Early Articles and Reviews by W. B. YEATS

Author:W. B. YEATS
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2004-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

III.—THE HOUSES OF THE TRIBES OF DANU

Although a man has told me that ‘the Others’, as the Galway peasant, like the Greek peasant, has named the gods, can build up ‘in ten minutes and in the middle of a field a house ten times more beautiful than any house in the world’, and although some have told me that they live everywhere, they are held by most to live in forts or ‘forths’, the little fields surrounded by clay ditches that were the places of the houses of the ancient people. Every countryside is full of stories of the evils that have fallen upon the reckless or unbelieving people, who have broken down the ditches of the forts, or cut the bushes that are in them. A man, who has a mill and a farm near Gort, in Galway County,12 showed me where a fort on his farm had been cut through to make a road, and said: ‘The engineer must have been a foreigner or an idolater, but he did not live long anyway’; and the people of a neighbouring townland tell how an old man, who is not long dead, cut a bush from one behind his house, and ‘next morning he had not a blade of hair on his head—not one blade, and he had to buy a wig and wear it all the rest of his life’. A distant relation of my own bid his labourers cut down some bushes in a fort in Sligo,13 and the next morning they saw a black lamb among his sheep, and said it was a warning, and would not cut the bushes; and the lamb had gone the morning after that. A great number of the people of every countryside have seen some fort lighted up, with lights which they describe sometimes as like torches, and sometimes as like bonfires; but once, when I questioned a man who described them as like a bonfire, I found that he had seen a long thin flame, going up for thirty feet and whirling about at the top. A man, who lives near the fort where the old man lost his hair, sees a woman lighting a fire under a bush in the fort; but I do not know what the fire is like, as I have not been able to question him; but a girl says the fires come with a sudden blaze ‘like a man lighting his pipe’. Somebody in almost every family that lives near a fort has heard or seen lights or shadows, or figures that wail or dance, or fight or play at hurling,14 which was a game among the Tribes of Danu in old days, or ride upon horseback, or drive in strange carriages that make a muffled sound. I know one fort where they hear the galloping of horses, as if from underground, but ‘the Others’ are generally supposed to live in the forts, as the ancient people lived in them and are indeed sometimes

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