DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

It seems to me not improbable that the banshee may have been regarded anciently as a tutelary guardian of the royal house of Stuart. My reasons for entertaining this belief are that the coronation stone of Scone, now the basis of the royal throne of the British Empire, in Westminster Abbey (which must not be confused with the Lia Fail of Ireland), is said by at least one old English writer to have been the dwelling-place of a tutelary spirit. It seems not unlikely that it may have been partly for this reason that the highly romantic and superstitious King Edward I. had the stone removed to Westminster. In an English account of the assassination of King James I. of Scotland at Perth in 1437 entitled The Dethe and False Murdure of James Stewarde, Kyng of Scotys, written about 1440, by John Shirley of London, or rather translated by him from the Latin text of what was probably an official Scottish account of the affair, he tells us that as the King rode to Perth, to hold Christmastide there, and came to the Water of Leith, a woman of Ireland (that is, of the Highlands) who called herself a soothsayer rose in the midst of the way, and cried with a loud voice: “My lord Kyng, an ye passe this water, ye shall never return agane on lyve”. On being asked how she could so prophesy, she said that “Huthart told her so”. (17)

The spirit Huthart may almost certainly be associated with the Scottish term “Huddy”, employed for the hooded crow, which is connected with the banshee in Ireland, “Huthart ” seems to be the same as that “Ethart” who is mentioned by the Rev. Robert Knox in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Wyllie (1677) as the familiar of a lady who dwelt. in “the West marches” of Scotland, who accompanied her on her journeys.(18) It is not impossible otherwise that the name Huthart may be a corruption of the Irish Gaelic Teathur, or Tethra, who, as we have seen, was associated with the scald or royston crow in Ireland in her form of the badb, the bird whose shape the banshee occasionally took. This Teathur, who, in human shape, was one of a trio of mythical kings of Ireland, was one of the mysterious Tuatha De Danann. The name seems comparable with that of Arthur, who according to English mediaeval superstition took the shape of a crow, a passage in Cervantes’ Don Quixote having it “that no Englishman would shoot a crow for Arthur’s sake”, a statement supported by Cornish tradition. (19) Morgan La Fee, Arthur’s sister, also took crow or raven shape on occasion, and she has been connected mythologically with the Irish Morngan, or crow-goddess of war.

We have thus good reason to associate “the woman of Ireland”, who warned King James, with the banshee. That she made a further effort to interview the King at Perth on the eve of his murder, but without effect, is on record. (20) The whole passage, indeed, gives me to think that a legend existed which more or less definitely associated the Stuart line with a banshee, and that this spirit, in the contemporary accounts of James I.’s assassination, became “euhemerized”, or humanized, into a Gaelic soothsayer or wise woman, whereas the current popular version of this part of the affair might have been susceptible of a more mystical interpretation, associated with an ancestral familiar of the ancient Celtic line of Stuart.

Welsh tradition preserves the belief in more than one spirit of the banshee type. The cyhiraeth comes in a dark mist to the window of a person about to die, flapping her wings against the glass, whilst repeating his or her name. In appearance she is even more repellent than the banshee herself. Her locks are tangled and knotted, her teeth are long and black, she displays shrivelled arms. Sir John Rhys believed her to be an ancestral spirit. (21) Like the banshee, she gives forth a dreadful noise in the night before a death or burial. “Its first cry is strong, its second lower, its third still lower and soft. If one bears the cyhiraeth and then proceeds to the death-bed be will hear the dying man’s moans precisely like those he heard from the cyhiraeth.” This spirit especially infested the twelve parishes in the hundred of Inis Cenin, which lies on the south-east side of the River Towy on the sea-coast of Glamorganshire. Her moaning, accompanied by lights, precedes a wreck. Occasionally she passes through a village by night, groaning and rattling the window-shutters. She invariably appears before the visitation of an epidemic. (22)

Another Welsh spirit of the banshee kind is the gwrach y rhibyn, or “hag of the dribble”. Her appearance is almost similar to that of the cyhiraeth, and like her she utters a dreadful keening. Occasionally she appears in the mist of a mountainside, or at cross-roads, or near a sheet of water, which she splashes with her hands. Sometimes this spirit appears as a male. A man who had seen it at Llandaff told Mr. Wirt Sikes, the United States Consul at Cardiff in 1878, that it looked like a horrible old woman, with long red hair, a face like chalk and great tusk-like teeth. He said: “It’s not these new families that the gwrach y rhibyn ever troubles, sir, it’s the old stock.”(23) The “hag” is said to be the wife of the mythical power Avagddu, a word which implies lordship over death, and so she may justly be equated with the badb wife of Teathur, the Irish death-god. She has also been described as rising out of swamps aid creeks, and haunting ruined castles, as “a banshee, an ancestral spectre”. That birds are also associated with “warnings” in Wales, as is the crow or raven in Scotland and Ireland, is revealed by the tradition concerning the aderyn y corph, which chirps at the doors of persons fated to die.

Equally revolting to modern susceptibilities, but revealing much of that gruesome quality which seems inherent in the mentality of the race to which the writer is privileged to belong, is the notion of the glaistig, a female Scottish ghost who is described as “a woman of human race, who has been put under enchantments”, and to whom a supernatural character has thus been given. She was usually regarded as “a woman of honourable position; a former mistress of the house, the interests of the tenants of which she now attended to”. (24) Like the banshee, she has a peculiarly dolorous tone of voice, and her dreadful keening can at times be heard along the whole black length of a nightbound glen.

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