The Turning of the Year: Lore and Legends of the Irish Seasons by Eithne Massey

Author:Eithne Massey [Massey, Eithne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: O’Brien Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Cat and Dog’s Story: The Horned Women

I love these mysterious horned women and their flight back to the magical mountain of Slievenamon – the Hill of the Women. This story was collected by Lady Wilde in the nine­teenth century, with one or two variants found in the National Folklore Collection. I first came across it as a child in one of the Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, which had a marvellous picture of the Horned Woman, while the phrase ‘My blood is on the lips of the sleeping children’ always managed to send shivers down my spine. Foot water was used to wash the feet at night time, an important task if you had been going through mud and worse in your bare feet during the day. It was never to be kept in the house or even in a pail outside the door, but had to be thrown away from the house. There were no doubt very practical hygienic reasons for this activity, but it also holds the echo of the old tales, such as that of Nera.

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