In the late 19th century, a young man from County Roscommon, Ireland set out to preserve the language of his people. , a member of several nationalist organizations and a compatriot of the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne and the young William Butler Yeats, was concerned that “as our language wanes and dies the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away.” Hyde saw this language, and the tales which were part of its “stream of collected thought,” as a means of resisting the yoke of English oppression, by allowing a colonized people access to a marginalized part of their culture. Hyde would gather these stories by visiting seanchaithe (plural of seanchaí, or storyteller), often old men, unused to the notion of someone wishing to collect their tales with pencil and paper. Hyde, who taught himself Irish in his teens, would coax them with “half a glass of ishka-baka, a pipe of tobacco, and a story of one’s own,” before patiently listening, without writing anything down, to the entire story. “[T]hen after judiciously praising him and discussing the story, you remark, as if the thought had suddenly struck you, ‘I’d like to have that on paper.’ Then you can get it from him easily enough…”
…The perfect way to pass a dark, still evening, preferably with a glass of uisce beatha (Irish for whiskey, literally “water of life”) at one’s side.
Later, Hyde would translate these stories from Irish into English despite the fact that, as he put it, “there are no two Aryan languages more opposed to each other in spirit and idiom.” Three of these tales would appear in Yeats’ 1888 collection , and, two years later, fifteen others would appear in Hyde’s own collection, . This collection is not only a scholarly attempt to preserve a vanishing way of life and an early text of the Celtic Twilight (more famously known as the ), but the perfect way to pass a dark, still evening, preferably with a glass of (Irish for whiskey, literally “water of life”) at one’s side.
This is the very environment the title of Beside The Fire is meant to conjure. Of all its tales, “The King of Ireland’s Son” has been the most enduring, inspiring a well-loved children’s adaptation despite its deep strangeness. Hyde’s transcription of “The King of Ireland’s Son” does contain a typical fairytale moral (helping strangers is rewarding). But this moral is saved until the story’s penultimate line, coming off as more of a concession than a point of emphasis. The story’s purpose, instead, seems to be to scare the living shit out of its listeners. As no less a luminary than Shane MacGowan has observed in his semi-autobiography A Drink With Shane MacGowan, Hyde’s tales were “nasty stories about people having to drag corpses on their backs for fucking twenty miles, and then, through the land of the half-living … Stuff that sent you shrieking home to your bed, y’know.” ()
