Béaloideas
by Alice O’Mahony
Tráth dá raibh, there was a night as black and tousled as the feathers of some pagan crow god, the boughs of the rowan tree outside my grandparents house shaking and pointing at the sky.
Me and my sister are lying in the spare room bed with the lamp on, a duvet tucked up to our chins, humming and hawing and waiting for Grandad to arrive with something sacred - a story.
Lucy says let’s have one of his own inventions, with the characters who have names like Kitty Wagonwheel and Jobser MacGillacuddy. I reject this with a scoff and shove her, saying we’ll get the one about the man with a screw in his bellybutton. (His bum falls off when it comes out, this always gets a laugh.)
Every sleepover he arrives with a hush of excitement from us. He sits by the foot of the bed, lowering himself with ceremony, a hand on the wooden bed frame.
This time, our eyes shine out like new conkers over the top of the covers, as he tells us from memory what we call ‘Lowry Lynch’.
The spare room is no more now as it warps and melts until we are in the high king’s court. The story always follows the same slopes and valleys, the king Lowry Lynch always hides a terrible secret - that he has the ears of a horse. Sometimes the words are changed, a harp turns into a guitar, and back again, the king’s name sometimes replaced with Labhraidh Loingseach. But his unfortunate affliction is the same in every iteration, the barbers always dead by the end.
To protect himself from the shame of his subjects, he must murder the men who cut his hair each year. One mother throws herself on the mercy of the king, asks if her only son may be spared. He is saved, but grows gravely ill with the weight of the secret, whispers it into the bark of a willow tree, which will hold it and keep it, relieving him of his sickness.
The guilty mutter comes like this.
‘Lowry Lynch has horses’ ears, Lowry Lynch has horses’ ears, Lowry Lynch has horses’ ears.’
We repeat this with glee, hushed.
The denouement arrives when a musician is asked to play a song for a celebration at Lowry Lynch’s court and makes his instrument from the wood of the tree. Lowry Lynch is betrayed by the song of the magical harp, which repeats,
‘Lowry Lynch has horses’ ears, Lowry Lynch has horse’s ears, Lowry Lynch has horse’s ears!’ This time it is sung, and our scene fades to black amid shouts for another.
Outside it was blustering, the tree tapping on the window in time with the rain, its leaves shed, its clusters of berries crushed against the pane. But within the house we were warm, and time seemed to tick back to a world of warrior aristocracy as he continued. He told us about Niamh Chinn Óir and Oisín like they would have around a banquet table in the Iron Age. He spellbound us with the weight of her words, and her enchantment, how they wound around the beating red muscle of the warrior’s heart and captured it. Her white horse carried him across the ocean, stole him away from Ireland.
Years later I first hear the word béaloideas, half paying attention sa rang Gaeilge.
We will read about things that come in threes, court cairns and other beings, and lovers who slept in stone beds set into the sides of mountains. Of a victorious Donn Cúailnge raging along the coast, his heart about to burst. It is stories, and how they are told. Our Irish teacher said something then, that I’ll think about for a while.
“It’s not meant to be written down.”
And the next week we continue as usual, briathre neamhrialta and an tuiseal ginideach. We recite conjugations of verbs like it will help us save an endangered tongue, and when asked, I struggle for the future tense of the word Tuigim.
It’s a feeling you couldn’t describe in this clipped language, that now I have to reach so far and so hard for even single words of what is supposed to be the first language. The blind grasping I do for sentences that have existed for centuries is a psoriasis of the soul. I am constantly searching for things that should be carried with the ease of plants shooting up, for structures of speech that run in the water and are stacked and buried with a history as deep as definitions of peat. The landscape as far as the eye can see holds the memory of all who have walked on it, and in turn their words, whispered into trees and pressed into the soil by their footsteps.
