The Stranger At Your Door is a Holy Woman

I grew up listening to versions of Ortha na Ghreama from my grandad, a Traveller tale that reminded me of the parables we were taught at my inner-city Anglican school. I didn’t listen, then, to the ancestral wisdom within it, or the many ancestral stories that it carried within its simple structure. Stories of hospitality or the lack of it, of extending care towards the Other, of shutting the door on the unwelcome and unwanted.

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Irish Travellers have long been marginalised and, by dint of their nomadic culture and often separate language, seen as outsiders to the mainstream, as negative Others. Folklore about them ran the gamut of their being an almost Otherworldly people, descended from the ancient bards due to their status as community storytellers, or having a particular association with Fairy Folk, often having obtained their herbal knowledge from them, to being descended from criminals and itinerants, outlaws who posed a threat to good Christian folk.

As many Travellers worked at tinsmithing or masonry, folklore sprang up that they had been cursed to wander the land because their ancestors had helped to forge the nails that had crucified Jesus. While the Nail story was originally applied to Romani people, who also often worked as smiths, it later became applied to Travellers too. There are parallels here with the antisemitic figure of the Wandering Jew; as Jonathon Bate explores in ‘Song of the Earth’, the very nomadism which defines Roma/Traveller people was used against them by fascist ‘blood and soil’ groups, suspicious of all those who do not fit it into tightly defined ideas of who belongs to the land and the nation. No wonder then that both European Jews and European Roma were the most targeted groups in the Nazi Holocaust.

Travellers fought back against these narratives however, with narratives of their own. The story of the Nail became subverted and retold, into a tale in which Travellers were not cursed but blessed, because the freedom to wander the land, to be at home on the Earth rather than within the borders of towns and cities and village, was a beautiful thing. Subverting the accusations of thievery, the story went that the ancestral smith had not forged the nails but stolen one of them, which had led to a little less pain for the crucified Jesus. As a result, God blessed his descendants and gave them a world to roam.

There’s a lesson for all of us there in how we shape, retell and use story. How story can be used as poison or medicine, to oppress or to liberate.

The stories of the Nail and Roma/Traveller folk are often widespread and well-known, perhaps because its association with both Romani and Irish Traveler folk meant that it was told over a wide area. There is another Traveller story, however, which I find just as powerful and have always loved, and that is Ortha an Ghreama.

It is a tale often told at Christmas, as an alternative to the Christian Holy Family ‘No room at the inn’ narrative, but is also often told in May, traditionally the month of the Holy Mother Mary, who is beloved by most Travellers as she was the Irish in general. As I heard it, it went like this:

It was a cold night and an old woman was cooking at the pot, when the door rapped. “Open it,” said her husband, when she hesitated. She opened the door to see a young woman in ragged clothing with a boy child behind her legs, peering up at the woman with a dirty face. Tinkers, she tutted to herself, coming to beg or rob.

“Please,” the stranger woman said, drawing a thin cloak about herself, “do you have anywhere warm for the night, for it is a cold wind and we are hungry.”

The old woman shut the door on them.

Her husband, however, felt sorry for the pair and went after them, even though his old bones ached something terrible in the wind and he knew his rheumatism would be bad for days after.

“Here,” he called after the beggar woman and her child, “I have a stall in the barn you can lie in. It’s not much, but there’s warm soft hay and some water. And I can save your lad some soup from our dinner.”

The woman thanked him gratefully and went to the barn. As the boy passed him, he looked at the man with his big eyes, and the man felt a shiver of calm run through him. Though his wife complained at him for giving up the barn and the soup, he slept soundly that night.

When he woke, his aches and pains were gone and he was as sprightly as a boy. For such is the blessing he was given for his kindness. The cooking pot was full enough for three days, but the woman and her child were nowhere to be seen.

For you see, the beggars were none other than Mary and the boy Jesus himself. Never turn away a stranger asking for help, for He comes in many guises, and His Blessed Mother too.

(As for the old woman, her husband’s pains passed to her, and the soup in the pot tasted like ashes in her mouth.)

Although it’s essentially a Christian tale, it tells like a fairytale, with the sting at the end for those who are ungenerous and refuse to share. Hospitality was a key theme in Irish mythology and folklore, and Ortha an Ghreama reminds us that for hospitality to be true, it needs to be extended to the outcast, marginalised and poor, too. It’s a tale that has always seemed to me to capture what is most beautiful in the Gospels and the folk Christian tradition, and is deeply at odds with both the institutional Church, with its history of power and corruption and abuses, and the rabid Christian Nationalism we are seeing currently. A Nationalism which has more in common with the fascism mentioned above than with the simple blessing of hospitality contained within the folktale.

Stories have power. What Ortha an Ghreama shows us, however, is that we can take those stories, rework them and make them our own. Turn them into tales of kinship, not cruelty.

Of cure, not curse.

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