No one can make fun of themselves like the Irish. This quite funny folktale is about two well-off but foolish farmers named Hudden and Dudden. They will do anything to get their hands on a small piece of land between their two farms. This land belongs to a poor but clever man named Donald O’Neary. The story begins simply enough with Hudden and Dudden deciding to poison Donald’s faithful cow. Things escalate from there with Donald becoming rich and three people dying. By the end of the story, justice appears to have been served. But has it really?
Our source for Hudden and Dudden was a children’s book called Celtic Folk and Fairy Tales by folktale collector Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1892. Many folktales around the world follow similar plots to those of other cultures. Sometimes there are enough differences to show that this has probably happened by chance. However, more often than not parts of stories are so similar that one must have evolved from the other, or they both developed from a common earlier story. The great Danish poet and writer Hans Christian Andersen wrote that a small number of his stories were versions of Danish folktales he had heard as a child. One of these is Little Claus and Great Claus. This contains the same (unlikely) major events as Hudden and Dudden but is very different in much of the detail. Researchers have examined the history of both stories. It appears their origin was an anonymous eleventh century Latin poem, Unibos, which found its way into the culture of the Celts in Ireland and then spread to Europe.
Original Text / PDF (2,215 words)
General Comments
The message of Hudden and Dudden can best be summed up in the English proverb: “The more you get, the more you want.” As usually happens in folktales, the greedy villains (Hudden and Dudden) come to a bad end. However, there is an interesting twist in this story. Donald O’Neary is clearly the “winner” in the story, but he is hardly a hero. He rises from poverty to riches through trickery. First, he tricks a man into buying a worthless cow-skin for a bag of gold. Next, he tricks Hudden and Dudden into unnecessarily killing all of their cows and getting a beating when they take the skins to market. Then, he tricks a greedy farmer into taking his place as Hudden and Dudden are carrying him away to be killed. And finally, he tricks Hudden and Dudden into jumping to their deaths in a lake. I think it would have been nice if the folktale was longer and had an ending where Donald doesn’t profit quite as much from his trickery.