The lovely Irish folk tune Port na bPúcaí (“The Music of the Fairies”) had mystical beginnings — it’s said that the people of the Blasket Islands heard ethereal music and wrote an air to match it, hoping to placate unhappy spirits. Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Given Note” tells of a fiddler who took the song “out of wind off mid-Atlantic”:

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
Though nothing like melody.

Recent research suggests that, rather than fairies, the islanders may have been hearing the songs of whales transmitted through the canvas hulls of their fishing boats. Humpback whales pass through Irish waters each winter as they migrate south from the North Atlantic, and their songs seem to resemble the folk tune.

Ronan Browne, who plays the air above on Irish pipes, writes, “In the mid 1990s I went rooting through some cassettes of whale song and there in the middle of the Orca (Killer Whale) section I heard the opening notes of Port na bPúcaí!”

No one can say for certain whether the one inspired the other, of course, but if it didn’t it’s certainly a pleasing coincidence.

(Thanks, James.)