
Kilkenny cats

The Kilkenny cats are a fabled pair of cats from County Kilkenny (or Kilkenny city in particular) in Ireland, who fought each other so ferociously that only their tails remained at the end of the battle. Often the absurd implication is that they have eaten each other. In the nineteenth century the Kilkenny cats were a common simile for any conflict likely to ruin both combatants. "Kilkenny cat" is also used more generally for a fierce fighter or quarrelsome person. These senses are now rather dated. In the later twentieth century the motif was reclaimed by Kilkenny people as a positive symbol of tenacity and fighting spirit, and "the Cats" is the county nickname for the Kilkenny hurling team. The original story is attested from 1807 as a simple joke or Irish bull; some early versions are set elsewhere than Kilkenny. Nevertheless, theories have been offered seeking a historical basis for the story's setting.
Versions of the story.
The earliest attested version of the story is from June 1807, in "Anthologia", a collection of jokes and humorous pieces copied by "W.T." of Inner Temple from unnamed previous publications. Steven Connor characterises the story as an Irish bull. Under the heading "Kilkenny Cats" it runs:
The tale was repeated verbatim the next month in "The European Magazine"'s review of "Anthologia", as well as "The Sporting Magazine", also in London, and "Walker's Hibernian Magazine" in Dublin. It reappeared in 1812 in Thomas Tegg's "The Spirit of Irish Wit", and in the 1813 supplement to William Barker Daniel's "Rural Sports".
The following appears in Thomas Gilliland's "The Trap", an 1808 satire on the theme of love:
An 1811 joke book from Boston in the United States included:
Another version is alluded to in an 1816 critique of a pamphlet by Andrew O'Callaghan, master of Kilkenny College:
Responding to the 1816 critique, Rowley Lascelles, an English antiquarian based in Ireland, denied the existence of such a story, which he saw as a slur on Kilkenny.
Although in 1835 John Neal called the story "one of the oldest and most undoubted "Joe [Miller]"s", the first edition of "Joe Miller's Jests" to include it was in 1836 (verbatim from "Anthologia"). Theodore Hook's 1837 novel "Jack Brag" jocularly sources the story to [Joe] Miller's "History of Ireland".
Elsewhere than Kilkenny.
An 1817 memoir of the Irish wit John Philpot Curran situates the story in Sligo rather than Kilkenny, as a tall tale told by Curran:
In "Real life in Ireland", an 1821 stage Irish novel by Pierce Egan, Captain Grammachree, a retired soldier, tells Brian Boru, a young country squire, of a cat-fight in the neighbourhood of Dublin:
An 1830 "dialogue on Popery" by one Jacob Stanley summarises "the Travellers tale of the Irish Cat fight", giving no specific location.
The battle of the cats of Ireland.
S. Redmond in 1864 in "Notes and Queries" recounted a tale told to him "more than thirty years" earlier when he was "very young" by "a Kilkenny gentleman", about a battle "some forty years before" [i.e. about 1790] on "a plain near that ancient city":
Although Redmond states "This has nothing to do with the story of the two famous Kilkenny cats", the two have occasionally been linked subsequently. A similar story was told in Charles Henry Ross' 1867 "Book of Cats", to which Kilkenny antiquarian John G. A. Prim responded that he had heard such a story told of many places in Ireland, but not of Kilkenny. In 1863, "Once A Week" had a story of a similar battle in Yorkshire. Folklorist John O'Hanlon in 1898 published a version from John Kearns of Irishtown, Dublin which situated the battle on Scald Hill in Sandymount, the future site of Star of the Sea Catholic Church, witnessed by curate Father Corrigan. In the 1930s, the Irish Folklore Commission noted a seanchaí from Rossinver, County Leitrim tell of a cat battle in Locan Dhee near Kinlough on New Year's Day 1855.
Use as a simile.
The story was sufficiently well known in the 19th century to be used frequently as a simile for "combatants who fight until they annihilate each other"; to "fight like [the] Kilkenny cats" means "to engage in a mutually destructive struggle". Early instances include: (from 1814) an account in "Niles' Register" of the loss of USS "Wasp" after sinking HMS "Avon"; (from 1816) the critique of Andrew O'Callaghan mentioned earlier; a letter from the 4th Duke of Buccleuch to Walter Scott comparing Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" to the story; and a riposte to disagreeing literary critics:
A similar metaphor is Spanish defined in a 1740 dictionary as "to eat up one another; to be always quarrelling".
