The late Professor Seamus Delargy, one time Director of the Irish Folklore Commission was not only a most learned man, but also one of the most companionable people you could meet. Irish literature and folklore, Scandinavian literature and life - you were likely to meet in his house an Icelander bearing a strange gift, a dried fish which, Delargy would say, you could chew like chewing gum.
He heard his first folktale from the part time barber in his village in the Glens of Antrim. Delargy's own words: "He was a very knowledgeable man. He could build a boat and shoe a horse, and dance a jig, and had many other accomplishments. He was a friendly man and had a way with children, and my mother sent for him when she made the great decision to have my red hair cut for the first time. He came with a smile on his face, and a big pair of scissors in his hand, and he frightened the life out of me; for I knew that something terrible and irredeemable was going to happen, and that I was drawing away from my mother's apron strings and about to take my first step forward into a strange world. So I cried and howled, and poor Jimmy stood there with the scissors in his hand, and looked at poor mother who felt half resentful herself and was on the brink of tears.
But the upshot was that "if I stayed quiet and let him cut my hair he would tell me a story. That's how I heard my first folktale." And every time Jimmy came afterwards, he brought a new story, and "what might have become a nightmare became a longed for ritual. It might be a tale about the fairies at Tiveragh, the fort on the hill above the village where the `wee folk' lived and rode around the country on the yellow hen weed which made the finest horses that ever you could see, much finer than the shaggy shilty ponies which we children saw the farmers driving in flocks off the hills of Glenariffe and Garron to the fair at Cushendall. Or it might have been the story of the `grogach', a wee hairy fairy who used to help the farmers in oldtime to thresh their corn but had a great dislike for anyone who offered to reward them."
And Delargy writes . . . "soft may the sod lie on jimmy's head, and God give him peace, for those tales have indeed brought me into pleasant paths and friendly company, not only in the Glens of Antrim but through most of Ireland and many another land besides." From Interests by T. K. Whitaker, published by the Institute of Public Administration, 1983.
Many other good pieces by Dr Whitaker. Would his own favourite be, by any chance "My First Salmon"? The date was 1964, the place Carrick, Co Donegal.