Eddie in the news - selected articles
Fairy dust up - from PEOPLE Weekly's August 23, 1999
When a highway threatened the spirits' storied lair in County Clare, Eddie Lenihan leapt to its defense.
To be sure, Eddie Lenihan enjoys his pint. But the County Clare folklorist swears he was stone-cold sober - and this is no blarney - when he stirred up a tempest over a thornbush this spring. He lobbied to save a 15-foot hawthorn from being uprooted during highway construction on the grounds that it was a "fairy bush." (Irish tradition links hawthorns to spirits, who, legend also has it, may exact a nasty revenge on anyone who tampers with their timber.) "I've taken many people to see this tree," says Lenihan, 48, explaining his letter of protest to the county council. "I feel a responsibility for it."
So, it seems, did a number of other County Clareans who phoned local radio stations in support. Whether it was this popular groundswell - or fear of the fairies' retribution - the county recently assured Lenihan that the tree would be incorporated into the highway landscaping and remain unscathed.
Although the prized bush would appear to be out of the woods, Lenihan is not about to rest on his, er, hawthorn. The Limerick high school English teacher and father of six has set himself a much more ambitious preservation project - to keep alive the old Irish tales of magic, mystery and the underworld that he has already compiled in nine books. "We are losing our tradition," says Lenihan, who allows that he has yet to clap eyes on any fairies himself.
"And if you have no magic in your life, you're in a sad place."
Reprinted from PEOPLE Weekly's August 23, 1999 issue by special permission; © 1999 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
To be sure, Eddie Lenihan enjoys his pint. But the County Clare folklorist swears he was stone-cold sober - and this is no blarney - when he stirred up a tempest over a thornbush this spring. He lobbied to save a 15-foot hawthorn from being uprooted during highway construction on the grounds that it was a "fairy bush." (Irish tradition links hawthorns to spirits, who, legend also has it, may exact a nasty revenge on anyone who tampers with their timber.) "I've taken many people to see this tree," says Lenihan, 48, explaining his letter of protest to the county council. "I feel a responsibility for it."
So, it seems, did a number of other County Clareans who phoned local radio stations in support. Whether it was this popular groundswell - or fear of the fairies' retribution - the county recently assured Lenihan that the tree would be incorporated into the highway landscaping and remain unscathed.
Although the prized bush would appear to be out of the woods, Lenihan is not about to rest on his, er, hawthorn. The Limerick high school English teacher and father of six has set himself a much more ambitious preservation project - to keep alive the old Irish tales of magic, mystery and the underworld that he has already compiled in nine books. "We are losing our tradition," says Lenihan, who allows that he has yet to clap eyes on any fairies himself.
"And if you have no magic in your life, you're in a sad place."
Reprinted from PEOPLE Weekly's August 23, 1999 issue by special permission; © 1999 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
if you believe in fairies, don't bulldoze their lair - FROM The new york times june 15, 1999
LATOON, Ireland -- Eddie Lenihan, a smallish man with a dark unkempt beard, a wild head of hair and an intense look in his eyes, pointed to the high white-blossomed hawthorn bush standing alone in a large field in this village in western Ireland and issued, not for the first or last time, a warning to local officials:
If they bulldoze the bush to make way for a planned highway bypass, the fairies will come. To curse the road and all who use it, to make brakes fail and cars crash, to wreak the kind of mischief fairies are famous for when they are angry, which is often.
That, he said, is because this particular hawthorn is a fairy bush, a favorite meeting place for supernatural folk, dating back to the mist of pre-Celtic history. A local farmer, who said he saw white fairy blood around the bush, told him the story.
The engineer in charge of the bypass, around the County Clare town of Newmarket-on-Fergus, says he will think it over. Lenihan hopes that once construction workers know it is a fairy bush, they will refuse to destroy it.
Other highways in Ireland have been rerouted around fairy locations in recent decades. People in Ireland, Lenihan said, say they don't believe the old tales of the fairies and their shoemakers, the leprechauns.
