Dream of Owen O’Mulready

A Connacht fireside tale from the West of Ireland — collected from the oral Gaelic of County Mayo, translated by Leland L. Duncan in The Gaelic Journal (vol. IV, 1893), and given its lasting English shape by Joseph Jacobs in More Celtic Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1894), Tale XXXIII.

In a thatched cabin near Ballaghadereen, on the eastern shoulder of County Mayo where the boglands climb toward Sliabh Cairn, there lived a labouring man named Owen O’Mulready and his wife Margaret. Owen had work, a roof, a creel of potatoes for the winter, and a master — James Taafe of the gentry house — who paid him fairly. By every reasonable measure of a Gaelic peasant’s life in the latter nineteenth century, Owen wanted nothing. He had health, he had Margaret’s good humour beside him at the hearth, and he had the small comforts that mattered: dry turf, a kettle, a stool, and a roof that did not let in the rain. Yet a single ache sat under his contentment, the sort of small unfilled corner that no amount of sense will entirely smooth away. Owen had never had a dream. Not once in all the long winter nights of his life had a sleeping vision come to him. Other men spoke of dreams the way they spoke of weather; Owen listened, and felt himself the poorer for never having anything of his own to add. So when the master came out to him one afternoon as he was digging on the ridge, and the talk fell — as Connacht talk so often did — on dreaming and what it meant, Owen blurted out the thing that had been quietly gnawing at him for years: he wished, more than anything, to dream just once.

The Master’s Strange Prescription

James Taafe, the master, leaned on his stick and considered. He was a man of the bigger house, with the air of one who had read books, and there is in Irish folk-tale a recurring figure of the half-learned gentleman who knows the country lore of the spirits as well as any wandering seanchaí. Taafe did not laugh at the labourer’s confession. Instead, he gave Owen a curious instruction. “You’ll have a dream tonight,” he said, “if you do as I tell you. When you go home, draw the fire from the hearth. Put it out. Make your bed in the place where the fire was. Sleep there. And before the morning comes you’ll have your fill of dreaming.” Owen promised, and Owen — being an obedient man and one half-thrilled at the prospect of at last entering a country every other man visited freely — went home and did exactly as he was told. Margaret, when she saw her husband sweeping the live coals out of the hearthstone she had kept warm for years, asked plainly whether he had taken leave of his senses. Owen explained the instruction. Margaret, after the manner of long-married wives in any country, thought the whole thing foolish, but yielded; and the two of them lay down together in the place the fire had been, on a night when the wind was up over the bog and the door creaked once or twice with the draughts of late October.

To the modern reader this looks like the silliness that opens many a comic fairy tale. To the folklorist it is something else entirely. Joseph Jacobs, writing his commentary in 1894, fastened on it at once. Owen’s problem, Jacobs wrote, resolves itself into this: where was he to go in order to come into closest contact with the world of spirits. The hearth in Indo-European folk belief is not merely the place where supper is cooked. It is the seat of the household spirits, the spot at which (in Roman religion) the lares were honoured, around which (in Gaelic custom) the dead were waked, and through which (in countless cabin tales) the sídhe entered and left. Taafe’s prescription, Jacobs argued, drew on a body of belief older than written record: that to sleep in the very place of the household fire is to bed down with the spirits themselves, and that dreams are simply the traffic of those spirits across the closed eyes of the sleeper. This is why a slight bit of comic foolery in a Mayo cabin opens, when you scratch its surface, onto the broad European hearth-cult that the historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges had documented in La Cité antique a generation earlier.

A Letter for America, and a Crane Who Speaks

The dream, when it came, was no quiet vision of fields and ancestors. It came with a hammering at the door. A voice cried, “Get up, Owen O’Mulready, and go with a letter from the master to America!” Owen rose and pulled on his boots, muttering to himself that the messenger had taken his time. He took the letter, set out into the night, and did not stop until he had crossed the foot of Sliabh Cairn, where a cow-boy hailed him by name. “The blessing of God be with you, Owen O’Mulready.” Owen blessed him back and noted, with the wry honesty that runs through every Irish comic tale, that everyone seemed to know him while he knew no-one. Yes, he was going to America with a letter. Yes, the road kept straight to the west. As to how he was meant to cross the great water — well, time enough to think of that when he got to it. So he walked on, and the great Atlantic opened in front of him at last, and on the shingle there stood a crane on one foot.

“The blessing of God be with you, Owen O’Mulready,” said the crane.

