Of Towns and Townlands

In recent months, I have been doing a little digging and posting on the myth of the Irish vampire. In 1997 authors Haining and Tremayne took a genuine Irish myth about a tyrant chieftain in county Derry called Ábhartach who came back from the dead and terrorised his subjects and completely transformed it by adding vampire-like details to it, such as claiming that Ábhartach demanded bowls of blood from his subjects when he rose from the dead and that he had to be killed by impaling with a yew-wood sword.

As a result of this rubbish, it is now universally accepted by idiots all over the world that the myth of Ábhartach the Irish vampire is ancient and that it was the source for the Dracula story of Bram Stoker. There are many retellings of this on line.

However, there is one detail in many of these retellings which amuses me greatly and which, it seems to me, perfectly expresses how little most of these people understand about Ireland or Irish culture. Try putting ‘Slaghtaverty’ and ‘town’ into Google and you will find many examples of the ‘the town of Slaghtaverty’ or ‘a little town called Slaghtaverty’.

It amuses me because I have visions of loads of Americans who are obsessed with vampires trying to book a holiday to spend a week wandering around the town of Slaghtaverty, visiting its bars and restaurants and attractions and chatting to locals about folklore.

The fact is, Slaghtaverty is a townland (Irish baile fearainn), which is not a town. The townland is a small unit of land in Ireland, which is of great importance to Irish people. For many rural people it is an important part of their identity. In 2014, there were 61,098 townlands in Ireland. I can assure you there are most definitely not 61,098 towns in this country. Indeed, some townlands actually have no population at all.

In the 1911 Census, there were 25 inhabitants living in Slaghtaverty, mostly Boyles, Mulhollands, Mullans and O’Kanes. There is nothing resembling a town or bar or shop or hamlet in the townland of Slaghtaverty. And, in case you are planning that dream holiday, there is certainly no hotel.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig!

Más mall, is mithid! (Literally, “If it is late, it is timely!” = Better late than never!) Unfortunately, I had intended to wish my readers a Happy St Patrick’s before now but I am only getting round to it a day late. Hope you all had a great time! I certainly did!

The Wikipedia Article on Abhartach

Recently, I have been debunking the myth that vampirism plays a major part (or indeed, any part) in Irish folklore and that this vampire tradition fed into the work of Bram Stoker. For example, the ancient story of Abhartach (or perhaps Ábhartach), a tyrannical chieftain from County Derry who returned from the dead and continued to oppress his subjects until he was buried under a huge rock to prevent his return, was rewritten about thirty years ago with Abhartach cast as a vampire rather than just a revenant.

There is now an article on Wikipedia which gives a lot of fake facts about this newly-manufactured story, glibly referring to ‘modern versions’ of the story (i.e. versions of the story made up by people who want to sell books about vampires.)

So much of this article is demonstrably nonsense and because of this, Eoin Ó Murchú in a comment on this blog suggested that I should go in and clean out the Augean stables, getting rid of all the rubbish about Abhartach on Wikipedia. While I understand Eoin’s point, I am quite sceptical/cynical about Wikipedia. I would certainly support and respect anyone who tried to do that, but I wouldn’t waste my own time trying.

Why do I have so little faith in Wikipedia? Well, it seems to me that the protocols of Wikipedia favour flaky and fringe ideas. People who have absolutely no idea about a subject consider themselves the ideal person to edit articles, drawing on ridiculously bad sources like newspaper articles which are essentially uncritical interviews with the talking heads (Daniel Cassidy, Peter Haining, Owen Harding) who originated this bullshit in the first place. Furthermore, looking up the real facts for yourself is considered to be ‘research’ and therefore unacceptable by the mad protocols of Wiki. Blogs like this are an unacceptable source, even if they are vastly more accurate and sensible than the printed sources. In short, the whole thing as it stands is a recipe for disinformation and nonsense.

I certainly hope someone else goes in and changes it to reflect the genuine facts rather than the contents of a lot of dim-witted Halloween-themed newspaper articles. However, if you do spend some of your valuable time doing that, only to find that some ignorant moron who has never even been to Ireland and knows less than nothing about the subject changes it all back again, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Is there an Irish vampire tradition?

Is there an Irish vampire tradition? There is certainly a vampire literary tradition in Ireland, begun by Sheridan Le Fanu with Carmilla in 1872 and brought to perfection in Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. Both le Fanu and Stoker drew primarily on Central and Eastern European folklore in their depiction of the vampire. There is nothing distinctively Irish about their versions of the undead, though some academics have argued that Stoker’s Dracula consciously draws parallels between the parasitic nature of the vampire and its baneful influence on the population of Wallachia and the parasitic control of Ireland by a foreign ascendancy, which is certainly a reasonable viewpoint.

