Irish Mythology Research Articles

Quantifying the role of supernatural entities and the effect of missing data in Irish sagas

For over a decade, complex networks have been applied to mythological texts in order to quantitatively compare them. This has allowed us to identify similarities between texts in different cultures, as well as to quantify the significance of some heroic characters. Analysing a full mythology of a culture requires gathering data from many individual myths which is time consuming and often impractical. In this work, we attempt to bypass this by analysing the network of characters in a dictionary of mythological characters. We show that the top characters identified by different centrality measures are consistent with central figures in the Irish sagas. Although much of Irish mythology has been lost, we demonstrate that these most central characters are highly robust to a large random removal of edges.

The Crane bag: Braiding Irish mythology, indigenous knowledge and posthuman concepts in early childhood education and care

Initially, this article aimed to present findings from an empirical set of data, where postgraduates explored their pedagogical practice within early childhood education and care (ECEC). However, predictable modes of knowing were disrupted while braiding an artefact from Irish mythology known as the Crane bag, together with indigenous knowledge and posthuman concepts. In the generation of knowledge, the teachings of the Crane bag transformed the methodological approach to go beyond the fabricated split of matter and spirit. This transformation created the conditions for an onto-epistemological becoming with water. Hence, the intra-action of braiding together multiple theories became part of the empirical data. From the initial set of data, a photograph, capturing children rolling down a hill, was submitted by a research participant as an example of their approach to safety. In agreement with the research participant, I re-present the photograph in a different format, to tell the story of how an onto-epistemological becoming created an opening to decentre the image of the child. This opening changed the approach to the data analysis, which in turn allowed the more-than-human to come to the fore in the spirit of reciprocity.

“Irish Folklore Has Always Interested and Influenced Me”: An Interview with Deirdre Sullivan

Deirdre Sullivan is an award-winning Irish YA writer who has been praised by several writers and folklore academics, such as Jack Zipes, for her fairy-tale revisions and her rewriting of the Irish legend “The Children of Lir”. Following the steps of contemporary feminist writers like Angela Carter or Emma Donoghue, Sullivan gives voice to minorities and deals with silenced topics such as sexual harassment. This interview focuses on her subversions of fairy tales and Irish mythology, especially in her collection Tangleweed and Brine (2017) and her revision of “The Children of Lir” in Savage Her Reply (2020). In this interview, Deirdre Sullivan talks about her interest in fairy tales and Irish folklore and how she became a writer.

Mickey Finn: Inebriation and Creativity in Myles na gCopaleen’s ‘Drink and Time in Dublin’

Myles na gCopaleen’s short story ‘Drink and Time in Dublin’ explores the literary role of alcohol and sedatives within a narrative framework. Examining binge drinking and blackouts in the short story that produce lacunas, complicate time, and disrupt the logical progression of events, this article explores the connection between intoxication and the deployment of anti-narrative strategies. Special attention is given to the use of sedatives in the text that, it is argued, allude to the Irish figure Mickey Finn. The story’s allusion to Finn reorganises Irish mythology as it replaces ancient traditional heroism with modern anti-heroism, resulting in the collapse of realist narrative norms and narrative structure.

Yeats's Photographs and the World Theatre of Images

W. B. Yeats's dramatic career was transformed in the 1910s through a series of collaborations in London. In an essay from the period, “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” he writes: “I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic.” This form, like many other modernist inventions, is better understood as something else, in this case the alchemy of his earlier work, some eclectic influences, and the contributions of his American, English, French, and Japanese collaborators. Together, this group of artists drew on Irish mythology, the occult, the continental avant-garde, and—as often has been stressed—Japanese noh. Originally, the “Certain Noble Plays” essay was published as an introduction to a related noh project, Ezra Pound's liberal completion of Ernest Fenollosa and Hirata Kiichi's incomplete translations. There have been at least four book-length studies on the relationship between Yeats and noh, as well as many theses and articles. It remains an exemplum of transnational modernist theatre.

