Dullahan

Ireland
Munster: County Cork — the Blackwater valley between Castle Hyde, Ballyhooly and Doneraile, the country round Mallow, and the road from Glanmire into Cork city — in Croker's pages; in the manuscript collections of 1937-1939, County Limerick between Newtown and Glin and County Clare at Kilrush

Dullahan — the headless coachman or rider who, in Irish folklore, drives the cóiste bodhar, the death coach, and announces a death

Variants and names

dullahan is the spelling that won, but it is not the first. In 1802 General Charles Vallancey prints Wulahan, or Dullahan, i. e. Di-ullahan, sets it among the Irish names for 'evil Genii' and derives it from Arabic: an Orientalist etymology that does not stand. Croker in 1828 prints dullahan and quotes in full a manuscript communication from Edward O'Reilly, the author of the Irish-English Dictionary: 'Dulachan (in Irish Dubhlachan) signifies a dark, sullen person. The word Durrachan, or Dullahan, by which in some places the goblin is known, has the same signification. It comes from Dorr, or Durr, anger, or Durrach, malicious, fierce, &c.' Croker is not wholly convinced and adds on his own account: 'The correctness of this last etymology may be questioned, as Dubh, black, is evidently a component part of the word.' Either way the name does not mean 'headless': it means 'dark, sullen person'. The dubh that circulates online comes from that line of Croker's, not from a dictionary, and eDIL has no headword dublach or dubluchán: the word is neither Old nor Middle Irish.

'Headless' is other words. Díceannach is the adjective Dinneen glosses 'headless'; gan ceann is the phrase, and in Lady Gregory 1920 it is the figure's own name: a girl coming back by curragh from Liscannor, in County Clare, looks behind her and there is 'the Gan ceann, the headless one'. The vehicle is the cóiste bodhar, anglicised Coach a bower by Croker and coach-a-bower by Yeats. Dinneen 1904, s.v. cóiste, glosses it 'c. bodhar, the "headless coach," a spectral vision'; Yeats, annotating Lady Gregory, explains it instead as the ''deaf-coach,' so called from its rumbling sound', and Lynd in 1909 writes 'the Death (or, rather, Deaf) Coach'. The two readings do not exclude one another: in eDIL bodar is 'deaf', but also, of a sound, 'indistinct (?); rough, grating (?)'.

What is told

In Croker's pages the dullahan is not one thing. He is the headless coachman of a black coach drawn by six horses that are themselves beheaded, and he is the rider who carries his own head under his right arm. The head, in Croker, 'looked like a large cream cheese hung round with black puddings', the skin stretched like the parchment head of a drum, two huge eyes moving on their own account and flashing 'like meteors'.

The business is to announce. In 'Hanlon's Mill' Mick sees go by at night 'a great high black coach drawn by six black horses' with a coachman dressed all in black, and neither the horses nor the man has a head; the coach makes no sound, 'still he could hear no noise'. Next morning word comes that the master, Mr. Wrixon, is dead. In the notes Croker adds the real roads: every night from Castle Hyde to Glana Fauna, beyond Ballyhooly, and every Saturday night through Doneraile, where the coach stops at door after door and whoever opens has a basin of blood flung in their face. A lady living near Cork writes to him that the coachman has 'a most marvellously long whip, with which he can whip the eyes out of any one, at any distance, that dares to look at him'.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The function is on the road, and it works in two moves. The first is the announcement: the coach goes past at night and the next day it is known who has died. Unlike the bean sídhe there is no need to belong to a lineage: it is enough to live along that stretch of road, and in the manuscripts of 1939 the rule is stated plainly, 'a sign of someone dyin' out of place'. The second move is a rule of conduct, and in the witnesses' own mouths it is the part that matters: do not look, do not stand in the doorway, do not open when you hear the wheels. Whoever looks gets the blood in the face, the whip in the eyes, the misfortune; at Kilrush you had to go down on your knees. It is an etiquette of the dark, and it applies to roads with names: Castle Hyde to Ballyhooly, Newtown to Glin, the Tea Road from Cuskinny to Ballynoe Bridge.