"They laugh at you," he said, standing beside the gnarled gray trunk of the 15-foot-high bush. "It's not sophisticated. But subconsciously, they believe."
Lenihan, who grimaces and gesticulates and speaks in low urgent tones, is dramatic but serious, a 49-year-old high school teacher who is one of the few traditional storytellers -- seanchai in Gaelic -- still working in Ireland.
Folklore experts at University College in Dublin say that Lenihan's style is a touch theatrical but that he is an authentic and competent folklorist, who has taped thousands of hours of the old stories around the country by interviewing old Irish men and women.
He retells them at arts and culture festivals around Ireland and before college students in the United States. Still, in the age of radio, television and the Internet, his art seems to be in its twilight.
While many people in Ireland may still believe in the fairies in a corner of their minds, they are more concerned with other unseen menaces, like radiation from cell phones and from the nuclear waste put into the Irish Sea by the British.
There is also considerable belief in UFO's and aliens from outer space who, like the fairies, are believed to steal babies and cause sudden, apparently accidental deaths. The current invisible menaces are merely an updating of the ancient ones, Lenihan said.
The experts at the University College's folklore department agree with Lenihan that while the people of modern Ireland scoff publicly at fairy stories, ashamed to admit their beliefs and superstitions to strangers, there is still strong vestigial belief in the fairies.
Baibre Ni Fhloinn, an archivist and fairy story collector in the department, said: "It's a passive belief, and it includes a lot of young, well-educated people. There is a reluctance to interfere in things which have an association with the fairies or with the other world. We would all rather be safe than sorry. People are not taking unnecessary chances. Life is complicated enough."
She would include herself, she said. She said Lenihan, though theatrical, was a serious folklorist, not merely a performer.
Reprinted from The New York Times June 15, 1999; © 1999 New York Time Inc. All rights reserved.
If they bulldoze the bush to make way for a planned highway bypass, the fairies will come. To curse the road and all who use it, to make brakes fail and cars crash, to wreak the kind of mischief fairies are famous for when they are angry, which is often.
That, he said, is because this particular hawthorn is a fairy bush, a favorite meeting place for supernatural folk, dating back to the mist of pre-Celtic history. A local farmer, who said he saw white fairy blood around the bush, told him the story.
The engineer in charge of the bypass, around the County Clare town of Newmarket-on-Fergus, says he will think it over. Lenihan hopes that once construction workers know it is a fairy bush, they will refuse to destroy it.
Other highways in Ireland have been rerouted around fairy locations in recent decades. People in Ireland, Lenihan said, say they don't believe the old tales of the fairies and their shoemakers, the leprechauns.
"They laugh at you," he said, standing beside the gnarled gray trunk of the 15-foot-high bush. "It's not sophisticated. But subconsciously, they believe."
Lenihan, who grimaces and gesticulates and speaks in low urgent tones, is dramatic but serious, a 49-year-old high school teacher who is one of the few traditional storytellers -- seanchai in Gaelic -- still working in Ireland.
Folklore experts at University College in Dublin say that Lenihan's style is a touch theatrical but that he is an authentic and competent folklorist, who has taped thousands of hours of the old stories around the country by interviewing old Irish men and women.
He retells them at arts and culture festivals around Ireland and before college students in the United States. Still, in the age of radio, television and the Internet, his art seems to be in its twilight.
While many people in Ireland may still believe in the fairies in a corner of their minds, they are more concerned with other unseen menaces, like radiation from cell phones and from the nuclear waste put into the Irish Sea by the British.
There is also considerable belief in UFO's and aliens from outer space who, like the fairies, are believed to steal babies and cause sudden, apparently accidental deaths. The current invisible menaces are merely an updating of the ancient ones, Lenihan said.
The experts at the University College's folklore department agree with Lenihan that while the people of modern Ireland scoff publicly at fairy stories, ashamed to admit their beliefs and superstitions to strangers, there is still strong vestigial belief in the fairies.