As I’ve explained in several articles, in more recent years, there has been a revisionist version of vampire tradition which claims that vampirism is a feature of Irish traditional folklore. For example, here is a paragraph from one of the worst offenders, a trashy book called The Un-Dead by Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, first published in 1997:

The first question to consider, therefore, is: Was there a vampire tradition in Ireland? The short answer is that there are such traditions in most ancient cultures and Ireland is no exception. And, in fact, it can be argued that Bram Stoker, though a city man from Dublin, was well placed to hear stories of the deamhan-fhola or blood-sucking demons which peopled the shadowy places of the rural Ireland.  Whatever he may initially have picked up from his mother, there is surely no doubt that over convivial dinners with the Wildes on dark winter evenings, Sir William and Lady Wilde recounted to Bram tales of the neamh-mhairbh or the Un-Dead that permeate Irish legends and folklore.

This is, unfortunately, typical of the shit found in this particular book. The first question we need to ask ourselves is, are there really vampire traditions in most ancient cultures? To me, the singular feature of a vampire is that they are physically resurrected from the dead and that they sustain themselves by drinking blood, which is what we find in the literary versions of vampirism. These stories seem to derive (like the word vampire) from Eastern Europe, but the specific trait of returning from the dead and drinking blood is not particularly common. In fact, it seems to me that the vampire story owes more to natural history and the known habits of the vampire bat in South America than to anyone’s folklore.

Haining and Tremayne speculate about how the young Stoker may have been influenced by tales told by Lady Wilde and Sir William Wilde, both of them folklorists of note. But their works, to the best of my knowledge, contain no references to the blood-drinking dead, and Haining and Tremayne don’t offer us any examples of such stories. The passage quoted also mentions the deamhan fola (plural, deamhain fola) and the neamh-mhairbh, terms which, as I’ve explained, are not ancient in Irish. It is unlikely that either of them goes back further than the 1930s. And again, where is the evidence of even ONE story about blood-drinking dead people in the Irish tradition? How can you say that they permeate Irish legends and folklore if you cannot point to even ONE example?

Before someone dashes off a message to complain, let me just say that blood-drinking was a thing in Irish culture and tradition. When someone died violently, it was not unusual to find references to a relative, usually female, drinking their blood. This probably doesn’t mean what it says. Perhaps they smeared their face and mouth with the dead person’s blood as a symbol of extreme grief. At least one ancient character, Mis, supposedly went mad after drinking her father’s blood on the battlefield. And the famous Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire alludes to the tradition. But this is something completely different from the vampire tradition. It’s about live people expressing grief for the dead, not dead people returning.

There are occasional (very occasional) stories where supernatural beings bleed a living person and mix their blood with meal to make a kind of black pudding. The enfeebled victim can be restored to health by placing a little of the black pudding in their mouth. I have heard tales that people in times of famine used to bleed (ródach a dhéanamh ar) cows and make black pudding in order to get some protein without actually killing the animal, so that could have been a familiar concept to poor Irish subsistence farmers. However, this is a long way from vampirism as we know it. The smouldering sexuality of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee has little in common with the art of black-pudding making.

The truth is, there is no evidence of vampirism in Irish folklore. None whatsoever! It is entirely a modern construct invented by people like Peter Haining and Bob Curran.

More on Irish Vampires – The Bad Blood of Dracula

Of all the imbecilic claims made about Irish vampires, none is as stupid or groundless as the claim that the name Dracula does not come from Romania but from Ireland.

The reality, of course, is that Dracula was a title given to Vlad Tepes or Vlad III. Part of the book takes place in Romania, Stoker researched the area and it is completely irrelevant that Stoker never went to Eastern Europe.

The claim that Dracula comes from Irish seems to have first surfaced around 1992. (The earliest reference I can find is in the Cambridge Evening News of July 25^th, 1992). According to this ridiculous version of the Dracula story, the name comes from droch fola (Cambridge Evening News version), droch fhola, or droch fhoula or droch-fhola, which is supposed to be the Irish for bad blood. It isn’t, of course, as anyone who speaks Irish or looks up an Irish dictionary online will tell you. The Irish for bad blood is drochfhuil. Drochfhola is the genitive version so it means ‘of bad blood’ but genitives in Irish can’t stand on their own, so this is simply meaningless.

Drochfhuil is pronounced drohill or drokhill (with the kh representing Spanish j or the ch of Scottish loch). This is not at all close to the sound of Dracula. (In fact, if drochfhola meant anything, it would be pronounced drokholla, which doesn’t sound much like Dracula either.) This crap has been spread by all kinds of people, such as Bob Curran, Ireland of the Welcomes, and (Dia idir sinn agus an drochrud) Frank McNally from an Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times, one of Daniel Cassidy’s legion of cretinous supporters.

