Chapter V: Conal Yellowclaw

_Source_.--Campbell, _Pop. Tales of West Highlands_, No. v. pp. 105-8, "Conall Cra Bhuidhe." I have softened the third episode, which is somewhat too ghastly in the original. I have translated "Cra Bhuide" Yellowclaw on the strength of Campbell's etymology, _l.c._ p. 158.

_Parallels_.--Campbell's vi. and vii. are two variants showing how widespread the story is in Gaelic Scotland. It occurs in Ireland where it has been printed in the chapbook, _Hibernian Tales_, as the "Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen," the Black Thief being Conall, and the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr. Lang's _Red Fairy Book_). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his _Irish Sketch-Book_, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost" (why "almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of the giant's breath occurs in the story of Koisha Kayn, MacInnes' _Tales_, i. 241, as well as the Polyphemus one, _ibid._ 265. One-eyed giants are frequent in Celtic folk-tales (_e.g._ in _The Pursuit of Diarmaid_ and in the _Mabinogi_ of Owen).

_Remarks._--Thackeray's reference to the "Arabian Nights" is especially apt, as the tale of Conall is a framework story like _The 1001 Nights_, the three stories told by Conall being framed, as it were, in a fourth which is nominally the real story. This method employed by the Indian story-tellers and from them adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all European literatures (Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally thought to be peculiar to the East, and to be ultimately derived from the Jatakas or Birth Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in former incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also in "The Story-teller at Fault" in this collection, and the story of _Koisha Kayn_ in MacInnes' _Argyllshire Tales_, a variant of which, collected but not published by Campbell, has no less than nineteen tales enclosed in a framework. The question is whether the method was adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign influences. Confining ourselves to "Conal Yellowclaw," it seems not unlikely that the whole story is an importation. For the second episode is clearly the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which was known in Ireland perhaps as early as the tenth century (see Prof. K. Meyer's edition of _Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis_, Pref. p. xii). It also crept into the voyages of Sindbad in the _Arabian Nights_. And as told in the Highlands it bears comparison even with the Homeric version. As Mr. Nutt remarks (_Celt. Mag._ xii.) the address of the giant to the buck is as effective as that of Polyphemus to his ram. The narrator, James Wilson, was a blind man who would naturally feel the pathos of the address; "it comes from the heart of the narrator;" says Campbell (_l.c._, 148), "it is the ornament which his mind hangs on the frame of the story."