The witch horse
The witch horse is a fairy tale . It is contained in the Irish fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm at position 19, which they translated in 1825 from Fairy legends and traditions of the South of Ireland by Thomas Crofton Croker .
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Fifteen-year-old Morty Sullivan leaves his parents and goes to America. Thirty years after her death, he makes a pilgrimage to St. Gobnates Chapel on Ballyvourney . He gets lost in the mountains, follows a light that he believes is Gobnate's guide and finds an old woman with red eyes and a sulfuric breath at dinner. She puts him on a wild shadow horse. Pilgrims will find it under a slope near Lake Gougane Barra . He swears by the hand of O'Sullivan never to drink again on the pilgrimage.
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According to Grimm: Ballyvourney means city of my lover. Pope Clement VIII granted the pilgrims indulgences there in 1601. In the legend, the holy Gobnate came to the aid of an inferior chief in battle by turning bees into armed warriors. After that, the beehive had become a helmet from which the dying were given something to drink for their happiness. A wisp as it appears here, is in Southern Ireland Miscaun marry in Scotland spunkie . An oath by the hand of O'Sullivan is considered particularly powerful.
literature
- Irish fairy tales. In the broadcast by the Brothers Grimm. Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, first edition 1987. pp. 212-215, 268-269. (Insel Verlag; ISBN 978-3-458-32688-5 ; The text follows the edition: Irische Elfenmärchen. Translated by the Brothers Grimm. Friedrich Fleischer, Leipzig 1826. Orthography and punctuation were slightly normalized.)