Cleena is the queen of the fairies, and once exercised a powerful spell
over the peasants around Glengariff, but she is losing her influence.
The national school board is opposed to her. The teachers have disputed
her power and authority with such persistence that she cannot exercise
them among the present generation as she did among those of the past. It
is only among the schoolless communities, far back in the rocky glens
along the seashore, where the people cannot read or write and do not
have candles to illuminate their lonely cabins during the long winter
nights, that she is remembered at all. In more thickly settled parts of
the country where the national schools stand at three-mile intervals,
the children even scoff at her and ridicule her and say that she may
play all the pranks she likes with them and welcome. Cleena has been a
favorite of the Irish poets for ages, and appears in many old-fashioned
love stories.
"God grant 't is not Cleena, the queen that pursues me;
While I dream of dark groves and O'Donavan's daughter."
Cleena often did a kindly act, and when Dooling O'Hartigan, the bosom
friend of Murrough, the eldest son and heir apparent of Brian Boru, was
on his way to the battle of Clontarf, she met him and tried to persuade
him to stay out of the fight. But nothing could induce him to abandon
his friends in such an emergency, particularly as the aged king had
given Murrough the command of the army that day. Having failed to
persuade him, Cleena placed a magic cloak around O'Hartigan and warned
him solemnly that he would certainly be slain if he threw it off. He
fought fiercely all day by the side of his friend and made fearful havoc
among the Danes. The field was strewn with the bodies of the men he
slew, and Murrough, observing the slaughter, but being unable to
recognize the cause of it, cried out:
"I hear the blows of O'Hartigan, but I cannot see him!"
In order to console and encourage his friend, O'Hartigan threw off the
cloak that made him invisible. The moment he stood unprotected an arrow
from the bow of a Dane smote him in the temple, and he died for
neglecting Cleena's words of warning.
It is only occasionally that the fairies interfere with people nowadays.
Then it is to make trouble for innocent men who are out later than they
should be and get bewildered in their brains or suffer other lapses that
they are not responsible for. A friend of mine told an amusing story of
his coachman, who frequently suffered from the mischievousness of a
fairy not long ago, and explained in the morning:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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