“The blessing of God and Mary be with you, Mrs Crane,” said Owen. “Everyone knows me, and I don’t know any one.” He explained his errand and his difficulty. The crane offered her back. “Leave your two feet on my two wings, sit on my back, and I’ll take you to the other side.” Owen, with the cautious civility of a man who knows that a free offer in folklore is rarely free, asked what would happen if she tired before they got over. “Don’t be afraid,” said the crane, “I won’t be tired or wearied till I fly over.” On this assurance Owen mounted, and the bird rose with him over the open sea. Halfway across the Atlantic the crane cried out that she was tired and that he must dismount. Owen, hanging in mid-ocean on a bird’s back, used the kind of language a Mayo cottager keeps for treachery: “That you may be seven times worse this day twelvemonth, you rogue of a crane!” — but then, lifting his eyes, he saw threshers passing high above him through the sky. He shouted up to them and asked the foremost thresher to lower a flail to him so the crane might take a rest. The thresher complied. Owen took the flail in both hands and the crane went off laughing and mocking, leaving him hanging from a thresher’s flail between heaven and the ocean.

The Sailor’s Boat and the Falling Shoe

The thresher above presently grew impatient. He shouted down for Owen to let go of the flail. Owen, with the same flat reasoning that had carried him this far, refused, on the perfectly sensible ground that he would drown. The thresher then threatened that if Owen did not let go he would cut the leather thong of the flail. “I don’t care,” said Owen, “I have the flail.” It was at this moment, looking sideways across the empty horizon, that he saw a sail far below on the sea — a boat with a small crew working the rigging. He cried out across the air, “O sailor dear, sailor, come, come — perhaps you’ll take my lot of bones!” The captain shouted back, “Are we under you now?” and Owen called that they were not, not yet. “Fling down one of your shoes, then,” said the captain, “till we see the way it falls.” So Owen shook one foot in the air, and the shoe fell.

What happens next is the perfect comic hinge that gives this little tale its standing among the great Gaelic aislingí — its dream-tales. The shoe falls — but in the same instant, in the cabin in Mayo, Margaret O’Mulready feels a sharp blow on the side of the head and wakes screaming, “Uill, uill, puil, uil liu — who is killing me? Where are you, Owen?” Owen, who has been hanging in the air halfway between the threshers and the sailors, hears his wife’s voice and answers, baffled, that he didn’t know it was she who was up there in it. She gets up and lights the candle, and finds her husband halfway up the chimney, climbing hand over hand on the iron crook from which the cooking-pot is hung, his face and arms black with soot from the chimney’s lining. He has one shoe on his foot. The other shoe — the very shoe he had cast down for the captain to gauge his position — has fallen from the chimney on Margaret’s head and woken her up. The dream and the cabin meet exactly where he has been climbing all this time. He climbs back down off the crook, washes the soot from his face, and (in the closing line that has charmed every reader since Duncan first translated it) “from that out there was no envy on him ever to have a dream again.”

The Tale’s Place in the World — Sources, Parallels and Type

The provenance of The Dream of Owen O’Mulready is unusually clear for an Irish folk story of the late nineteenth century. The Gaelic original was published anonymously in Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge — The Gaelic Journal — vol. IV, page 57 and following, in 1893. It was translated into English the next year by Leland Lewis Duncan, the Greenwich antiquarian whose Leitrim collections are one of the great late-Victorian harvests of Connacht story. Joseph Jacobs took Duncan’s translation and made it Tale XXXIII of More Celtic Fairy Tales (London, David Nutt, 1894), the second of his two great volumes for English-speaking children. Jacobs, in his Notes and References, noted as parallel only Thomas Crofton Croker’s Daniel O’Rourke from Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) — another comic dream-flight tale in which a Munster man, drunk on poteen, finds himself carried away by an eagle. Both stories belong to the international folktale type the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index numbers as ATU 1881, “The Man Carried Through the Air,” with a clear admixture of ATU 1880, “The Sky Is Falling,” and the Irish dream-narrative motif that students of Celtic literature recognise from the great medieval visions Aislinge Meic Con Glinne (“The Vision of MacConglinney”) and Aislinge Óengusa (“The Dream of Aengus”). What sets Owen’s tale apart from those high-literary visions is its absolute groundedness in the kitchen: the supernatural here does not arrive on a horse of light, it arrives because a labourer let his fire go out and slept in the ashes.

