Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [3]
Elizabeth Haydon’s “The Merrow” may well be a cousin to the silkie woman who was a key character in John Sayles brilliant fantasy film The Legend of Roan Inish. In both cases the seal woman (perhaps borrowed from Nordic folklore) fought for her love, and in both they won, but more gently in the film, where the missing baby is only spending time with “another branch of the family” until his parents decide not to abandon the island. In both this and the previous story, God’s love for his creatures is invoked on the side of faerie, a point which Gaby and Mike make in my story.
I’ve never heard of the Butter Spirit (in Charles de Lint’s story “The Butter Spirit’s Tithe”), though I suspect he is part of the crowd and not a nice person either, probably one of the bad Shee in the Yolen and Stemple story. However, the gray man is certainly part of the heritage and also a bad Shee, but not without some sense of justice.
Is the wailing young woman out in the cold in Ray Bradbury’s story really a “Banshee” (a woman spirit) or is she a ghost or is she a plant that the narrator has used to get rid of his dubious friend? I’m inclined to think that she is the last. The real banshee, is, as everyone knows, an old woman, just as she appears in Duane’s story.
Finally, my own efforts to reconcile the Shee with the Seraphs (“Peace in Heaven”) is based on two premises—if the angels have bodies (as the fathers of the Church say they do), albeit ethereal bodies, then there must eventually be deterioration and, for the species to survive, reproduction. Gender differentiation is not the only way to do it, but the Other seems to have a certain fondness for this method. The second premise is that in the book of Job, Satan is one of God’s court and not a demon. The Seraphs have appeared in some of my novels, but this is the first time they’ve ever been to Ireland. Like I say, they are fantasy, not theology. Yet, as I also say, I’ll be disappointed if in the Other’s variegated cosmos there are not beings like them.
The second group of stories are less explicitly tied to faerie lore, though the “Lady in Grey” in Jane Lindskold’s story about Maud Gonne and William Yeats may well be faerie too. Yeats was surely the greatest English-language lyric poet of the twentieth century, but I have always felt that he was a creep as a lover and that Maud was well rid of him. Readers of the story will have to decide whether they agree with me.
The two stories about blood, “A Drop of Something in the Blood” and “For the Blood Is the Life”(Fred Saberhagen and Peter Tremayne), are a reference (explicit and then implicit) to another Irish writer who has had an enormous impact on the world, though no one has ever suggested that Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula, was in the same class as Willie Yeats. The encounter between him and Charcot is a dazzling premise brilliantly executed. Peter Tremayne has the most terrifying of the horror stories in this collection, not particularly Irish in its assumptions, but still benefiting greatly from its setting in Dublin.
Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s retelling of Lady Gregory’s version of the Oisin story is impressive. It is about Irish Faerie and the followers of Finn McCool, and the ultimate defeat of the faerie (though never complete) by Patrick and his crowd.Moreover the faerie woman who takes Oisin away from the Fiana is the daughter of MacLir, who shows up in Dublin to dialogue with Gaby and Mike. Yet the story in its present form is more literary than folkloric, so I put it in the section that deals with fantasy inspired less by folkore and more by more or less contemporary Irish literature (last century and a half).
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s lyrical story of space travel could also belong to the early-twentieth-century Celtic revival, an era dense with Irish mysticism. And in this story there’s more than a hint of Irish mystical pride. “The universe is thought, wrapped