In his book 111 Places In Dublin That You Shouldn’t Miss, McNally says of Stoker ‘that the name of his most famous character is often said to be a contraction of the Irish words for “bad blood”, droch-fhola, or Dracula, for short.’ So … the three syllables of drochfhola are contracted into the three syllables of Dracula, are they, Frank? Do you even know what the word contracted means, Frank? Some journalist!

An even stupider claim is that the phrase ‘droch fhola’ [sic] meaning ‘bad blood’ is a phrase that was probably used by the Celtic tribes as they moved through Transylvania northwards ending up in Ireland, made by one Irish Dracula ‘expert’ called Hillen. So Celtic tribes thousands of years ago used modern Irish – or something kind of resembling it, anyway? Strange, because our fellow Celtic speakers in Wales would call bad blood ‘gwaed drwg’, which is nothing like drochfhola or drochfhuil.

Unfortunately, the bullshit doesn’t stop there. This claim has also been conflated with a dodgy story mentioned by Haining and Tremayne in the Undead. (Amazing how much of this bullshit seems to lead straight back to them!) They say that there was a story about a fairy fortress called Dún Dreach-Fola, (which means ‘fortress of visage of blood’ and is not the same as drochfhuil or drochfhola) which seems to have been sent to them in a letter from Cathal Ó Sándair in 1995 (See The Undead, page 71):

It was Ó Sándair, writing to the authors in April 1995, who also made the observation that Bram might have been guided to use the name of the historical Wallachian hero – Dracula – because it sounded the same as the Irish droch-fhola (pronounced drok’ola), bad blood; he might even have connected the name with a Kerry folk-tale about ‘Dún Dreach-Fhola’ (pronounced drak’ola), the castle of blood visage. The castle was said to be high up in a lonely pass among the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks, a range in Co. Kerry, which contains Ireland’s highest mountain. Ó Sándair may well be right: Seán Ó Súilleabháin, the Kerry-born one time registrar and archivist of the Irish Folklore Commission, mentioned this same oral folk-tale in a lecture at UCD in 1961, prior to the publication of his book on Irish death customs, Caitheamh Aimsire ar Thórraimh, translated into English six years later as Irish Wake Amusements. He said it was told to him in the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks. The story concerns an ‘evil fairy fortress’ – Dún Dreach-Fhola, inhabited by neamh-mhairbh (Un-Dead), who sustained themselves on the blood of wayfarers. Unfortunately there is no reference to the story in Caithreamh [sic] Aimsire ar Thórraimh.

What can we say about this? Ó Sándair and Ó Súilleabháin were genuine people but I don’t buy any of this stuff about Dún Dreach-Fhola. If you look at the paragraph above, it is actually saying two different things. The first part of the paragraph says that there was an actual place in the mountains of Kerry called Dún Dreach-Fhola. The second part says that this was a folktale collected by Ó Súilleabháin in Kerry. Ó Súilleabháin was a careful folklorist. If he collected such a story, he would have preserved it in writing.

I am not saying that this claim is completely untrue. Perhaps someone, somewhere, sometime, will find some real evidence for it or for part of it. But this is certainly not evidence.

An article in the Dublin Review of Books (Blood Relations by Brian Earls, published in 2012) says this about Irish vampirism:

Vampires are not to be found in Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s A Handbook of Irish Folklore, published in 1942. The handbook, whose author was archivist to the Irish Folklore Commission, covered all of the major categories of Irish folklore and has been described as “an encyclopedia of Irish, and, indeed, of West-European tradition”. Following its publication it provided an indispensable guide for Irish field collectors. Its ability to direct collectors towards particular topics and areas of inquiry was based on the knowledge gained during a decade of intensive collection by the Folklore Commission and its predecessor, the Irish Folklore Institute. The absence of vampires from the handbook was not thus a casual omission but based rather on the expectation that, amid the otherwise bewildering array of Irish supernatural actors, they would not be encountered by collectors.

In other words, if there were such a story, it would have an immense importance, because it would be breaking new ground. However, there is no corroborating evidence for the existence of this story. No written account from any third source. Nothing. The only authority for it is (apparently) a letter from Ó Sándair in the possession of either Tremayne or the extremely dodgy Haining. It’s simply not evidence. And even if such a letter existed and gave such information, can we really be sure that Ó Sándair was not a practical joker or suffering from some kind of dementia? Other things about the story should make us suspicious. Why is the term neamh-mhairbh used in this story? This term was invented by Seán Ó Cuirrín for Dracula in 1933. Why would a native Irish speaker use it? Why is it dreach-fhola? Dreach is a masculine noun, so it should be dreach fola (visage of blood). (If it were a compound word, of course, the meaning of dreachfhuil would be face-blood rather than blood-face, which doesn’t mean a lot.) And why would anyone with any knowledge of Irish claim that drok’ola is an accurate transcription of the pronunciation of drochfhola?

