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.

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.