Sitting on my Fathers knee, around the roaring fire and listening to the storytellers, I have believed in fairies since I was very little.
Brought up on a farm you learned to respect the fairies. Fields that could not be ploughed or planted because there was a Fairy Mound in it, and no farmer in his right mind would interfere with the fairy home for fear of drawing upon us the wrath of the fairies.
I remember leaving a token of something sweet for the fairies on May Eve, the night when the fairies were out dancing and singing.
The stories of the fairies coaxing a child to go with them is immortalised in W.B. Yeats “The Stolen Child” and sometimes leaving a sickly child, who was called a Changeling.
A fairy tune in the wind was heard by one of the Islanders on the Blasket Islands called ‘Port na bpúcaí’, a beautiful melody given to us by the fairies.
I will be blogging on the fairies shortly but a little something from my favourite poem by W.B. Yeats:
“Come away of human child – to the waters and the wild
With a fairy hand in hand – for the world is more full of weeping
Than you can understand”
Creidim i síoga, ó bhíos an óg, agus mé suite ar ghlùin m’athar os cóir tine mhór oscailte, ag éisteacht leo seo, a bhíodh a’scéaltóireacht.
Tá cuir síos síoraí,maidir leis na síoga, ag iarraidh leanbh a mhealladh chun dul leo, i ndán W.B. Yeats The Stolen Child … (An Leanbh a Fuadaíodh) agus uaireanta a’ fágaint leanbh a bhí leochailleach breoite ina ionad, go dtugtaí iarlais air.