Kilkenny cats

[32] In the 1930s, the Irish Folklore Commission noted a seanchaí from Rossinver, County Leitrim, tell of a cat battle in Locan Dhee near Kinlough on New Year's Day 1855.

[36] Early instances include: (from 1814) an account in Niles' Register of the loss of USS Wasp after sinking HMS Avon;[37] (from 1816) the critique of Andrew O'Callaghan mentioned earlier; a letter from the 4th Duke of Buccleuch to Walter Scott comparing Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" to the story;[38] and a riposte to disagreeing literary critics:[39] One context for the simile was advocating isolationism, allowing one's enemies to defeat each other, or a divide-and-conquer policy.

A report in Niles' Register of Spanish church opposition to the 1817 tax reform of Martín de Garay [es] wished 'the fate of the "Kilkenny cats"' on "Ferdinand and his priests".

Similarly in 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Clifford Berryman depicted Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin as "a modern version of the Kilkenny Cats".

[45] In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels accuse Bruno Bauer of fomenting antagonism between Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach "as the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland".

Some extended the metaphor to say the North would win as having the longest tail; this was popularly reported in 1864 as a quip by Grant,[50] but George Gordon Meade made the same comparison in an 1861 letter to his wife.

[51] Some Mormons viewed the Civil War as fulfilling a prophecy by founder Joseph Smith, who said after an 1843 attempt to arrest him, "The constitution of the United States declares that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be denied.

"[50][52] Donald Dewar, the then First Minister of Scotland, in 1999 denied media talk of a rift with John Reid, the Scottish Secretary, conceding, "I must confess the casual outsider who simply read the headlines might think it was a collection of Kilkenny cats fighting".

[63] Prosper Mérimée alluded to les chats de Kilkenny in 1860s correspondence,[n 7] prompting a query to L'Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux in 1904,[66] the answer to which was prefaced, "Those of us who ever had an English governess will recall the 'Kilkenny Cats'.

[71] In an 1840 story by Edgar Allan Poe, "Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, of Connacht" says he was "mad as a Kilkenny cat" when a rival came to court his beloved.

[34][72] In George Lippard's 1843 satire of Philadelphia publishers, Irishman Phelix Phelligrim exclaims, when his associates are cursing and red-faced with anger, "Its in a fine humor ye are, gentleman!

[80] John G. A. Prim in Notes and Queries in 1850 conceded that this was the most commonly accepted theory ("This ludicrous anecdote has, no doubt, been generally looked upon as an absurdity of the Joe Miller class").

[83] Prim proposed that the cats were originally an allegory for continual jurisdictional disputes between the adjacent municipal corporations of Kilkenny (or Englishtown, or Hightown) and Irishtown (or Saint Canice, or Newcourt).

[81][n 9] Prim claimed that "mutual litigations, squabbles, assaults and batteries, with the accompanying imprisonments, fines and law costs",[21] which brought both near to bankruptcy, lasted from 1377 to "the end of the seventeenth century".

[92] Thomas D'Arcy McGee in 1853 claimed the origin is a metaphor for feuding, not between Englishtown and Irishtown, but in the Confederation of Kilkenny between supporters and opponents of Ormonde's first peace in 1646.

[95] The story holds that a group of bored soldiers stationed in Kilkenny held fights between two cats tied together by their tails and suspended from a clothes line or crosspost.

[101] Joseph O'Connor's 1951 memoir has Matt Purcell, a comrade of his father's in the 10th (North Lincoln) Regiment of Foot in the 1880s, claim the original Kilkenny cats were tied together by the Earl of Ormond's jester.

[102] A 1324 witchcraft case in Kilkenny saw Dame Alice Kyteler flee and her servant Petronilla de Meath burnt at the stake after admitting relations with a demon which variously took the form of a dog, a cat, and an Aethiopian.

[103] Austin Clarke's 1963 poem "Beyond the Pale" recounts the story of "Dame Kyttler", continuing:[104] Soon afterwards, they say, that demon sired The black cats of Kilkenny.

In 1986 Terence Sheehy suggested a link with the luchthigern,[105] a beast mentioned in Broccán Craibdech's poem in the "Book of Leinster" as having been slain by Midgna's wife[n 11] at a place named Derc-Ferna.

Joyce[109] in regarding the luchthigern as a huge cat; in contrast to Brian O'Looney ("some sort of monster")[110] Thomas O'Neill Russell ("Can this word mean a great mouse?

[107] A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology says that luchtigern was "Mouse-lord of Kilkenny, slain by a huge cat, Banghaisgidheach";[111] this is apparently a misreading of Joyce, who describes Midgna's (human) wife as a ban-gaisgidheach "female champion".

[109] In 1857, the editor of The Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society suggested that a heading "Grimalkin slain in Ireland" reported in a synopsis of the 1584 book Beware the Cat might be relevant;[112] this was disproved by an 1868 reply in the successor journal explaining that the episode (a version of the folktale "The King of the Cats") is set in Bantry in County Wexford about "Patrik Agore", a kern of John Butler, son of Richard Butler, 1st Viscount Mountgarret, who sets out to kill Cahir mac Art Kavanagh.

[127] Steven Connor comments, "Because they involve bodily illogic ... in which a body is imagined as simultaneously present and absent, the cake both eaten and miraculously intact, the fact of death is often in play in Irish bulls".