Where it is attested

The first printing is of 1802, and it is not a tale. In the preface to the Prospectus of a Dictionary of the Language of the Aire Cotti (Dublin, Graisberry and Campbell, 1802) Lieut. General Charles Vallancey lists among the names for 'evil Genii' the 'Wulahan, or Dullahan' and writes: 'The Dullahan or Wullahan is a terrible bug-bear at this day; the peasants hear him in the night dragging a heavy chain through the villages and along the roads.' No missing head, no coach: the sound of a chain on the road.

The body of material is Thomas Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. Part II, John Murray, London, MDCCCXXVIII, inscribed to Sir Walter Scott. The section 'The Dullahan' runs from p. 85 to p. 155: 'The Good Woman', 'Hanlon's Mill', 'The Harvest Dinner', the ballad 'The Death Coach', 'The Headless Horseman'. Croker states where each thing comes from: the etymology from a manuscript communication by Edward O'Reilly, the dullahans and their coach from a lady living near Cork, the Castle Hyde legend from an anonymous correspondent at Clonmel, Wales from Miss Williams, Scotland from Walter Scott, the Breton cart of the Ankou from 'Dr. Grimm'. The condensed one-volume edition (The Family Library, Murray 1834) moves the section to pp. 209-242 and cuts 'The Harvest Dinner'.

Then come the borrowings: Yeats 1888, Dinneen 1904, Lynd 1909, Yeats annotating Lady Gregory in 1920. The dated oral material is in the National Folklore Collection and can be read on dúchas.ie: CBÉ 0575, p. 60, taken down by Liam Shine from Mrs Jack Manaher on 30 November 1938 between Rathkeale and Glin; CBÉ 0592, p. 179, by the same Shine from Thade Enright on 27 January 1939; and, in the Schools' Collection, 'The Cóiste Bodhar', vol. 0630, p. 18, written out by Maureen Barrett from what her father Joseph Barrett told her, at Kilrush.

Caution

Grade A because the whole chain is in hand: the first printing of the name is of 1802 and I have read it in two separate scans; the 1828 corpus I opened in the original, notes included, and the notes name the informants and where they came from; the dictionaries I queried; and for 1937-1939 there are manuscripts with collector, informant, place and date to the day.

The most useful finding is a negative one. In the National Folklore Collection the word dullahan does not exist as the name of a figure: it appears only as a surname. What people said was 'the headless coach' — one hundred and sixty-four transcribed pages in the Schools' Collection — or cóiste bodhar, or gan ceann. 'Dullahan' is a word out of books: Vallancey, Croker, Yeats, and from Yeats to us.

What does not hold. The whip made from a human spine: in Croker's ballad the spine is the pole of the coach, thigh bones are the spokes of the wheels, the lamps are two hollow skulls, and the whip is a whip. The dullahan as a form of the 'Celtic god Crom Dubh' and as a pre-Christian survival: no source between 1802 and 1939 says it, and those who have traced it put it back to Bob Curran, 1997, a book I have not opened. The automatic link with the bean sídhe: in Croker the banshee is in part one, of 1825, and the dullahan in part two, of 1828; it is Yeats, in 1888, who tucks the dullahan into the banshee note, and there he also adds the coffin on the roof of the coach, which is not in Croker.

Washington Irving. 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' came out in 1820, five years before Croker's part one and eight before the dullahan: the reverse descent is impossible. That the headless rider was a European commonplace Croker knew himself, since in his notes he points to the Spectator no. 110 for 'a spirit… in the shape of a black horse without a head', to Wales for 'Ceffyl heb un pen', to Thiele for the lords of Glorup who blind whoever fails to hide his face, and to Scott for the Duchess of Queensberry wheeling her own head in a wheelbarrow at Drumlanrig.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.