Oddities


Strange and Mysterious Tales

The Air Ship
One day the monks of Clonmacnoise were holding a meeting on the floor of the church, and as they were at their deliberations there they saw a ship sailing over them in the air, going as if it were on the sea. When the crew of the ship saw the meeting and the inhabited place below them, they dropped anchor, and the anchor came right down on to the floor of the church, and the priests seized it. A man came down out of the ship after the anchor, and he was swimming as if he were in the water, till he reached the anchor; and they were dragging him down then. ‘For God’s sake let me go!’ said he, ‘for you are drowning me.’ Then he left them, swimming in the air as before, taking his anchor with him.

Irish; author unknown; fourteenth-fifteenth century?

from A Celtic Miscellany translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, Penguin Classics reprinted 1982

Drowned Giantesses
A woman, whose breasts had not grown, was cast up on a sea shore in Europe. She was fifty feet tall, that is from her shoulders to her feet, and her chest was seven feet across. There was a purple cloak on her. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her head had been cut off; and it was in this way that the wave cast her up on land. Finit

Another woman was cast up from the sea in Scotland, and she was a hundred and ninety-two feet long; there were seventeen feet between her breasts, and sixteen was the length of her hair, and seven the length of the finger of her hand. Her nose was seven feet long, and there were two feet between her eyebrows. Every limb of her was as white as the swan or the foam of the wave.

Irish; author unknown; fourteenth-fifteenth century ? (Source of the second paragraph ninth century)

from A Celtic Miscellany translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, Penguin Classics reprinted 1982

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