August 2019 - Changelings


"Are you a witch? Or are you a faery?
Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?"

In my Sophomore year of college, I served as Assistant Lighting Designer for a show entitled Away with the Fairies.  The play concerns the murder of Bridget Cleary in the west country of Ireland in 1895. She fell ill and her husband believed that she had been spirited away by the faeries and replaced with a changeling. While not an uncommon story, it was odd to have happened so recently. And either way the man way clearly mad. In an effort to exorcise the changeling, he ended up burning and immolating his innocent wife. The case became somewhat of a media frenzy and the locals may have even believed that there was something to it. The judge was not fooled. Her husband, Michael, was convicted of manslaughter. The mob that helped lead to the violence was also charged though only four were convicted of “wounding.”
            This month we are going to look at the legends surrounding Changelings and some of the story of the tragic murder of Bridget Cleary. Not to overlook the gruesome nature of this crime, but I do still think there are some important warnings to be taken for our own time. People who are left isolated in their non-fact-based beliefs can become dangerous. Do they all become violent? Absolutely not, but ignorance poses dancers.
            There is also a personal reflection on the Minnesota Irish Fair – it combines the best of Temple Bar with the county fair. I love that it takes place in August like the traditional Lughnasa fairs celebrating the beginning of the harvest season.


from

The Golden Bough

by James George Frazer

Moreover, just as a witch can assume the form of an animal, so she can assume the form of some other human being, and the likeness is sometimes so good that it is difficult to detect the fraud. However, by burning alive the person whose shape the witch has put on, you force the witch to disclose herself, just as by burning alive the bewitched animal you in like manner oblige the witch to appear. This principle may perhaps be unknown to science, falsely so called, but it is well understood in Ireland and has been acted on within recent years. In March 1895 a peasant named Michael Cleary, residing at Ballyvadlea, a remote and lonely district in the county of Tipperary, burned his wife Bridget Cleary alive over a slow fire on the kitchen hearth in the presence of and with the active assistance of some neighbors, including the woman’s own father and several of her cousins. They thought that she was not Bridget Cleary at all, but a witch, and that when they held her down on the fire she would vanish up the chimney; so they cried, while she was burning, “Away she goes! Away she goes!” Even when she lay quite dead on the kitchen floor (for contrary to the general expectation she did not disappear up the chimney), her husband still believed that the woman lying there was a witch, and that his own dear wife had gone with the fairies to the old rath or fort on the hill of Kylenagranagh, where he would see her at night riding a grey horse and roped to the saddle, and that he would cut the ropes, and that she would stay with him ever afterwards. So he went with some friends to the fort night after night, taking a big table-knife with him to cut the ropes. But he never saw his wife again. He and the men who had held the woman on the fire were arrested and tried at Clonmel for willful murder in July 1895; they were all found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to various terms of penal servitude and imprisonment; the sentence passed on Michael Cleary was twenty years’ penal servitude.

Links:


Reflections from Irish Fair

This past weekend was Irish Fair Minnesota. A delightful time. It was nice to walk around the venue – Harriet Island – and see everyone celebrating their heritage. There were sheep herding demonstrations, hurling matches, pipers, and many, many dirty men walking around in kilts.

Nora’s first Irish Dance performance: Nora’s company, North Star Irish Dance, had two performances on Sunday – which is the primary reason that we went. Nora had been nervous in the weeks leading up to the event. We thought that she was performing at noon and at two o’clock, but when we arrived we found out that since she was still new she was only doing the two o’clock. She was disappointed but I think it was best, because when she say the older girls that she knew performing at the early performance, she got so excited and couldn’t wait perform herself. And in the time between their early performance and Nora’s performance, we saw another dance troupe who had some dancers who had qualified for World Championships. Nora was completely star-struck. She performed so well – with enthusiasm and determination – and can’t wait until her next opportunity to perform.

Irish Weather: Saturday evening I attended a lecture and a poetry reading. When I showed up everything was dry, but in the two hours I sat in the tent, the heavens opened and dropped torrents of rain. By the end of the night, my shoes in two inches of standing water. But it was cool because I could look out of the tent behind the performer and see people dressed in kilts and fairy wings dancing in the rain.

Boxty: I ordered boxty from one of the food vendors and Nora asked what it was. I told her “it’s the potato pancakes that I sometimes have.” To which the man in the food cart asked “sometimes? Do you make it at home?” I was proud of my Irish-nerdiness.


Further Reading

  • The Stolen Child a poem by William Butler Yeats – already included in the May 2019 edition of The Murray Reader.
  • Irish Folktales compiled and edited by Henry Glassie contains two stories of changelings in The Mountain Elf and Inishkeen’s on Fire.
  • The Irish Gazette- Dave Hogan’s article on the Irish Storyteller
  • Check out Eddie Owens’ poetry if you ever get the chance.


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