Abjection and the Irish-Greek Fir Bolg in Aran Island Writing

Abstract

This chapter analyses the reception history of the Fir Bolg, a legendary Irish people who sought refuge in Greece, were enslaved there, rebelled, and returned to Ireland where they were driven to the Aran Islands by invaders. The complex range of engagement with the Fir Bolg by Victorian and Celtic Revivalists, by anthropologists, diarists, travellers, writers, poets, and by scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is deeply entangled with identity politics in Ireland. Cast as abject figures the Fir Bolg are trapped in the primitivism of island writing that uses antiquity, including comparisons to Homeric islanders, to enshrine the past. But the Fir Bolg could be mobilized as revolutionary within the political discourse of Aran islanders, and the marked silence of J. M. Synge on the Fir Bolg (and on Homer) may activate their revolutionary potential. The Fir Bolg become resurgent under erasure.