My Grandad himself spoke Irish more than English in school, and as our bedtime story he would plant seeds of this idea while he told us about Setanta, boy-warrior. The gifts passed from his father to him meant he could defeat whole hurling teams by himself, as well as the chieftains favourite hound. With the force of the sliotar that tore through the body of that dog, he turned to a legend passed between poets and their patrons, parents and their children, read in English, agus as Gaeilge. The tale was inherited along with those like it, shifting and warping with the changing of hands.
I see it even in the sloinne on my green passport, itself a derivative given by someone who came before. O’Mahony, Ní Mhathúna, Mahon, Mathgamain, the brother of Brian Boru. These things are all principle. Beatha teanga í a labhairt - to give life to a language you must speak it. But how do you do that, when it cannot exist anywhere other than under the skin, only thrumming in the cell of the brain and beating alongside the heart, keeping a steady time. Like a compass for the body, it directs me back.
What I do know, what he taught us with every sleepover - You could never hunt it. Like Diarmuid and the boar - Both, in the end, would be speared on a tusk or a blade. It would just live on in hedgerows and be passed down like a quality coat between cousins.
Long nights have stretched themselves their millions between the time of the Fianna and the time of my childhood, stories living and growing and breathing in the cavities of many chests. We re-spin old tales, change their passages, or their language. But there is always something to be learned from this birthright, the stories of an island, the old and new. In this country, change is the only thing that stays the same.
And when I, my sister, and my Grandad lean in close together for the nighttime ritual and this tradition older than all three of us combined, there always seems to be a flicker of an ancient firelight across our faces.
Tonight, he might tell the one about the boy. He burned his thumb on cooking fish and saw the secrets of the universe spelled in the scales of the salmon, heard it spoken in the curling smoke above the roasting spit. He found language abounding, and saw the future as the past.
That knowledge, for a piece of it, what would you do?
I would blister a whole hand, just even to try and hear ancient voices echo around the sweet circle of the woods, to listen carefully and quietly, to not strain to comprehend.
But to be able to answer?
Translations
Trá dá raibh- Once upon a time
Labhraidh Loingseach- This is the original name of the anglicisation, ‘Lowry Lynch’, which is a story in the King’s cycles of Irish folklore about the King Lowry Lynch, who must hide the fact that he has horses’ ears.
Niamh Chinn Óir- Niamh of the golden hair, the daughter of the king of Tír na nÓg (The land of youth.)
Béaloideas- Béal-Oideas is literally translated as mouth-formula/recipe. This word is used as a catch-all term for Irish mythology and folklore, and also refers to the tradition of telling stories aloud rather than writing them down that was prominent in pre-Christian Ireland.
Sa rang Gaeilge- In Irish class.
Donn Cúailnge- literally translated as ‘Brown Bull’, this refers to the story of the prized brown bull of Cooley, whose heart burst with rage after its days-long battle with the white horned bull Fionnbennach.
Tuigim- I understand, present tense of the verb ‘Tuig.’
Setanta- Given name of the son of the god Lugh.
Sliotar- Ball used in hurling.
Cú Chullain- Hound or warrior of Cullan, the name given to Setanta after he slays the guard dog of the Chieftain Cullan in self-defence.
Agus as Gaeilge- and in Irish.
Sloinne- Last name.
Beatha teanga í a labhairt- Phrase or seanfhocal meaning, ‘to give life to a language you must speak it.’
Fianna- Band of warriors who lend their name to the Fianna cycle of Irish mythology. The legends involving some of their more famous members such as Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his son Oisín would be some of the more well-known stories.
Alice O’Mahony is a seventeen year old secondary school student from Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland. Previously she received a special commendation in the UNESCO and Idries Shah Foundation’s ‘World Tales’ competition for a piece of her poetry, and in 2022 she was published in The Irish Times as part of their annual young writer’s supplement, run by Fighting Words. She is inspired by writers like Jeffrey Eugenides and Donna Tartt, and Seamus Heaney is her favourite poet. In her free time she enjoys reading, writing, swimming, and other people’s company. She is currently studying for the Leaving Cert, and hopes to study English in 2024.