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Research Article: Believers, Sceptics, and Charlatans: Evidential Rhetoric, the Fairies, and Fairy Healers in Irish Oral Narrative and Belief

2005; Routledge; Volume: 116; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0015587052000337680

1469-8315

Timothy Corrigan Correll,

Historical Studies of British Isles

Abstract This article examines storytelling events as contexts in which propositions about the fairies and folk healers associated with them were appraised and contested. It considers the evidential rhetoric employed in narratives that argued for and against the existence of fairies and the powers of wise folk who trafficked with them. Particular attention is given to narratives of negative evidence including stories that depicted individuals who believed they have had supernatural experiences as deluded, either by their own imaginations or through the chicanery of others. As will be seen throughout, traditions of belief and traditions of disbelief were competing discourses that came into collision, interpenetrating and modifying each other in a dialectical relationship that informed individuals as they negotiated their own attitudes about the fairies and fairy healers. Acknowledgements All extracts from the IFC are published with the permission of the Head of the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin, Ireland. I would like to thank Michael Owen Jones, Joseph F. Nagy, Timothy Tangherlini, Anna Suranyi and Patricia Lysaght, as well as the referees of Folklore, for suggestions and/or editing various formulations of this article. Notes [1] IFC, Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin, Ireland (the numbers at either side of the colon represent the volume number of the folklore manuscript and the page number(s), respectively). In the IFC material I have seen, piseog is often used in reference to spells or charms. In some instances, it is also employed as a general term for magical or supernatural beliefs; in others, to designate groundless or false beliefs. [2] People designated these healers variously as "fairymen" and "fairywomen," "elf doctors," and "fairy doctors," or by the Irish equivalents doctúirí na síofraí ("fairy doctors") and leá (lianna) sí ("fairy healers"). Some were called mná feasa or "wise women," while others were given names that implied a relationship with the fairies or their healing powers, such as the Kerry healer Seán na bPúcaí ("Seán of the fairies"). In addition to providing cures, these wise folk displayed other magical powers such as uncanny knowledge about past, present, and future events, the ability restore magically bewitched butter, and so on. See Correll . [3] In Irish tradition, the term púca often designates a solitary bogey. When the word appears in the plural form such as pucas or púcaí, however, it often refers to the fairies. [4] Biddy Early, the "wise woman of Clare," is perhaps the most famous folk healer who lived in nineteenth-century Ireland. See Lenihan . [5] For narratives featuring a doctor and a schoolteacher implicitly acknowledging fairy beliefs, see Gregory vol. 1, 148; Harris , 27. [6] For further examples, see IFC 308: 1, 88, Co. Kerry; 402: 17, Co. Kerry; 1222: 31, Co. Kerry; see also IFC 1413: 99, Co. Antrim. A more systematic analysis of individual storytellers' repertoires needs to be undertaken to determine the use and distribution of such tags. [7] Zimmermann notes that while some storytellers might have resented being called liars, "the same label could also be a term of praise" in some locales (2001, 564). [8] For a priest who defies local belief and levels a fairy forth with no ill effects, see IFC 1486: 97, Co. Longford. [9] On the mixture of supernatural and rationalist interpretations of uncanny cries attributed to the banshee see Lysaght , 221–2.