The Gobán Saor was a highly skilled smith or architect in Irish history and legend. Gobban Saer (Gobban the Builder) is a figure regarded in Irish traditional lore as an architect of the seventh century, and popularly canonized as St. Gobban. The Catholic Encyclopedia considers him historical and born at Turvey, on the Donabate peninsula in North County Dublin, about 560.
Wikipedia, Goban Saor
Ella Young, an Irish poet and mythologist and part of the literary revival in Ireland around the turn of the last century, took the myths and stories about Gubban Saor or Cullion the Smith aka Mananaun and rewrote them for children in this Newbery Honor book of 1928. The full title of the book is The Wondersmith and His Son: A Tale from the Golden Childhood of the World. The tales were fantastical and very odd to my ear, but maybe not so very child-like. I’m too used to my folklore in simple everyday language, pre-digested and probably dumbed down. This collection is written in highly poetical language, and the tales meander about without a clear meaning or plot or character arc.
The Gubbaun wandered at his own will, as the wind wanders. Every place seemed good to him, because his heart was happy.
p.31
On the morrow the Son of the Gubbaun rose in the whiteness of dawn. He put a linen robe on his body. He crowned himself with a chaplet of arbutus that had fruit and blossom. Barefooted he went three times around the Sacred Well, as the sun travels, stepping from East to West. Then he knelt and touched the waters with his forehead and the palms of his hands.
p.109
Tulkinna the Peerless one stepped forward. He had nine golden apples and nine feathers of white silver and nine discs of findruiney. He tossed them up: they leaped like a plume of sea-spray, they shone like the wind-stirred flame, they whirled like leaves rising and falling. He wove them into patterns. They danced like gauze-winged flies on a summer’s eve. They gyrated like motes of dust. They tangled the mind in a web of light and darkness till at last it seemed that Tulkinna was tossing the stars.
The Gubbaun’s Feast, p.168
Perhaps it would be fun to read these tales aloud to a group of children and see just what they make of them. I’m baffled, befuddled, and bewildered, although I do catch some moments of beauty in the midst of the confusion. If you are of Irish extraction or just interested in myths and folktales and hero tales, you might enjoy trying to make sense of these stories. I read for plot, meaning, and characters, with a nod to language along the way. Therefore, I had to force myself to finish this translation and retelling of old Gaelic tales.
The pictures by Boris Artzybasheff, a Caldecott honor winner in 1938 for his illustrations for the tale Seven Simeons, are fittingly odd themselves. They’re black and white woodcut-looking pen and ink drawings with lots of Celtic knots and strangely writhing creatures and illuminated letters at the beginning of each tale. I thought they were . . . interesting and perhaps would bear closer examination if I were interested enough in the stories themselves to try to match illustration to prose.
Young ends her introduction to this storybook with the wish: “I would wish to have for this book the goodwill of Ireland and of America.” She has my goodwill, but not my further interest, unless someone else can explain them or simplify them enough for them to make sense to me. Your mileage may vary.