The Songs of the Folk

Abstract

The love-songs of the folk in Ireland are closely related to the Dánta Grá, the poems of love composed by professional poets and aristocrats between the years 1350 and 1600. The earliest Dánta Grá were perfected by aristocrats like Gerald ‘The Rhymer’ Fitzgerald, an earl who fused the forms of bardic poetry with themes of love and passion. Although there are traces of the French amour courtois tradition in his sighing and disconsolate lovers, his poems finally owe far more to the native traditions of popular love-song and love-story. It was only in the fifteenth century that the amour courtois tradition became a significant element in the Dánta Grá and, even then, its philosophical background was reduced in scale and importance by the Irish writers. Nevertheless, many conventions of the genre entered Irish aristocratic poetry and some even went underground to live even more vibrantly in the songs of the folk. This popular tradition was a crucial source of inspiration for the poetry and plays of Synge.KeywordsNative TraditionIrish LanguageIrish TextLove SongPoetic TraditionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.