Two Hunchbacks, The

Play recording: Two Hunchbacks, The

Two hunchbacks live in a village. They are miserable. In addition to the humps on their backs, they have long crooked noses; and when they encounter an obstacle in their paths they have to turn around and go backwards in order to avoid banging their noses against whatever is in their way.

One day, one of the hunchbacks is returning from a fair, blind drunk, and he sits down next to a huge rock to sleep it off. Unthinking, he sits on some mushrooms, whereupon a half-dozen fairies – for whom the mushrooms serve as umbrellas – come out and yell at him. Apologizing profusely, he then leans against the rock and composes himself for a nap.

Around midnight he wakes up to the sound of music, which seems to be coming from inside the rock. Unbeknownst to him, the rock is actually a fairy dwelling, and the fairies inside are singing one line of a song, over and over (sings):

Dé Luain, Dé Máirt, Dé Luain, Dé Máirt — Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday

Listening carefully, the man feels that he could make a useful addition to this song, so he sings out:

Dé Luain, Dé Máirt, Dé Luain, Dé Máirt, Dé Luain, Dé Máirt, Dé Chéadaoin — Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday¹

After a long silence, the rock opens and a throng of fairies pour out. Their leader demands to know who managed to find an ending for a song they’ve been working on for thousands of years. They take the man inside and treat him like an honoured guest, eventually offering to do anything they can for him. ‘That’s easy,’ he says. ‘Take this hunch off my back.’ The fairies do so, throwing the hump into the corner and putting an old sack over it. Then they open the rock and let him go home, walking straighter than he ever did in his life.

When he hears the story, the second hunchback – who thinks he’s cleverer than the first man – determines to get his hump removed as well. Unfortunately, he doesn’t show the same consideration of the fairies that the first man showed, and instead of removing his hump, the fairies retrieve the first man’s hump from the corner of their dwelling and add it to the second man’s burden. As a result, the first man cannot possibly keep his nose out of the ground as he walks home, even by walking backwards.

As he’s going along, people see him churning up the earth with his nose, and that’s how the first plough came to be invented².