One context for the simile was advocating isolationism, allowing one's enemies to defeat each other, or divide and conquer policy. A report in "Niles' Register" of Spanish church opposition to the 1817 tax reform of wished 'the fate of the "Kilkenny cats"' on "Ferdinand and his priests". Similarly Charles Napier in 1823 hoped "the French and Spaniards [would] war like Kilkenny cats"; likewise "Figaro in London" in 1832 urging British neutrality after the Ten Days' Campaign and Charles Darwin in 1833 in Buenos Aires during the Revolution of the Restorers. J. S. Pughe in a 1904 political cartoon in "Puck" depicted Japan and Russia as Kilkenny cats fighting the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria. Similarly in 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Clifford Berryman depicted Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin as "a modern version of the Kilkenny Cats". In "The German Ideology", Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels accuse Bruno Bauer of fomenting antagonism between Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach "as the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland". 
Conversely, the fable serves as a cautionary tale for the moral "united we stand, divided we fall". It was invoked in 1827, in "The Lancet" during disputes around the Royal College of Physicians; and in "The Literary Gazette" of the rivalry between Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres. It was a common metaphor before and during the American Civil War, a conflict seen as likely to destroy both sides; especially when criticising the war of attrition strategy of Ulysses S. Grant. Some extended the metaphor to say the North would win as having the longest tail; this was popularly reported in 1864 as a quip by Grant, but George Gordon Meade made the same comparison in an 1861 letter to his wife. Some Mormons viewed the Civil War as fulfilling a prophecy by founder Joseph Smith, who said after an 1843 attempt to arrest him, "The constitution of the United States declares that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be denied. Deny me the writ of habeas corpus, and I will fight with gun, sword, cannon, whirlwind, and thunder, until they are used up like the Kilkenny cats." Donald Dewar, the First Minister of Scotland, in 1999 denied media talk of a rift with John Reid, the Scottish Secretary, conceding, "I must confess the casual outsider who simply read the headlines might think it was a collection of Kilkenny cats fighting". In the Supreme Court of India in December 2018, K. K. Venugopal, the Attorney General, justified the government's suspension of Alok Verma and Rakesh Asthana from the Central Bureau of Investigation by saying, "The government was watching with amazement the director and his deputy fight like Kilkenny cats." Indian media explained the simile in their reports on the case.
It was invoked in 1837 for political gridlock in divided legislatures: by Thomas Corwin in the 24th Congress, and by Thomas Carlyle in "". James Grant (1837, 1843) and S. Gerlis (2001) draw analogy with litigants who are both ruined by legal costs. It was often used in accounts of factionalism within Irish nationalist politics, such as between the Repeal Association and Young Ireland in the 1840s, Isaac Butt against Joseph Biggar in the 1870s, or the Parnell split of the 1890s. Francis Jacox invoked the Kilkenny cats in 1865 when enumerating "Certain Eligible Cases of Mutual Extermination" in "Bentley's Miscellany". Prosper Mérimée alluded to in 1860s correspondence, prompting a query to "L'Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux" in 1904, the answer to which was prefaced, "Those of us who ever had an English governess will recall the 'Kilkenny Cats'." In his diary in 1950, Ernest Bevin, the UK Foreign Secretary, described the UK's Cold-War security links to the US as being "tied to the tail of a Kilkenny cat". 
A single Kilkenny cat may be invoked to symbolise ferocity or vigour without the implication of mutual destruction. In an 1825 humorous verse, Anthony Bleecker inquiring into the cause of death of a peaceable cat asks, "Did some Kilkenny cat make thee a ghost?" John Galt in 1826 refers to "an enormous tiger almost as big as a Kilkenny cat". In an 1840 story by Edgar Allan Poe, "Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, of Connacht" says he was "mad as a Kilkenny cat" when a rival came to court his beloved. In George Lippard's 1843 satire of Philadelphia publishers, Irishman Phelix Phelligrim exclaims, when his associates are cursing and red-faced with anger, "Its in a fine humor ye are, gentleman! The Kilkenny cats was a mere circumstance to ye!" Leo Richard Ward in 1939 described someone as "contrary and mean as a Kilkenny cat." In 2009, a Children's Court magistrate in Sydney described a schoolgirl arrested for fighting as a "Kilkenny cat".
Reclaimed.
Irish counties have nicknames, some long established and in general use, others invented by sports journalists covering inter-county Gaelic games. The Kilkenny county team, which has won more All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championships than any other county, has been called "the Cats" in newspapers since at least the 1980s.
In 1998 a man in Clark County, Washington changed his surname from "Kenny" to "Kilkenny", reversing a change his great-grandfather had made to avoid the fighting stereotype associated with the name "Kilkenny" in the United States.
Origin theories.
