There's a song they sing in Irish primary schools, little ones, infant classes, hands clapping, the whole room going "weile weile waile" in this lovely bouncy lilt — and it is, when you stop and actually LISTEN to the words, a song about a woman stabbing a baby to death with a penknife. I'm not being dramatic. That's the plot. That's what's happening in the verses while a roomful of five-year-olds beam up at the teacher.
I love this song. I want to be clear about that before anyone clutches their pearls. But the gap between the tune and the story is one of the strangest, most wonderful things in the whole tradition, and I've wanted to write about it for ages.
So. The setup. There was an old woman and she lived in the woods, weile weile waile. She lived down by the river Saile (that's the refrain place-name, sometimes "the river Saile," sometimes mangled into "weela weela walya" depending on what street you grew up on). She had a baby three months old. And then — and the melody does not change one bit, it stays jaunty as anything — she takes out a penknife. She sticks it in the baby's heart. The baby's heart stops beating. Three loud knocks come at the door. It's two policemen and a man (a peeler and a sergeant, in some versions), they take her away, they put her in the gaol, and they hang her by the neck until she's dead. The end. Off you go to little lunch, children.
GAS, isn't it. In the dark way. The thing is the kids singing it haven't a clue what they're really saying, and honestly half the time the words get so worn smooth by repetition that the meaning drops out entirely. "Weile weile waile" doesn't MEAN anything in Irish, not really — people reach for "wail" and that's a fair guess at the feel of it, but it's mostly just mouth-music, nonsense syllables that hold the rhythm while the story unspools underneath. That's the trick of it. The horror rides in on a hook so catchy nobody examines the cargo.
Now where does a thing like this come from. Because Dublin didn't invent baby-murder ballads out of nowhere on a Tuesday.
Here's the honest answer: it's old, it's English in its bones, and the Dublin version is a streetwise local descendant of a much grimmer broadside. The ancestor is usually traced back to a ballad called "The Cruel Mother" — you'll find it in the big Child ballad collection, number twenty (Francis Child, the Harvard man who catalogued these things in the 1880s). "The Cruel Mother" is a proper old murder ballad, centuries old, a woman who kills her newborn children by a riverside, often with a penknife, and is haunted or condemned for it. It's been sung all over Britain and Ireland in a hundred shapes. Strip the moralising and the ghosts out, speed the tune up, give it a Dublin tongue and a daft refrain, hand it to children for skipping and clapping, and you get Weile Weile Waile. The murder ballad walked into the schoolyard and put on a funny voice.
I won't pretend to a precise date or a single author, because there isn't one and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Folk songs don't have birthdays. What I can tell you is the Dublin version we know got carried into the modern world largely thanks to The Dubliners (the band, God bless them) recording it, which is why your granny and your nephew might both know it but learned it sixty years apart. The traditional words are well out of copyright — it's the arrangement and the brand of any one recording that you'd want to mind, not the song itself.
The bit I keep coming back to, the bit that ties it to everything I love about THIS site, is the SHAPE of it. Weile Weile Waile isn't strictly cumulative the way the lyrics of the Rattlin' Bog are — it doesn't pile verse on verse and make you sing the whole tower back every time. But it's a near cousin. It's built on relentless, hypnotic repetition: the same refrain after every single line, "weile weile waile" then "down by the river Saile," over and over and over, a structure so regular a small child can lock into it on the second go and never let go. That's the same engine that makes the bog work in a classroom. The repetition does the remembering FOR you. (This is exactly the sort of thing dr_niamh_tm would draw a graph of, and probably has.)
And that's also, I think, the answer to "why do kids love it." It's not that they love the murder. They've no notion of the murder. They love the SOUND — the predictability, the clap-along certainty, the little thrill of the three knocks at the door, the satisfaction of a story that goes somewhere and ends with a bang. Children adore a dark fairy tale. Always have. Same reason they want the witch in the oven and the wolf in the bed. Weile Weile Waile is a Brothers Grimm in three minutes with a tune you can skip rope to.
If you ever teach it — and teachers do, all over Ireland, it's a staple — my advice is don't ruin it. Don't sit a class of six-year-olds down and explain the penknife. Let them have the music first. The day they're twelve and the words suddenly land and they go "WAIT" — that's a gift you're giving them, that little jolt of recognition. I had it myself, on a bus, about thirty years too late. Pure delight.
It's a class song. Grim as the grave and twice as cheerful. Go sing it.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat sat on my chest at half six this morning and stared at me with those eyes she has, completely silent, three little taps of the paw on my chin like the three knocks at the door, and I'll be honest I thought of this song and got a small chill before she demanded her breakfast and broke the spell. She's grand. We're both grand.