Baibre Ni Fhloinn, an archivist and fairy story collector in the department, said: "It's a passive belief, and it includes a lot of young, well-educated people. There is a reluctance to interfere in things which have an association with the fairies or with the other world. We would all rather be safe than sorry. People are not taking unnecessary chances. Life is complicated enough."
She would include herself, she said. She said Lenihan, though theatrical, was a serious folklorist, not merely a performer.
Reprinted from The New York Times June 15, 1999; © 1999 New York Time Inc. All rights reserved.
Land blessing tradition survives as farmers seek to ward off piseogs -FROM THE Irish Independent May 3, 2011
Did you take the time to shake holy water in each corner of your fields on Saturday night? The old custom of using holy water to ward off bad luck and protect against piseogs on May Eve may have died out in some areas but the tradition is alive and well in others.
It was believed that shaking Easter water or blessed water from 'Cumann na dTrí nUisce'-- any place where three waters, three parishes, three townlands or even three drains meet - was particularly powerful, but any water that had been blessed was enough to ward off bad luck. The aim is to protect your boundaries from bad luck in the form of piseogs.
East Clare resident and well-known storyteller Eddie Lenihan says piseogs can be described as simply old superstitions but they have a more sinister side that he says is the Irish equivalent of voodoo in the Caribbean.
Badness
"Piseogs are evil magic, the working of badness on your neighbours or the taking away of his luck to add to your own luck," he says.
"People used to believe that there was only a certain amount of luck to go around."
There are hundreds of piseogs that relate to farming, crops and land.
To place raw eggs on your neighbour's land was said to reduce his crop and increase your own. The placing of raw meat, be it a piece of bacon or a dead chicken, in another man's field would ruin his crop.
"You could find that your potato crop would be all stalks and no crop," says Eddie. "If you looked at your neighbour's field, his might have a great crop and you would be suspicious of him.
"Nowadays, modern people would say it was a lack of fertiliser but, back then, it was what people believed."
Piseogs were often associated with certain families and certain parishes, with the piseog being passed from mother to daughter. The female connection was due to women being in charge of butter making and butter was a source of wealth in the old days.
"If the butter failed, you couldn't pay rent so you were out on the road," Eddie says. "It's no wonder the women were always watching each other's butter and their success."
Protecting the milking cows from piseogs was absolutely imperative on May Eve, when it was believed piseogs were even more powerful. To ward off bad luck, a red ribbon would be tied to the cow's tail or around her neck.
There were also strict rules about where a cow house could be built. Under no circumstances should a cow byre be built on a fairy path and it should be away from a fairy fort or you would have no luck.
If you had bad luck for building the byre in the wrong place, you could try to remedy it by having a mass said in the byre.
Many families also dressed their boys in girls' clothes on May Eve to prevent them being taken by the fairies.
On May Eve, the hours between midnight and the dawn were believed to be the most dangerous and some farmers would stay up all night to try and protect their land from piseogs.
Eddie recalls several cases of women being found on their neighbour's land up to no good.
"Some women would creep onto the neighbour's land and, using a scarf or cloth, would skim the dew off the grass on May Eve. Then she would have the dew of the grass of your land to do her bad work," he says.
Another woman notorious for piseogs was reputed to use a dead man's hand for working her magic.
Terrified
"People in the area were terrified of her. They still talk about her and what she could do if you got on the wrong side of her," says Eddie.
For anyone who thinks all this happened hundreds of years ago, think again.
Within the past few years, a commercial farmer contacted Eddie about a peculiar bundle he found tied to his boundary.
"He found a 10-10-20 bag with seven hazel sticks, pointed at each end, on May morning," says Eddie. "Someone was trying to frighten or give him bad luck."
Another part-time farmer, whose suckler herd pined away each year around May Eve, became suspicious of an old lady who lived beside his farm. He resolved to stay up one May Eve and camped out in his boundary ditch under a blanket.
