Riobárd Ó Dwyer's Beara tales — 'The Carpenter's Coffin' and the blacksmith 'dentists' of Adrigole and Eyeries

Riobárd Ó Dwyer Papers, NEHGS (Mss 1097) — "Stories from Beara"; received as an email from Riobárd Ó Dwyer · private email correspondence; also deposited at NEHGS (American Ancestors) · 2012-02-01

oral historysecondary focus

Summary

Two humorous Beara folk-tales relayed by Riobárd Ó Dwyer (verbatim in notes.md per NEHGS rights): - **The Carpenter's Coffin** — Paddy the carpenter lies in a coffin he'd built, for "devilment," to smoke his pipe; his donkey sees the rising smoke and "raises the alarm," and his wife nearly drowns him with a bucket of water. By grim coincidence, the next person laid in that same coffin is Paddy himself — dead. - **The Blacksmith "Dentists"** — before dentists, Beara smiths pulled teeth: one in **Adrigole** by reddening a bit of iron and feinting it at the patient's mouth so he jerked the corded tooth free; one near **Eyeries** by tying the cord from the tooth to a donkey's hind leg and pinching the donkey into bolting. Period social-history color (folk medicine, rural improvisation) for the Beara chapters. The Eyeries setting is the Murphy parish.

Also mentioned

Riobárd Ó Dwyer
Beara genealogist/folklorist; see the other O'Dwyer-email oral histories in this batch.

Places

Eyeries (village + parish + RC Chapel) (primary)
Beara Peninsula (primary)
West Cork (context)

Themes

Story threads

Berehaven Murphys

Related sources

Transcription

transcription: complete · confidence high

# The Carpenter's Coffin / The Blacksmith "Dentists" *Beara folk-tales relayed by Riobárd Ó Dwyer (email, 1 Feb 2012); also NEHGS Mss 1097.* > **Rights note.** NEHGS copy © NEHGS, CC BY-NC-ND, member-restricted. > Verbatim text is held in `notes.md` (private). Summary below is the > editor's own words. Two Beara humorous tales: a carpenter who naps for "devilment" in a coffin of his own making and is nearly drowned by his wife when the donkey raises the alarm over his pipe-smoke (and who later occupies that very coffin in earnest); and the blacksmith "dentists" of Adrigole and Eyeries who extracted teeth by feinting with red-hot iron or by tying the corded tooth to a bolting donkey. (Full verbatim in notes.md.)

Open questions

Adrigole not yet a vocab place; named only here. Add if it recurs.