to Ireland.
Foot Notes.
1. Moira O’Neill in one of her songs of the Glens of Antrim laments time’s change: “Nor a child in all the nine Glens that knows the grace for light.”
2. The Gaelic Storyteller.
3. The Gaelic Storyteller.