At dawn, he watched as the old woman crept into his field and searched for a cow pat. Crouching over it, she drew a reaping hook through the dung repeatedly, chanting "All for me, all for me, all for me." The furious farmer confronted the old woman and his cattle never pined again.
Reprinted from The Irish Independent May 3, 2011; © 2011 Caitriona Murphy/Irish Independent. All rights reserved.
It was believed that shaking Easter water or blessed water from 'Cumann na dTrí nUisce'-- any place where three waters, three parishes, three townlands or even three drains meet - was particularly powerful, but any water that had been blessed was enough to ward off bad luck. The aim is to protect your boundaries from bad luck in the form of piseogs.
East Clare resident and well-known storyteller Eddie Lenihan says piseogs can be described as simply old superstitions but they have a more sinister side that he says is the Irish equivalent of voodoo in the Caribbean.
Badness
"Piseogs are evil magic, the working of badness on your neighbours or the taking away of his luck to add to your own luck," he says.
"People used to believe that there was only a certain amount of luck to go around."
There are hundreds of piseogs that relate to farming, crops and land.
To place raw eggs on your neighbour's land was said to reduce his crop and increase your own. The placing of raw meat, be it a piece of bacon or a dead chicken, in another man's field would ruin his crop.
"You could find that your potato crop would be all stalks and no crop," says Eddie. "If you looked at your neighbour's field, his might have a great crop and you would be suspicious of him.
"Nowadays, modern people would say it was a lack of fertiliser but, back then, it was what people believed."
Piseogs were often associated with certain families and certain parishes, with the piseog being passed from mother to daughter. The female connection was due to women being in charge of butter making and butter was a source of wealth in the old days.
"If the butter failed, you couldn't pay rent so you were out on the road," Eddie says. "It's no wonder the women were always watching each other's butter and their success."
Protecting the milking cows from piseogs was absolutely imperative on May Eve, when it was believed piseogs were even more powerful. To ward off bad luck, a red ribbon would be tied to the cow's tail or around her neck.
There were also strict rules about where a cow house could be built. Under no circumstances should a cow byre be built on a fairy path and it should be away from a fairy fort or you would have no luck.
If you had bad luck for building the byre in the wrong place, you could try to remedy it by having a mass said in the byre.
Many families also dressed their boys in girls' clothes on May Eve to prevent them being taken by the fairies.
On May Eve, the hours between midnight and the dawn were believed to be the most dangerous and some farmers would stay up all night to try and protect their land from piseogs.
Eddie recalls several cases of women being found on their neighbour's land up to no good.
"Some women would creep onto the neighbour's land and, using a scarf or cloth, would skim the dew off the grass on May Eve. Then she would have the dew of the grass of your land to do her bad work," he says.
Another woman notorious for piseogs was reputed to use a dead man's hand for working her magic.
Terrified
"People in the area were terrified of her. They still talk about her and what she could do if you got on the wrong side of her," says Eddie.
For anyone who thinks all this happened hundreds of years ago, think again.
Within the past few years, a commercial farmer contacted Eddie about a peculiar bundle he found tied to his boundary.
"He found a 10-10-20 bag with seven hazel sticks, pointed at each end, on May morning," says Eddie. "Someone was trying to frighten or give him bad luck."
Another part-time farmer, whose suckler herd pined away each year around May Eve, became suspicious of an old lady who lived beside his farm. He resolved to stay up one May Eve and camped out in his boundary ditch under a blanket.
At dawn, he watched as the old woman crept into his field and searched for a cow pat. Crouching over it, she drew a reaping hook through the dung repeatedly, chanting "All for me, all for me, all for me." The furious farmer confronted the old woman and his cattle never pined again.
Reprinted from The Irish Independent May 3, 2011; © 2011 Caitriona Murphy/Irish Independent. All rights reserved.
