{"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_flat32_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_neu_celt_flat_flat32_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_neu_celt_flat_flat32_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/flat32.htm","summary":"This is an Irish folklore tale in the tradition of Celtic fairy legend, likely from the early 19th century collection *Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland* by Thomas Crofton Croker. It follows Maurice Connor, a blind itinerant piper from the Iveragh peninsula of County Kerry, who possesses a magical tune with the power to compel all living things \u2014 people, fish, crabs, seals \u2014 to dance against their will. At a beach gathering, Maurice drinks an entire bottle of whiskey, accidentally plays his enchanted tune, and sets off a spectacular mass dance that draws sea creatures swarming onto the shore, culminating in a sea-woman with green hair emerging from the waves to court him. She lures him into the sea with promises of gold dishes and kingship over the fishes; he accepts, disappearing beneath a great wave despite his mother's grief-stricken pleas \u2014 a scene made darkly comic by the fact that she cannot stop dancing even as she watches her son drown. The tale is distinctive for its comic, digressive narrator's voice \u2014 full of asides, mock-heroic verse embedded in the prose, and self-aware humor (the mother worrying she might unknowingly eat her own grandchild as a piece of fish) \u2014 which sets it apart from more solemn treatments of the fairy-abduction theme and roots the supernatural firmly in the texture of ordinary rural Irish life.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Fairy Legends and Traditions: The Wonderful Tune","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas","translated_text":null,"word_count":2480}