The simplest theory for the story is that it is merely an Irish joke or Irish bull, and that the selection of Kilkenny as opposed to somewhere else in Ireland is arbitrary, perhaps favoured by the alliteration of the phrase "Kilkenny cats". John G.A. Prim in "Notes and Queries" in 1850 conceded that this was the most commonly accepted theory ("This ludicrous anecdote has, no doubt, been generally looked upon as an absurdity of the Joe Miller class"). "La Belle Assemblée" in 1823 credited Curran (for Kilkenny rather than Sligo). As regards the age of the story, Prim in 1868 wrote:
Rowley Lascelles claimed the 1816 version of the story was "taken from another, a well-known one, which is shortly this. Into a kennel of hounds, a dog of another species, did, one night, accidentally make its way. In the morning nothing was found of him but his tail." In the "Histoire Naturelle" (1758), Buffon describes how twelve unfed captive field mice ate each other, the survivor having mutilated legs and tail.
Prim proposed that the cats were originally an allegory for continual jurisdictional disputes between the adjacent municipal corporations of Kilkenny (or Englishtown, or Hightown) and Irishtown (or Saint Canice, or Newcourt). Prim claimed that "mutual litigations, squabbles, assaults and batteries, with the accompanying imprisonments, fines and law costs", which brought both near to bankruptcy, lasted from 1377 to "the end of the seventeenth century". He claimed to have a paper on "the natural history of the Kilkenny cats" in preparation, and cited a Close Roll entry from the Irish Chancery for the 1377 date. (The entry notes that Alexander de Balscot, the bishop of Ossory and sovereign of Irishtown, objected to Kilkenny corporation levying octroi for murage on Irishtown market.) Prim's paper about the cats story was not published, though in one of 1870 he states, "Soon after [1658] the municipal body of Kilkenny became involved in an expensive lawsuit with the neighbouring Corporation of Irishtown, concerning questions of privilege and superior authority within the latter borough"; while in 1857 he wrote that John Hartstonge, as bishop of Ossory from 1693, and his brother Standish, as Recorder of Kilkenny from 1694, were on opposing sides of the dispute. C. A. Ward suggested in 1891 that Prim's explanation is "simply a tale invented after the fable relating to the cats had got into circulation". Prim's theory was bolstered in 1943 by publication, in a calendar of Ormond papers, of a 1596 arbitration between the corporations over markets, merchants' guilds, and musters. "The New International Encyclopedia" in 1903 claimed this allegory was a satire by Jonathan Swift, who attended Kilkenny College from 1673 to 1681. Henry Craik's 1894 biography suggests the alleged dispute between Englishtown and Irishtown was still in progress in Swift's time and was between Protestants and Catholics. In fact, Irishtown corporation was controlled by the Church of Ireland bishop of Ossory.
Thomas D'Arcy McGee in 1853 claimed the origin is a metaphor for feuding, not between Englishtown and Irishtown, but in the Confederation of Kilkenny between supporters and opponents of Ormonde's first peace in 1646. D. M. R. Esson in 1971 gave Ormonde's second peace in 1648 as the source.
Another theory was reported by "Juverna" in "Notes and Queries" in 1864, as having been heard "in Kilkenny, forty years ago, from a gentleman of unquestioned veracity". The story holds that a group of bored soldiers stationed in Kilkenny held fights between two cats tied together by their tails and suspended from a clothes line or crosspost. Their commander forbade the practice, but they carried on in secret. When the commander was heard approaching, a soldier hastily cut through the cats' tails, allowing them to escape. The commander asked about the hanging tail ends, and the soldier averred that the cats had eaten each other. In Juverna's version, the troops were Hessians after the Wexford Rebellion of 1798 or Emmet's Insurrection of 1803. A review in "The Athenaeum" of Ross' "Book of Cats" claims the soldiers were in the Williamite army of 1690. Prim agrees that the episode occurred with Hessians in 1798, but states that their sport was influenced by a story already proverbial. In other accounts, the soldiers were the regular garrison at Kilkenny Castle in Elizabethan times (1558–1603); or the Catholic Confederate army of the 1640s; or Cromwell's occupying force of the 1650s. John Baptist Crozier when Bishop of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin endorsed the theory. Joseph O'Connor's 1951 memoir has Matt Purcell, a comrade of his father's in the 10th (North Lincoln) Regiment of Foot in the 1880s, claim the original Kilkenny cats were tied together by the Earl of Ormond's jester.
A 1324 witchcraft case in Kilkenny saw Dame Alice Kyteler flee and her servant Petronilla de Meath burnt at the stake after admitting relations with a demon which variously took the form of a dog, a cat, and an Aethiopian. This cat has occasionally been linked to the Kilkenny cats story. In 1857, John Thomas Gilbert made passing reference to "the Kilkenny cat of Dame Alice". Austin Clarke's 1963 poem "Beyond the Pale" recounts the story of "Dame Kyttler", continuing:
In 1986 Terence Sheehy suggested a link with the "luchthigern", a beast mentioned in Broccán Craibdech's poem in the "Book of Leinster" as having been slain by Midgna's wife at a place named Derc-Ferna. "Luchthigern" is usually interpreted as "mouse lord" and "Derc-Ferna" as Dunmore Cave near Kilkenny city. Sheehy follows Praeger and P.W. Joyce in regarding the "luchthigern" as a huge cat; in contrast to Brian O'Looney ("some sort of monster") Thomas O'Neill Russell ("Can this word mean a great mouse?") and Dobbs ("a demon or a giant"). "A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology" says that "luchtigern" was "Mouse-lord of Kilkenny, slain by a huge cat, Banghaisgidheach"; this is apparently a misreading of Joyce, who describes Midgna's (human) wife as a "female champion".