In short, this is another claim that simply doesn’t stand up to any close scrutiny and should be ignored by anyone with any sense.

More on Irish Vampires – The Irish for Vampire

In the accounts of Irish vampirism on line, there are various Irish terms mentioned: neamh-mharbh; dearg-diúlaí; deamhan fola. These terms give the impression that there is a thriving ancient tradition of vampirism and the undead in Irish folklore. However, none of these terms is actually ancient.

Neamh-mharbh

Neamh-mharbh seems to have been invented by Seán Ó Cuirrín, the translator of the Irish version of Dracula in the 1930s, as the equivalent of Stoker’s term undead. Neamh- means non- or un-, and when it combines with the adjective marbh, meaning dead, it becomes neamh-mharbh, which is pronounced nyav-varuv or, in Ulster Irish, nyaw-waroo. While neamh-mharbh is in the book, Ó Cuirrín mostly refers to vampires in his translation using the term súmaire, which means a leech (i.e. the bloodsucking creatures found in ponds, as in the scene from Stand By Me.)

Dearg-due, dearg-dul, dearg-diúlaí

Haining and Tremayne’s book The Undead says that there are tales from the 18^th century of a vampire called the dearg-dul. Even if this is correct (which I doubt), it is completely useless, of course, because it gives no evidence, no references, not even a clue as to where such information might be found. Haining and Tremayne then claim that a being called the dearg-due is mentioned by Anthony Masters in a book published in 1972. In fact, the earliest reference to a term like this seems to be Montague Summers in 1928: ‘In Ancient Ireland the Vampire was known simply as dearg-dul, “red blood sucker”, and his ravages were universally feared.’

Others have suggested that Montague Summers got this information from the works of Crofton Croker, an early 19^th century collector of Irish folklore but I have failed to come up with any evidence for this.

Anyway, what could a dearg-dul be? Well, the likeliest explanation is that this represents the Irish word deargadaol (Devil’s coach-horse), originally known as a darbdael or darb-dóel. In the former spelling, it occurs as early as the Book of Ballymote of 1391. The deargadaol is not red and is not a vampire, though it is an unlucky and cursed creature. In fact, it is a black beetle. The word is formed from the two words doirb (a water beetle) and daol (a beetle), and this was later corrupted to Dearg-Daol or Deargadaol.

Because most of the people writing about this subject have little or no Irish, this has then given rise to a lot of ludicrous mutated versions, in both Irish and English: dearg-dubh; dearg-diúlaí; dearg-dur; dearg-dililat and whatever you’re having yourself. Haining and Tremayne simply assume that dearg-diúlaí (red-sucker) is the ‘original’ Irish version of dearg-dul and their book is full of references to it.

In fact, dearg-diúlaí is not a real Irish expression for a vampire. It is not in any dictionary. There are several words for blood in Irish, such as fuil and cró. The word dearg, which means bright red or scarlet, is not used as a noun for blood.

Even if dearg were used to mean blood, in a compound word séimhiú would apply, so it would be dearg-dhiúlaí (pronounced jarrig-yoolee).

There is also claimed to be a story from Waterford about a vampire woman called the Dearg-Due buried under ‘Strongbow’s Tree’. No such place exists in Waterford and no source is given for this story, so we are quite at liberty to regard this claim as fake until such a time as the Irish vampire ‘experts’ get their act together and provide some evidence.

Deamhan Fola

Deamhan Fola (pronounced dyavan folla or jawan folla) is given as one of the terms for vampire in Irish dictionaries like de Bhaldraithe, along with the word vaimpír, which of course is just a Gaelicisation of the word vampire. Deamhan means demon, while fola is the genitive of fuil meaning blood, so deamhan fola means ‘a blood demon’.

This sounds quite native. It’s the kind of thing a native Irish speaker would invent to describe the concept of a vampire. However, as far as I know, this is not an ancient term. It is not found in Dinneen’s dictionary in the early twentieth century. The earliest reference I can find to it is in the radio listings for August 1941, when there was a detective drama on Radio Éireann called An Deamhan Fola. It was written by Ciarán Ó Nualláin, brother of the great Irish writer Brian Ó Nualláin (Flann O’Brien).

So – what is the Irish for a vampire?

The simple answer is that we now use the word vaimpír. (Don’t trust any self-appointed ‘expert’ who tells you there is no letter v in the Irish language. The letter v occurs in a number of words and phrases such as veain, Cathair na Vatacáine, and two that have been hard to ignore over the last few years – vacsaín and víreas.)

