Red Hanrahan

Red Hanrahan by W.B. Yeats (1890)

A red-haired hedge schoolmaster and accomplished songmaker finds himself involved in a fateful, otherworldly night. At a village gathering on Samhain Eve in an old barn, he is first called to deliver a message from his sweetheart regarding the urgency of her situation. Amid men singing and sharing in a modest card game, a mysterious, seemingly mad old man arrives and insists that the schoolmaster pause and join him in a game, using a time-worn pack of cards. As the game progresses, the card play transforms into something supernatural: the old man’s deft shuffling conjures phantom hares and a pack of hounds that burst from his hands and scamper through the barn, inciting both mirth and apprehension in the onlookers. Undeterred by warnings and the magic of the moment, the schoolmaster sets out immediately in pursuit of his destined course. Under a full moon and along winding, desolate roads, he follows the elusive echoes of the hunt, encountering strange, disorienting challenges—a misstep into a bog, an uncertain path in the darkness, and a landscape shifting between familiar fields and desolate mountains. His journey becomes a liminal passage between the mortal realm and a mysterious, otherworldly space. Eventually, exhausted and disoriented, he stumbles upon a hidden door near a rugged mountain expanse. Entering, he is transported into a grand, luminous house filled with enchanting sights and scents reminiscent of summer. There he encounters a regal woman, resplendent yet marked by a sorrowful weariness, attended by four aged figures. Each of these figures bears an emblematic treasure—the first holds a cauldron declaring “Pleasure,” the second a heavy stone proclaiming “Power,” the third a long spear symbolizing “Courage,” and the fourth a sword representing “Knowledge.” Their silent, portentous gestures and murmured judgments convey a cryptic moral and foretell a destiny intertwined with these virtues. Overwhelmed by the opulence and the enigmatic atmosphere of that realm, the schoolmaster loses himself in dreams, slipping into a state where the boundaries of time and memory blur. When he finally awakens, the brilliant light of day reveals not only the stark contrast with the night of his revelations but also the undeniable passage of a full year. Now thinner, his hair longer and wilder, he finds that all the magical experiences and his fervent quest have become elusive fragments of a lost past. Returning to his village on yet another Samhain night, he is met with the skepticism of his fellow men. When he recounts his uncanny journey and his long-awaited effort to find his sweetheart—who, in his absence, has vanished into the remorseless tides of fate and rumor—he is met with disbelief and gentle ridicule. The woman he sought is rumored to have married another and departed for distant, bustling places, leaving him with a profound sense of loss and dislocation. The narrative weaves together themes of love, fate, transformation, and the tension between scholarly discipline and the intoxicating pull of an enchanted, ephemeral world. The extraordinary encounter and the surreal night’s adventures leave the protagonist irretrievably changed, haunted by the intangible magic of that singular night, and marked by the elusive, bittersweet realization that some journeys—both physical and spiritual—lead not to reunion but to an enduring, unresolved longing.

By W.B. Yeats · First published 1890 · Genre: Fantasy, Folklore, Allegory · 5,070 words

First lines

Hanrahan, the hedge schoolmaster, a tall, strong, red-haired young man, / came into the barn where some of the men of the village were sitting on / Samhain Eve. It had been a dwelling-house, and when the man that owned / it had built a better one, he had put the two rooms together, and kept / it for a place to store one thing or another. There was a fire on the / old hearth, and there were dip candles stuck in bottles, and there was a / black quart bottle upon some boards that had been put across two barrels / to make a table. Most of the men were sitting beside the fire, and one / of them was singing a long wandering song, about a Munster man and a / Connaught man that were quarrelling about their two provinces.

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Red Hanrahan is listed on Textopian as a short story by W.B. Yeats, dated 1890 CE.

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Irish folklore · mythology · supernatural · fairy tale · legend · magical realism · symbolism · mysticism · allegory · heroic · Celtic · romanticism

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