Ghosts, piseógs and frightening folktales -FROM THE IRISH EXAMINer OCTOBER 28, 2011
Well-known seanachaí Eddie Lenihan recalls the dares and games of Halloween to Carl Dixon.
EDDIE Lenihan is a well-known seanachaí who came to national prominence in the 1980s with his 12-part RTÉ series Storyteller and Ten Minute Tales. He has also written numerous books and perhaps more importantly has recorded the tales of an older Irish generation, which otherwise would have been lost. Lenihan has a particular interest in fairies and the beliefs that older generations had about them, and in 1999 he led a successful campaign to prevent a sceach, or fairy bush, from being destroyed by roadworks in Co Clare. The storyteller has also had an enduring fascination with haunted places, fairy paths and holy wells and his stories for both adults and children are by turns comedic, haunting and grotesque. Born in Brosna in Kerry, he obtained an MA in phonetics before a brief and unlikely job with the Revenue Commissioners, followed by a long stretch as a teacher. Although rarely in one place for long, technically he lives in Crusheen, Co Clare. "This for us is the end of autumn and the first day of winter, but in olden times, for the Celts it marked the end of the entire year. Their other quarter feast days were Imbolc (which has been Christianised to St. Brigid’s Day), Bealtaine (May Eve) and Lunasa (Garland Sunday, Domhnach Chrom Dubh). "Samhain and Bealtaine were the two rent-payment days in Ireland and by Samhain every farmer worth the name was expected to have his crops secured for the winter ahead. "When this was done it was a time for celebration and fun, when adults and children alike could enjoy themselves for a little while with fun and games, nuts, apples, candles stuck in turnips, etc. This sense of jollity remains even today, though pumpkins have replaced the turnips and shop goods have overtaken the home-made varieties of almost every article (even barm-brack) and it is children almost exclusively who celebrate the festival. "This was also a time for dares and games, for example daring a boastful person to go to a haunted place, or a graveyard or fairy fort and bring back something to prove he’d been there. Part of the celebration of the night was the playing of tricks on neighbours, especially on those seen to be cantankerous or mean-spirited. By comparison with some of the things being done today most of those were quite harmless, indeed funny. But to the person on the receiving end they could sometimes be baffling. And the victim was always carefully chosen. "I well recall four examples from my home place in Kerry. The first involved keeping a close eye on a man who took his few pints every night. On one night as soon as he left for the pub, "the boys" went to his yard, took the wheels off his ass-cart, manhandled cart and wheels into the house. They then brought in the ass, tackled him to the cart, and when the poor man arrived home later to find the ass fully tackled in the kitchen …. God only knows what he must have thought about the quality of the porter that night! Another one was where the "lads" painted the windows of an old bachelor’s house with tar. The poor man had no idea when morning came. It was said afterwards that he didn’t come out for three days, until he got hungry. "Another was throwing wet sacks on people’s chimneys where there was a height behind the house. The door would have been tied beforehand, of course, from the outside, and when the kitchen began to fill up with smoke from the open fire the so-called "fun" would begin! Drunks on their way home on this night were liable to be waylaid. I recall one such case, where the man in question, asleep at the roadside, had his Wellingtons removed, then his trousers. His Wellingtons were then put back on and he was left there in his drawers. Imagine what he must have felt like when he woke, sobered somewhat and cold, in the morning! Luckily there was little motor traffic on the roads in those days. "But apart from such fun, if fun it can be called, Halloween was — and still is for some of the oldest of the old generation — genuinely a time when that veil which separates our world from the next one, the other one, is at its very thinnest, when those who live in "the place beyond" can visit us here. "It was especially believed that the souls in purgatory could visit their former homes on this night, for in the Irish Celtic tradition dead people come and go. Exactly at the hour of midnight that was the time that both ghosts and fairies could appear in our world and we could be ‘carried’ into theirs. "The belief that the ‘poor souls’, especially the souls of your own dead, might come back on that night caused not so much fear as a wish to have a welcome for them if them should come That was why the hearth was cleaned that night and a little meal left on the table."