In reality, there is no traditional and ancient word for a vampire in Irish. Why would there be? There was no need for it in ancient Irish, because the concept didn’t exist, any more than the ancient Irish had a word for djinn or mujina or zombie.

More on Irish vampires – Abhartach

Another stupid claim about the supposed Irish vampire tradition centres around the story of a County Derry tyrant called Abhartach. The first version of the story appeared in the 19^th century (1875) in a book by Patrick Weston Joyce, The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places:

There is a place in the parish of Errigal in Londonderry, called Slaghtaverty, but it ought to have been called Laghtaverty, the laght or sepulchral monument of the abhartach [avartagh] or dwarf (see p. 61, supra). This dwarf was a magician, and a dreadful tyrant, and after having perpetrated great cruelties on the people he was at last vanquished and slain by a neighbouring chieftain; some say by Fionn Mac Cumhail. He was buried in a standing posture, but the very next day he appeared in his old haunts, more cruel and vigorous than ever. And the chief slew him a second time and buried him as before, but again he escaped from the grave, and spread terror through the whole country. The chief then consulted a druid, and according to his directions, he slew the dwarf a third time, and buried him in the same place, with his head downwards; which subdued his magical power, so that he never again appeared on earth. The laght raised over the dwarf is still there, and you may hear the legend with much detail from the natives of the place, one of whom told it to me.

From this, it appears that the tyrant in question was supposed to have lived around the fifth or sixth centuries. Incidentally, while Joyce was a native speaker of Irish and a clever man, I would not agree with his comments about the meaning of abhartach. The Irish for a dwarf is abhac and I cannot find any evidence of abhartach being an alternative version of abhac. Abhartach (or perhaps Ábhartach) is an Irish name, not a title meaning a dwarf. Also, while leacht is the usual name for such a monument in Irish, sleacht is obviously a northern variant. (As anyone with an interest in the GAA knows, Slaughtneil is another townland in the north. Another example is Slatady or Sleacht Aidí, just outside Belfast.) Logainm.ie gives Slaghtaverty as Sleacht Ábhartaigh in Irish. This means that the Ábhartach who was a tyrant in the Garvagh area could well be the same Ábhartach who occurs in the tales of Fionn Mac Cumhaill as the Giolla Deacair, an unpleasant sorcerer who took some of the Fianna to the other world and held them hostage there.

Anyway, there are a couple of references to the story of Abhartach in other sources such as newspaper articles in the 1930s. These follow the story as given by Joyce.

However, by 1997, when Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne (Peter Berresford Ellis) published their work on Stoker, The Undead, the story of Abhartach had apparently mutated into something else. Their version differs from Joyce’s in a number of respects.

Firstly, there is no mention of Fionn Mac Cumhaill in their version. The neighbouring chieftain mentioned by Joyce is named as Cáthan (sic). (In Irish, this name would be Cathán, not Cáthan. In fact, the Irish language in The Undead is almost all terrible, which is surprising considering Peter Berresford Ellis’s background.)

After Abhartach is killed for the first time, he returns demanding bowls of blood from his subjects to sustain him.

He is killed the third time by being stabbed with a sword made of yew-wood. And rowan branches are scattered over the grave to stop him from rising.

In other words, the book The Undead, published in 1997, differs in some important respects from the original story as given by Joyce. Where did these differences come from? Unfortunately, we don’t know, because they do not tell us what authority they are using for changing the story.

The story about the chieftain being called Cathán rather than being Fionn Mac Cumhaill is probably of local origin in the Garvagh area. Note that Joyce says “by a neighbouring chieftain; some say by Fionn Mac Cumhaill”. Anyone from that area would know that the main local clan in that area in the Middle Ages were the Ó Catháin family, now known in English as the O’Kanes. The name Ó Catháin means “descendant of Cathán”, so this is reasonable as a guess for the identity of the neighbouring chieftain, though the Ó Catháin family are not actually indigenous to that area. They came there in the twelfth century from Donegal, so Cathán himself never lived there.

Anyway, though that may be an understandable local addition to the story, the other changes are harder to explain. How did Abhartach change from a tyrant and a revenant to a creature that drinks blood to survive? How did the method of despatching him change from burying him upside-down to stabbing him with a large sharp wooden spike?

And since the publication of the Undead, a number of further changes have been added. Bob Curran changed the druid into a Christian saint and actually names him as Eoghan (a saint associated with the Slaghtaverty area). He quotes him as describing Abhartach as a neamh-mharbh and a dearg-diúlaí, both modern, invented terms. He adds the idea that thorns were scattered over his grave to keep him there, which is not mentioned in other sources.

