Fairy Legends and Traditions: Clough na Cuddy

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is a comic Irish folk tale in the tradition of early nineteenth-century literary folklore — likely from Thomas Crofton Croker's circle — set around the lakes of Killarney and blending supernatural enchantment with broad clerical satire. Its central figure is Father Cuddy, a jovially corpulent monk of Innisfallen whose defining traits are prodigious appetite, a fondness for drink, and prayers that grow short whenever a full cup is near. The plot sends him on an official errand to Muckross Abbey to arrange a wine shipment, where he eats, drinks, and sings his way through the day until, wandering home drunk under a strange double moon, he is lured off the path by a vision of a girl carrying a bottle and drops to his knees in prayer — only to fall asleep. He wakes to find summer has become winter, woods have grown and vanished, and his knees have sunk six inches into solid stone, suggesting he has slept for many years in a Rip Van Winkle–style enchantment; arriving back at the monastery he finds himself unrecognized and the old monastic order apparently dissolved. The story's distinctive quality is its warmly irreverent narrator, who treats Cuddy's gluttony and drunkenness as endearing rather than sinful and teases the reader about the unreliability of fairy stories while telling one — making the comedy and the supernaturalism feel genuinely intertwined rather than merely decorative.

Fairy Legends and Traditions: Clough na Cuddy

Related pages View as graph →