Country Life
Tales from Ireland
Denis Wood
Writing in The Nationalist recently, Bill O'Brien told the story of a boy who, despite a voracious appetite, dwined and dwindled until he became only skin and bone. It took a 'fairyman' to diagnose that an 'Art Lucre' had crept into his mouth and down into his stomach while he was asleep in a bog. It was induced to come out of him after the boy had been given a strong dose of salt water and his head held over a bowl. The 'Art Lucre' came out and was followed by four little ones, and when they had all drunk of the water in the bowl and the mother was about to herd them all back down the boy's gullet, the 'fairyman' intervened. After this the boy recovered completely. Tales of this sort are still fairly common in Ireland to this day and credence still attached to them.
In the article the 'Art Lucre,' which is also spelt `Luchre,' and 'Luche,' is described as a lizard, which struck me as unusual in that I had always thought that lizards are creatures of hot, dry places. (The common lizard, Lacerta vivi
para, is the only reptile to be found in Ireland).
have an insatiable etymological curiosity and, having just come to live in Oxford, took advantage of the splendid facilities given by the County Library, who gave me an extract from Radford's Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, which referred to a common belief that a man going to sleep in a bog with his mouth open would be liable to have a 'lizard' creep down his throat.
I was further referred to Professor I. L. Foster, the Jesus Professor of Celtic in the University, who most kindly wrote me a long and detailed letter on the subject. It appears that the word 'Art' is a variant of an Irish word which occurs in the form erc (earc) and airc, and refers to a reptile of some kind. Aire Machra occurs in a work by Geoffrey Keating of about 1630. Here it means an 'eft' or 'newt.' The word 'Lucre' is an anglicised Machair, meaning 'rushes, a place where rushes grow, a marsh' — in this case a bog; and Professor Foster thought that there might be some force in my conjecture that an 'Art Lucre' is really a newt in a 'bog.
I wonder if there is a Gaelic connection somewhere — my great grandmother was a Macpherson and used to tell a similar story but, in this case, it was a kind of gigantic tape worm enticed out of a man's mouth (after due starvation) by a steaming bowl of broth.
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