Since then, other changes have been added to the story. One of these is a claim that Abhartach was not slain in battle but died in a fall while crawling on a window-ledge trying to spy on his wife and her lover. This claim, which first appeared about 2013, was lifted whole-cloth from a story associated with Alnwick Castle in England (the castle made famous by its use as the model for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films). The Alnwick Vampire story dates back to the chronicler William of Newburgh in his book Historia rerum Anglicarum (“History of English Affairs”) of 1196-98. The fact that these people have taken an Irish myth about Fionn Mac Cumhaill and an Irish revenant and have added details taken from an English story set hundreds of miles away, in a different culture with a different language, in a different period of history, just shows how little respect they have for our culture.

I cannot prove that there is no earlier account of these changes than Haining, Tremayne and Curran. It may be in one of the myriad books about Dracula and vampire lore published in the twentieth century. However, I have no evidence of that, and there is a strong piece of circumstantial evidence that this is not the case. As soon as The Undead was published, people like Bob Curran and Owen Harding used its version to promote the idea that the Garvagh chieftain was a vampire. Numerous articles appeared in newspapers, there were interviews on the BBC. It seems unlikely to me that there was already a printed version of this story and that nobody else picked it up and ran with it the way Curran and Harding did. All I know is that in 1875, Joyce told a version of the legend where Abhartach was not a vampire and was not impaled with a wooden sword to kill him and then suddenly, in 1997, Haining and Tremayne publish The Undead and suddenly, Abhartach is depicted as a kind of proto-Dracula.

Did Haining and Tremayne just invent this fake vampire version of the Abhartach legend? I don’t know. Haining was certainly an unscrupulous writer who is well-known (for example) for claiming that Sweeney Todd was a historical character and not a fiction.

Whoever was responsible for this nonsense, it doesn’t change the fact that however many accounts of Abhartach the Irish Vampire are available on YouTube, it seems that the earliest source for Abhartach’s vampiric nature dates back to 1997. Far from it being an ancient piece of Irish folklore, I have shirts older than the legend of Abhartach the Irish Vampire.

More on Irish Vampires – Foras Feasa ar Éirinn

I have frequently discussed the myth of the Irish vampire in the past.

Basically, this newly-manufactured myth claims that the Irish author of Dracula, Bram Stoker, was influenced by a substantial body of vampire lore in Irish tradition and that this lore goes back hundreds of years.

Where did these stories about Irish vampires come from and what evidence exists for them? I intend to go through these claims and debunk them one by one. The first claim (chronologically) is that there is evidence for the Irish vampire tradition in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (A Basis of Knowledge About Ireland), the history of Ireland written in the Irish language by Seathrún Céitinn (anglice Geoffrey Keating) in the 17^th century.

Haining and Tremayne (who I will discuss in detail later) in their 1997 book, The Undead, claim that this work contains an account of vampirism:

It has been suggested by the prolific Irish author and novelist Cathal Ó Sándair (1922-1996) in ‘Dracula Domharfa’ (Dracula the Immortal), Irish Times, 18 May 1993, that while at Trinity College, Bram undoubtedly came across and read Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, the History of Ireland, written between 1629 and 1631. Dr Céitinn dwelt on the subject of the neamh-mhairbh (the Un-Dead) in Volume I, Chapter 10.

Is this true? Well, we can dispense with this nonsense very easily and very quickly, by quoting the relevant passages in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, in both the original Irish and in an English translation. The passage deals with the great magicians of Irish mythology, the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were living in Greece on their travels when the country was attacked by the Syrians. The Tuatha Dé Danann used magic to reanimate corpses to fight for their Greek hosts:

Tárla mu’n am soin go dtáinig cobhlach mór ó chrích na Siria, do dhéanamh cogaidh ar lucht críche Ateniensis go mbíadh cathughadh laitheamhail eadorra; agus an drong do marbhtaoi do na h-Ateniensis is iad bhíodh ar a bhárach ag cathughadh re lucht na Siria. Tré dhraoidheacht Tuaithe Dé Danann do-ghníthí an siabhradh soin: óir do chuiridís deamhna is na corpaibh ceudna d’á dtoghluasacht. Agus mar thugadar lucht na Siria sin d’á n-aire, téidhid do dhéanamh comhairle re n-a ndraoi féin. Ráidhis an draoi riu, faire do chur ar láthair nó ar ionad an ármhaigh, agus cuaille do bhior caorthainn do sháthadh tré mheidhe gach mairbh do bhíodh ag aitheirghe chuca, agus má’s deamhna do-ghníodh a gcoirp do thoghluasacht go gclaochluidhfithí i gcrumhaibh fo cheudóir de sin iad; agus damadh é a n-aithbheodhadh dá ríribh do-ghníthí, nach géabhdaois na coirp truailleadh ná claochlódh chuca. Tigid lucht na Siria do chur an chatha ar a bhárach, agus maoidhtear rompa, agus sáithid na cleatha caorthainn tré sna marbhaibh amhail ro ráidh an draoi riu, agus do rinneadh crumha dhíobh do láthair; agus lingid lucht na Siria fótha iar sin d’á n-óirleach.