© This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, October 28, 2011
EDDIE Lenihan is a well-known seanachaí who came to national prominence in the 1980s with his 12-part RTÉ series Storyteller and Ten Minute Tales. He has also written numerous books and perhaps more importantly has recorded the tales of an older Irish generation, which otherwise would have been lost. Lenihan has a particular interest in fairies and the beliefs that older generations had about them, and in 1999 he led a successful campaign to prevent a sceach, or fairy bush, from being destroyed by roadworks in Co Clare. The storyteller has also had an enduring fascination with haunted places, fairy paths and holy wells and his stories for both adults and children are by turns comedic, haunting and grotesque. Born in Brosna in Kerry, he obtained an MA in phonetics before a brief and unlikely job with the Revenue Commissioners, followed by a long stretch as a teacher. Although rarely in one place for long, technically he lives in Crusheen, Co Clare. "This for us is the end of autumn and the first day of winter, but in olden times, for the Celts it marked the end of the entire year. Their other quarter feast days were Imbolc (which has been Christianised to St. Brigid’s Day), Bealtaine (May Eve) and Lunasa (Garland Sunday, Domhnach Chrom Dubh). "Samhain and Bealtaine were the two rent-payment days in Ireland and by Samhain every farmer worth the name was expected to have his crops secured for the winter ahead. "When this was done it was a time for celebration and fun, when adults and children alike could enjoy themselves for a little while with fun and games, nuts, apples, candles stuck in turnips, etc. This sense of jollity remains even today, though pumpkins have replaced the turnips and shop goods have overtaken the home-made varieties of almost every article (even barm-brack) and it is children almost exclusively who celebrate the festival. "This was also a time for dares and games, for example daring a boastful person to go to a haunted place, or a graveyard or fairy fort and bring back something to prove he’d been there. Part of the celebration of the night was the playing of tricks on neighbours, especially on those seen to be cantankerous or mean-spirited. By comparison with some of the things being done today most of those were quite harmless, indeed funny. But to the person on the receiving end they could sometimes be baffling. And the victim was always carefully chosen. "I well recall four examples from my home place in Kerry. The first involved keeping a close eye on a man who took his few pints every night. On one night as soon as he left for the pub, "the boys" went to his yard, took the wheels off his ass-cart, manhandled cart and wheels into the house. They then brought in the ass, tackled him to the cart, and when the poor man arrived home later to find the ass fully tackled in the kitchen …. God only knows what he must have thought about the quality of the porter that night! Another one was where the "lads" painted the windows of an old bachelor’s house with tar. The poor man had no idea when morning came. It was said afterwards that he didn’t come out for three days, until he got hungry. "Another was throwing wet sacks on people’s chimneys where there was a height behind the house. The door would have been tied beforehand, of course, from the outside, and when the kitchen began to fill up with smoke from the open fire the so-called "fun" would begin! Drunks on their way home on this night were liable to be waylaid. I recall one such case, where the man in question, asleep at the roadside, had his Wellingtons removed, then his trousers. His Wellingtons were then put back on and he was left there in his drawers. Imagine what he must have felt like when he woke, sobered somewhat and cold, in the morning! Luckily there was little motor traffic on the roads in those days. "But apart from such fun, if fun it can be called, Halloween was — and still is for some of the oldest of the old generation — genuinely a time when that veil which separates our world from the next one, the other one, is at its very thinnest, when those who live in "the place beyond" can visit us here. "It was especially believed that the souls in purgatory could visit their former homes on this night, for in the Irish Celtic tradition dead people come and go. Exactly at the hour of midnight that was the time that both ghosts and fairies could appear in our world and we could be ‘carried’ into theirs. "The belief that the ‘poor souls’, especially the souls of your own dead, might come back on that night caused not so much fear as a wish to have a welcome for them if them should come That was why the hearth was cleaned that night and a little meal left on the table."
© This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, October 28, 2011