In 1857, the editor of "The Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society" suggested that a heading "Grimalkin slain in Ireland" reported in a synopsis of the 1584 book "Beware the Cat" might be relevant; this was disproved by an 1868 reply in the successor journal explaining that the episode (a version of the folktale "The King of the Cats") is set in Bantry in County Wexford about "Patrik Agore", a kern of John Butler, son of Richard Butler, 1st Viscount Mountgarret, who sets out to kill Cahir mac Art Kavanagh.
Authorities which discuss various origin theories include "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable" (the Prim and Juverna theories in early editions; the 19th edition follows "Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable" in plumping for the Juverna theory); the "Encyclopædia Britannica" Eleventh Edition (Prim, Juverna and J. P. Curran); World Wide Words (Prim, Juverna, and Redmond's great battle); Charles Earle Funk (the same three, Prim's credited to Swift; "probably none of them is true"); Terence Dolan (Juverna); and Eric Partridge (Curran). Cashman and Gaffney's "Irish Proverbs & Sayings" recounts the Juverna theory as "probably just a tall tale". , the "Oxford English Dictionary" does not comment on any of the purported historical origins.
Folkloristics.
Comparative mythology seeks to find parallels with folklore elsewhere. Angelo de Gubernatis wrote in 1872:
Moncure Daniel Conway built on this in 1879:
Carl Van Vechten in 1922 was sceptical:
"R.C." in 1874 suggested a comparison with an epigram by Palladas from the "Greek Anthology":
Archer Taylor suggested the Kilkenny cats "may involve an old story with parallels in Icelandic saga"; in the Bandamanna saga, Ofeig says, "And with me it has fared after the fashion of wolves, who eat each other up until they come to the tail, not knowing till then what they are about".
The cat with two tails, a stonemason's carving associated with the Gobán Saor in Irish folklore, is sometimes conflated with the Kilkenny cats.
Steven Connor comments, "Because they involve bodily illogic ... in which a body is imagined as simultaneously present and absent, the cake both eaten and miraculously intact, the fact of death is often in play in Irish bulls".
In the 1930s the Irish Folklore Commission collected two origin stories:
Derivatives.
Verse and song.
Several poems have been written about the Kilkenny cats; the best known appeared in November 1867 in New York in "The Galaxy", along with a grandiloquent literary commentary extolling it as "the Kilkenny epic" and comparing its "unknown author" to Homer:
This is often reduced to a limerick by omitting "excepting their tails and some scraps of their nails". With standardised spelling it has been included in 20th-century Mother Goose anthologies. The full version has been set to music by Beth Anderson and performed on her 2004 album "Quilt Music" by Keith Borden and H. Johannes Wallmann. It was also set by W. Otto Miessner for gradeschool music lessons, and arranged for six voices by Jean Berger as "There Were Two Cats at Kilkenny". James Barr Walker published an expanded version in 1871.
Ebenezer Mack's 1824 poem "The Cat-Fight" is a stage Irish mock-heroic dialogue in which Jemmy O'Kain tells Pat M'Hone or Mahone that none of the great battles from myth and history compare to the one he witnessed "in Kilkenny, down the mole" between "two Grimalkins", at the end of which "... not the tip end of a tail, / Was there / Left for a token." 
In Cruikshank's "Omnibus" in 1841 was printed "The Terrific Legend Of The Kilkenny Cats" by "C.B."; a 24-line poem in which there are six tomcats, owned and underfed by a drunk woman named O'Flyn; they resolve to kill and eat her, then turn on each other. A musical setting by Barry Kay was recorded in 1951 by Benny Lee. The poem also appeared on "Islands Of The Moon", a 1981 spoken word album of poetry for children by the Barrow Poets.
The 1893 collection "Irish Songs and Ballads", with words by Alfred Perceval Graves and music by Charles Villiers Stanford, included "The Kilkenny Cats", in which the cats resort to cannibalism after "the Game Laws came in", stopping them from hunting wild animals. Allen Doone published an original song in 1916 called "The Kilkenny Cats" based on the Juverna story. Other poetic adaptations include "The Kilkenny Legend" (Harvey Austin Fuller, 1873); "The Kilkenny Cats" (Anne L. Huber, 1873); "The Kilkenny Cats" (Laurence Winfield Scott, 1880); "The Cats av Kilkenny" (Charles Anthony Doyle, 1911).