It happened about that time that a great fleet came from the country of Syria to make war on the people of the Athenian country, so that there was daily warfare between them; and those of the Athenians who would be slain, it is they who would be on the morrow fighting with [i.e. against] the people of Syria. That necromancy used to be done through the art magic of the Tuatha Dé Danann: for they would put demons into the same bodies to restore them. And when the people of Syria became aware of this, they go to take counsel with their own druid. The druid says to them, to set a watch on the site or on the place of the battle-field, and to thrust a stake [of a spit] of quicken-tree through the trunk of every dead person who would be rising up against them; and if it were demons who would cause their bodies to revive, that they would be from that immediately turned into worms, while, if it were really their revival that had been brought about, the bodies would not suffer change or corruption. The people of Syria come to join battle on the morrow, and it is won by them, and they thrust the stakes of ash through the dead, as the druid had told them, and presently worms were made of them: and the people of Syria fell on the others after that, slaughtering them.

As you will see, there is no reference to the word neamh-mharbh (plural neamh-mhairbh) in this text, which is unsurprising given that its first recorded use was in the 1930s. The dead are referred to as bodies or as the dead. There is no reference to them drinking blood and they are not regarded as vampires. And while the staking of the dead to kill them might make us think of vampirism, such anomalous burial practices are found in many countries and cultures. Bodies have been found with stones wedged in their mouths, others with stakes through them at crossroads, yet others buried face down and others with bolts or nails through their ankles or hips to stop them walking. These traditions are not exclusively Irish and they certainly aren’t all aimed at vampires, only at unhappy spirits who might choose to leave the grave and go for a walk.

The County Derry story of Abhartach (which I will deal with next) is not mentioned at all in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, as many of these garbled accounts of Irish vampirism wrongly claim. It is of no relevance that Foras Feasa ar Éirinn or its English translation might have been seen by Stoker in Trinity College Library, because Foras Feasa contains no reference at all to vampirism or to Abhartach.

More on Cave Hill and Gulliver’s Travels

In this blog, my primary target has been the fake etymology of Daniel Cassidy but I have touched on a number of other phoney memes about Ireland and Irish such as the silly claim that Swift was inspired to write Gulliver’s travels by the appearance of Belfast’s Cave Hill, which looks like a sleeping giant. Extensions of this myth say that Swift also took the name Lilliput from a farm in North Belfast as the name for his nation of tiny people and that Lilliput Street commemorates this farm. According to many sources, the name Lilliput in Belfast goes back to before the time when Swift lived in the area.

The truth is quite different, as I have said before. Swift did live in Kilroot near Carrickfergus for about two years between 1694 and 1696, and had a relationship with a girl called Jane Waring from Waring Street in Belfast, so he undoubtedly travelled into the town through the area around Lilliput Street, and Cave Hill does look a little like a sleeping giant. However, he did not write Gulliver’s Travels until the 1720s (it was published in 1726) and there is absolutely no evidence that Swift had Cave Hill in mind when he wrote about his giants.

In fact, the idea that Swift was inspired by Cave Hill is very recent, though not quite as recent as I initially thought. When I posted on this in 2022, the earliest reference to it that I was able to find was from an article in the Scotsman in 2004. However, when I checked again recently, I found an article from 1973 by George McBride in a Ballymena newspaper which said: “It is possible that the Cave Hill, the outline of which indeed resembles the profile of a sleeping giant overlooking Belfast Lough, gave birth to the idea for a sleeping Gulliver in the land of the little people of Lilliput.” This article was added to the archive in the autumn of 2023, which is why I hadn’t seen it before.

Even though it is thirty years older than I thought, there is still a huge gap between the 1690s when Swift lived in the area and the first reference to this claim. Experts on Swift and his work tend to make the point that Swift was influenced by the French writer Rabelais, whose satirical works about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel are much more obvious as inspirations. For example, Oxford Quick Reference says about Rabelais that he had a widespread influence on English literature, particularly on S. Butler, Swift, Sterne, Peacock, and Joyce. Whole articles have been written on the subject, such as Eddy’s 1922 essay, Rabelais, a Source for Gulliver’s Travels. And then there is Marion Graz Carr’s 1924 work, A Comparison of the “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel” of Rabelais with Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” Just Google Swift and Rabelais and you will find hundreds of references.

