Features of Irish Dance Music

"The focus of this paper is to bring into light the traditional categories of Irish dance music, emphasizing the musical characteristics that differentiate them. Energetic and effervescent, Irish dance music is rarely analyzed, with Irish folklore lacking a school of dedicated musicologists. The topic of this article is important in the context of the tensions related to globalization, commodification, and transformations in Irish Traditional Music, that scholars are examining. The paper includes musical examples of the traditional Irish dance music categories, for a better view of the phenomenon. Keywords: Irish music, dance music, ethnomusicology. "

Endeavour and Responsibility of the Historian – Creating an Archive of Ego Documents in Regions of Highly Contested Memories

The Irish folklore collection is a national social archive and has been an important focal point and a stabilizing influence on the development of the Irish collective identity after the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. This historic blueprint has been adapted and modified to fulfill a similar role in the emerging collective identity of South Tyrol in Northern Italy, where a challenging minority issue was pacified through far-reaching concessions and a regional political and cultural autonomy. This contribution outlines that establishing a social archive in this area of contested memories and conflicting interpretations of the history of the 20th century poses many challenges to the historian, ranging from the respect for individual recollections to the adoption of internationally accepted interpretations of the Fascist past in Germany and Italy. It concludes that despite these challenges, a social archive might be the appropriate instrument to foster reconciliation and mutual understanding.

Name-Avoidance and Circumlocutory Terms in Modern Irish and Scottish Maritime Memorates

In 1942, Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s Handbook of Irish Folklore was produced for collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission. Among many things related to the Irish folklore tradition, the handbook included a section on ‘Fishing Lore’. This initial inquiry was followed by a questionnaire of a fuller scale distributed among the fishermen and members of coastal communities on ‘fishing beliefs’ by the Department of Irish Folklore at UCD in 1979 (see Ní Fhloinn 2018: 352–4 for further detail). Questions relevant to this paper included the following: • Are certain kinds of people or certain animals thought to bring bad luck to the fishermen? • Are people with certain surnames regarded as unlucky? • How do fishermen react to all of these? • What attitude do fishermen have towards red-haired people and red things in general? The answers have since been carefully documented by the Department of Irish Folklore. Most recently, results of research into a specific aspect of the occupational lore of Irish fishermen, “namely, the idea that it was unlucky to mention certain words and entities while at sea” (Ní Fhloinn 2018: 13) was published. Drawing upon Ní Fhloinn’s methodological framework, I would like to examine the corpus of maritime memorates collected by Ulster University’s Stories of the Sea project since 2010 drawing particular attention to various circumlocutory fishing terms and the fishermen’s sociocultural practice of name-avoidance.

Of Bees, Fairies, and Women: Lisa Carey's Feminist and Parodical Rewriting of Tradition in The Stolen Child (2017)

This article examines Lisa Carey’s recent novel, which offers a rewriting of both folkloric and Yeatsian traditions. The author reuses fairy beliefs, bee folklore, and religious traditions around Saint Brigid and Saint Gobnait, in contrast with the demands of modern life, to illustrate the antagonistic pulls on the protagonists. Through this rewriting of Irish folklore, she offers a feminist parody of tradition, in Linda Hutcheon’s sense of the word. The North American writer reuses Irish fairy beliefs to question the representation of motherhood through her character of Emer, and rewrites the legend of Saint Brigid, to turn her into a feminist model for the female protagonists. Keywords: Irish folklore; contemporary literature; parody; feminism; motherhood; fairies; changeling; Brigid.

Gregory, Augusta (1852–1932)

Born Isabella Augusta Persse in County Galway, Ireland in 1852, Lady Augusta Gregory was a playwright, folklore collector, essayist, and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Following the death of husband Sir William Gregory of Coole Park in 1892, she became a leading member of the Irish Revival, working to establish Irish culture as an alternative to colonial culture and rule. To this end, she published several collections of Irish folklore and established a branch of the Gaelic League at her home at Coole in the west of Ireland. In addition, Gregory hosted and fostered writers at her home in Coole Park, which became a site of meeting and inspiration for writers, including William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, George Russell, and Sean O’Casey. Her most significant contribution to Irish cultural life was through her collaboration with W. B. Yeats, with whom she and Edward Martyn established the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. Gregory also co-wrote Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902) with Yeats, and the two launched the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904, together with J. M. Synge. Gregory wrote plays for the Abbey stage and piloted its development as one of the nation’s most important institutions, overseeing productions of key works by J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O’Casey.