There were, of course, imaginary bards and bards who had imaginary experiences, just as some men, according to story, entered the otherworld in the body and some simply dreamt they had gone thither.

CHAPTER VI

THE MYTHICAL AND THE ACTUAL BLIND HARRY

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,

Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,

Be thy intents wicked or charitable,

Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.

Hamlet

AN we discover nothing more definite about

the mythical Blind Harry, whose name the author of the Wallace seems to have chosen as an alias? If, as Dunbar asserts, he was descended from Finn mac Cumhaill, and all his congeners were Gaels, he cannot in the beginning have been called Harry. That must be an anglicized form of an original Gaelic name, or due to some confusion. An inquiry into this matter, though it may not yield certain results, is essential here, and will be seen to throw more light on conceptions of faery.

Blind Harry's father, according to Dunbar, was "mickle Gow mac Morn." The poet's statement that the son was "long" in faery implies that he was no permanent resident of the otherworld, but a mortal (fabled or real) who had resided there for an extended period of time. His blindness was ap

parently not a self-imposed disguise, but an affliction he was obliged to endure. Thus, both his ancestry and his experience link him with Blind Ossian, also a son of Gow mac Morn.*

Under these circumstances, it is not going too far to suggest that Harry may be merely a corruption of Garry, for Celtic tradition has much to tell of a son of Gow mac Morn called Garaidh (Garry), which name in Scotland at the end of the fifteenth century, as we see from the Book of the Dean of Lismore,† was written phonetically in a form resembling Zarri, which the first editor regularly transcribed as Garry, and the latest Gairri. It may have been Garry with an aspirate, which is practically Harry. Aedh was the name of Gow mac Morn before he lost an eye, and was therefore called Gow (Goll, blind). Aedh, which means Fire, and is preserved in proper names like MacKay and Mackie, was frequently anglicized as Hugh.

Garadh mac Morn appears in Irish documents as a decrepit old man telling tales mournfully of the Fianna whom he has outlived: "And his condition this: that the major part of his life was past, and his kinsmen all were slain." He is represented as coeval with the fathers of a company of women whom he was left to serve and entertain while the men were away hunting. He could not accompany them, "because," as one of them says, "he is gone

off his lustihood and his spear throwing and because the condition in which he is, is that of old age." When the women call upon him to play chess he refuses, but instead "chants at them an old rhyme" of a chess-match of former days which begot a quarrel causing great slaughter of the Fianna. The incident is recorded, and the lay is summarized, by Caeilte in the Colloquy of the Elders,* to explain why a famous curative well at Cnoc na Rígh (Hill of the Kings), created by St. Patrick by striking a rock-wall with his staff, was named Garadh's Well. This Garadh was possibly identical or confused with the Guaire Goll, Blind Guaire, one of Finn's bearers of the chessboard, who is the leading figure of the story which the old minstrel tells, perhaps about himself. In any case, Garadh of the clan of Morna, and a brother-champion of Ossian, is well attested as a reciter of tales during his unhappy days of prolonged life; and, as he remarks significantly, "an ancient man without an ancient legend is amiss." St. Patrick blessed Caeilte for repeating his story because it was "grand lore and knowledge" - such as could evidently be obtained only from a man of an older age.

Whether or no Garadh mac Morn is to be identified with Guaire Goll,† Blind Guaire, it is worthy of attention that the latter appears as a reciter of old tales in another Erse narrative, preserved in

*

the twelfth-century manuscript The Book of Leinster, which recounts Finn's fearful struggle with phantoms who "for their sister" sought vengeance on him in a lonely hunting-lodge in a glen a tale showing such fundamental resemblance to the famous story of Wallace's visitation by the revengeful ghost of Fawdoun in Gask Hall,† one of the most picturesque sections in Blind Harry's poem, that we may surmise the author here followed a Highland narrative. Blind Guaire in this case, however, is only an alias for Ossian, as appears from the lines:

Not" Guaire the Blind" was I called

On the day we went at the king's call,
To the house of Fiachu who wrought valor
To the fortress over Badammar.

Which suggests the interesting question: Were Blind Harry and Blind Ossian regarded as mere variant names of the same mythical person? They were at all events both represented alike as sons of Morn and denizens of faery, with supernaturally prolonged lives, while both Blind Guaire and Blind Ossian in extreme old age were tellers of former

events.

"By one name was I never called since I went among peoples," Blind Odin (alias Hárr) declares in an Eddic poem,‡ and Snorri makes him enumerate fifty names he had adopted at one time or