I should also point out that a much-loved book on the history of Belfast, As I Roved Out by Cathal O’Byrne, first published in 1946, has articles on Swift and Varina and on Cave Hill. O’Byrne does not link the outline of Cave Hill with Gulliver’s Travels in either article. If it had been “a thing” back then, I have no doubt that O’Byrne would have heard about it and mentioned it. His silence shows that the claim simply hadn’t been invented back then.

As for the idea that Lilliput Farm in Belfast was the inspiration for the name Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels, this is only possible if Lilliput Farm was called that in the 1690s. This is often claimed on the internet and by self-appointed local historians in Belfast but if we look for evidence, there is none. The earliest reference to Lilliput as a place in the Belfast area seems to be (it’s not absolutely certain that it’s the one in the Belfast area but seems likely) a reference in the Belfast Newsletter to an auction of furniture at the house of Hercules Heyland at Lilliput in 1786. There are quite a few references to Lilliput House and its garden in the early 19^th century too, and this is definitely in the right area of the city. It seems to have been a nursery or garden and seed suppliers at that time.

However, 1786 is sixty years after Gulliver’s Travels was published. It seems likely to me that someone chose to build a house and call it Lilliput because they were a fan of Swift or because they were small or the house was small – for some whimsical reason which hasn’t been recorded. If that’s the case, it wasn’t the only one. There was a Lilliput Lodge in Limerick in the early 19^th century. There is also a Lilliput House at Nure in County Westmeath which was named after Swift’s creation in the 18^th century. There are probably many other Lilliputs named after Gulliver’s Travels rather than the other way round.

There is also the question that Lilliput doesn’t sound like an Irish placename. There aren’t any places anywhere in Ireland (apart from the occasional Lilliput named after Swift’s book) with the element Put in them, to the best of my knowledge, and the same goes for Lilli. They aren’t common elements with Irish Gaelic equivalents like kill or maghera or bally or knock…

So, if Swift didn’t get the name of Lilliput from a place in Belfast, where did he get it? Well, experts on Swift have speculated about that one. The answer seems to be that the Lilli- is a childish rendering of little, which makes perfect sense. As for the put, this word was a common slang term meaning a stupid fellow or a blockhead in Swift’s day. Swift was an opponent of slang and actually mentioned the word put as one of the words people shouldn’t use in an article he wrote in the Tatler in 1710! In other words, Lilliput would be the kingdom of the little fools.

And, just as the Irish language doesn’t need a Cassidy to make it interesting or important, the Belfast Hills have more than enough going for them without a fake association with Swift. They are stunningly beautiful and they are full of genuine history. So let’s just ditch all this newly-manufactured fakery and stick to the facts!

Comments on CassidySlangScam

OK, for my first post of the year 2024, I want to discuss a question I have touched on before but never really spelled out clearly, the question of what kinds of comments get answered on this blog. Because, the fact is, many comments get transferred to the trash fairly quickly. As I’ve said before, this isn’t some open public space, a democracy wall where every dimwit and lunatic has a right to scrawl stupidities at will, so I vet new comments and discard any I don’t like. No doubt the authors of the rejected messages will assume that I am afraid to engage in debate with them because of their superior knowledge and logic. I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

So, if you want to post a comment and get it answered on this blog, here’s how to do it.

Firstly, make sure what you are saying makes sense. And I don’t mean, make a coherent, logical, non-crazy argument. I mean, write something that is actually intelligible enough to be answered. You would be amazed at how often comments don’t have a verb, or where it’s completely unclear who or what they’re referring to. It also helps if you can spellcheck them, as comments peppered with basic spelling mistakes look ugly and it’s less likely that I will spend any of my valuable time answering them if you can’t even be bothered doing that.

However, sometimes a comment can be grammatically correct but completely empty of content. Someone tried to post a comment on my post on Irish and Jamaican Slang with the words “Sounds like simply you don’t like what he’s saying because he’s white.” I mean, what am I supposed to say? Am I expected to argue with an idiot about not being a racist? It seems to me that just ignoring people who are FOS is probably a better policy.

And above all, if you expect me to spend my time answering you, then ASK A QUESTION or PROVIDE INFORMATION. If you believe that I have got it wrong about Irish influence on Jamaican English, don’t just say “You’ve got it wrong, everyone knows that Jamaican English is full of Irish words.” If you think they exist, provide a list. I can’t argue with you about these words if I don’t know what they are.

I don’t know how many comments have languished in the Trash folder, but it’s a lot, and while I don’t think their authors spent a lot of time thinking about them or researching before they sent them, whatever effort they did expend was a waste of their time, not of mine. So if you want a debate rather than just hurling some random and unheeded abuse in cyberspace, follow the rules above. All serious comments will be considered.