{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_neu_celt_flat_flat20_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_neu_celt_flat_flat20_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_neu_celt_flat_flat20_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/neu/celt/flat/flat20.htm","summary":"This is an Irish folk tale in the oral storytelling tradition, presented as a first-person yarn told by an old man named Daniel O'Rourke to a narrator visiting County Cork in 1813. The story follows Daniel's supernatural misadventures after he drinks too much at a landlord's celebration: he falls into a river, washes up on a deserted island, gets stranded in a bog, and is carried to the moon by a talking eagle who turns out to be settling an old score (Daniel once robbed its nest). Once deposited on the moon, Daniel clings to a reaping-hook until the Man in the Moon chops it off, sending him tumbling back to earth \u2014 where the narrative breaks off mid-fall as a flock of wild geese appears.\n\nThe tale's distinctive texture comes from its pitch-perfect rendering of Irish vernacular speech: Daniel is garrulous, sly, and self-deprecating, negotiating with eagles and lunar residents with elaborate rural courtesy while muttering curses at them in Irish so they won't understand. A notable interpolated claim is Daniel's nostalgic aside about the old Anglo-Irish gentry \u2014 generous landlords who might whip you but kept \"rattling houses\" and charged little rent \u2014 versus the grinding present, which grounds the fantasy in real social grievance. The work belongs to the tradition Croker collected in *Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland* (1825), and rewards readers interested in Irish comic folk narrative, the phooka and fairy tradition, or early 19th-century dialect writing.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Fairy Legends and Traditions: Daniel O Rourke","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas","translated_text":null,"word_count":3282}