The setting itself is meticulously local. Ballaghadereen — Bealach an Doirín, “the road of the little oak grove” — sits on the Mayo–Roscommon border and was, for centuries, a market town for the small hill farmers of the surrounding parishes. Sliabh Cairn (“the cairned mountain”) is the long ridge a few miles to the west. The Connacht peasant’s image of America in the 1880s and 1890s is also no whim of the storyteller: this is precisely the period of the heaviest emigration from Mayo, when half the men of a parish might leave for Boston or New York, and a “letter from the master to America” was the most concrete piece of business many of them could imagine.

The Comic Dream-Flight in Celtic Tradition

What Jacobs called the “primitive philosophy” beneath the comedy is worth pausing over, because it is the same philosophy that animates the more famous Celtic dream-tales. In medieval Irish literature an aisling (“vision,” “dream”) is rarely a private psychological event in the modern sense. It is a journey: the soul travels from where the body sleeps, encounters beings of the Otherworld, and returns with knowledge or with food or with a wound. The young Aengus dreams a woman and falls into a love-sickness so severe that the high gods must search Ireland for her. The drunken cleric in Aislinge Meic Con Glinne dreams a city of cheese and a king of butter, and the dream becomes the means by which a demon of gluttony is exorcised from the king of Munster. In every case the dream is real travel. Owen O’Mulready, sweeping out his hearth in 1890s Mayo, is heir to the same belief. The fire that warms the cabin also marks the door between the daylight world and the world the spirits move through, and to lie in the place of the fire is to lie at the threshold. The comedy is that Owen takes this seriously, and the spirits do too — and what they send him is not a high vision of the Tuatha Dé Danann but an absurd transatlantic flight on the back of a Connacht heron (the bird Hyde reminded his readers was always called a “crane” in Ireland).

The figure of the talking, treacherous bird is itself a deep Indo-European motif. Compare the eagle who carries Daniel O’Rourke from Croker’s Fairy Legends (1825), the goose who flies the Brahmin in the Indian Pañcatantra, the swan-bridges of the Norse fornaldarsögur, and the great bird that bears Sindbad in the Second Voyage of The Thousand and One Nights. In each case the bird’s promise carries the hero further than he can return on his own, and the comedy or terror of the tale lies in the moment of suspension above the void. Owen’s particular gift to the type is the entirely Connacht detail of the threshers in mid-air — agricultural workers sailing through the sky exactly as a Mayo labourer would imagine them, swinging their flails — and the homely, kitchen ending: the great voyage ends because his shoe drops down his own chimney and hits his sleeping wife on the head.

Moral

“Ó sin amach ní raibh fonn ar Eoghan Ó Muireadhaigh aisling do bheith aige go deo arís.” — “From that out, there was no envy on Owen O’Mulready ever to have a dream again.” (Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, vol. IV, p. 60)

The closing line of the Gaelic original carries the moral better than any abstracted lesson. The thing we long for from the outside, glimpsed only across the boundary of someone else’s experience, can lose all its romance the moment we are inside it. Owen wants a dream because every other man seems to have one; what he is given is a dream of being suspended over the Atlantic on a flail, betrayed by a heron, with his only hope of rescue a sailor far below who needs him to throw down a shoe to get a fix on his position. He climbs out of bed in the morning grateful to be a man without dreams, the way a child who has begged to stay up past midnight climbs gratefully into bed at half past ten. The story is, very gently, a tale about the dignity of an ordinary contented life — about not letting envy of someone else’s experience push you out of the small house you are warm in.

Why This Story Has Lasted

Folklorists usually trust that a tale which gets told a hundred times before it is written down is a tale which has earned its keep. The Dream of Owen O’Mulready earned its keep in fireside Irish for at least a century before Duncan put it into The Gaelic Journal, and it has earned it again in print for one hundred and thirty-two years since. The reasons are easy to see when you read it aloud, which is how every folktale should be tested. The opening establishes character with two strokes — the contented man, the small unfilled wish. The middle escalates with the formal repetition the oral storyteller depends on: the cow-boy, the crane, the threshers, the sailor, each greeting Owen by name in the same Gaelic form (“The blessing of God be with you, Owen O’Mulready”), each conversation a little stranger than the one before. The climax turns on a brilliantly simple piece of dream-logic: a single shoe, falling from the wrong place to the right place, makes the impossible voyage and the cabin’s hearth into a single connected world. And the ending closes with a child’s idea of justice — Owen has had his dream, and he never wants another. The whole thing reads in eight minutes. It is funny enough to make a Connacht child laugh out loud, and it is, beneath the laughter, a small statement about the soul’s relation to the hearth which a folklorist can spend a chapter unpacking. A story does not last by accident in either category.