Lilies on the Deathbed of Etaín and Other Poems by Oisín Breen

Reviewed by: Lilies on the Deathbed of Etaín and Other Poems by Oisín Breen Greg Brown OISÍN BREEN Lilies on the Deathbed of Etaín and Other Poems Tipperary, Ireland. Beir Bua Press. 2023. 54 pages. OISÍN BREEN'S Lilies on the Deathbed of Étain is a book of poetry woven together by threads of various longing. The first and title poem's titular character comes from Irish mythology: Étaín is an immortal who was forced into other forms in order to thwart her lovers over many lifetimes. Other poems in the collection are set in the contemporary, ordinary world, yet they too give visions of possibilities beyond mortal reach. Breen's précis admits his preference "towards the long-form and the experimental." Throughout the first two poems, "Lilies of the Deathbed of Étaín" and "The Love Song of Anna Rua," Breen plays with different styles of line and typography. Typically, Breen uses initial capitals to begin each left-justified line. The styles have a system, but not a rigid one: for example, in "Lilies" and in "The Love Song" are examples of lines centered and written in capital letters, but while the latter are exclamation or forte within the song, in the former poem these passages loom off the page like inscriptions on tombs. Here is the first example: "thus the levee skirls with white noise and elan / for here in the dark light, / where prohibition becomes licence / here there is death: / the one true vision of abundance." Other examples in "Lilies" are similarly epitaphic in tone, sometimes repeating and combining with prophetic flair. Some passages in "Lilies" seem to pattern after the long, phrasal-lines that run on much longer than the physical page is wide, marked only by initial capitals and the slight hanging indent, but curiously this cannot be said for all similar patterns. Some stanzas are more aptly described as having subordinate lines—lines that do not wrap at the right margin like prose but stand off the left margin and lack the line-starting capital letter. The subordinate lines are appositional to their main line, and within such passages are some of the most striking lines in the book, such as these lines that follow a list of Étaín's several forced incarnations: "For each of us it differs. / But our death will come in a single reckoning, / a blow that shakes us from navel to heart, / a furious meeting of synapses riffing out sketches / in a stop-start-stop algorithmic play, / All at once, / And not at once." These lines dramatically describe our most current understanding of the physical process of death, underscoring the contemporary relevance of Breen's poetry. Beyond the typography, the most skillful wordwork in these poems is harder to describe in the space of a review. Breen's rhythms, often enhanced with internal rhymes, make these poems extremely pleasing in sound. These poems need to be heard like the music they are. Though Irish myth features prominently in the work, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étain is more than a Yeatsian project. Neither is the legend used merely as costume. As Breen states in the foreword, some of the poems are as direct and contemporary as a description of watching seabirds hunt alongside a boat, and others, like "Six Months Bought with Dirt," are simply timeless in the sense that the struggles and joys captured are immortal, even if the generations that experience them are not. Breen's handling of the legend of Étaín is particularly suited for the contemporary world, awash as it is with more ways of living than any mortal person could ever experience. [End Page 84] Of course, it is not the range of experiences itself that has expanded so much as our knowledge of them, and this knowledge is both liberating and a source of dread. Recalling her change "to water, worm, and scarlet fly" and imagining "her second birth in her thousandth year," these poems soothe and magnify us who can only experience one life. Along this theme is "A Chiaroscuro of Hunger," my favorite poem of the collection. In it, a speaker recollects...

The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

Reviewed by: The Slain Birds by Michael Longley Fred Dings MICHAEL LONGLEY The Slain Birds Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2022. 96 pages. MICHAEL LONGLEY'S new verse collection, The Slain Birds, is mostly a book of miniatures, some poems not exceeding four, five, or even two lines, appearing two per page in eighteen instances; consequently, we read eighty-eight poems in seventy pages. In only a few cases do the poems achieve a length greater than half a page. This matters because, with Longley working in the tradition of poetry being an essential art, it places great pressure on the language to achieve the poetic in a few words. The poet does achieve that benchmark frequently, sometimes as luminously as a dwarf star, but other times, the poems can seem merely notational or observational. The Slain Birds would be a great book if it were edited to 70 percent of its current length, but as such it is only a good book. Patient readers will be rewarded. At his best, Longley uses nuance and carefully selected detail (uncrowded by the inclusion of the superfluous) to attain affecting resonance with few words. Consider the imagery in the following poem, "Agony": "To die like the skylark / parched on a mirage // Or like a tired quail / after crossing the sea [End Page 90] / losing the will to fly and / dying in the first bushes // But not to live lamenting / like a blinded goldfinch." The second image has the pathos of Shelley's "sick eagle looking at the sky." Similarly, what might seem at first like merely descriptive language in "Shell" becomes quickly consequential: "The spring tide keeps us from walking any farther / Towards the sea, so we sit on a reedy bank / And you pick out from wool and seaweed and droppings / A shell and slip into your handbag its spirals / With the fisherman's float I rescued from the lake / Where, more than fifty years ago, we honeymooned. / The ravens in conversation overhead might be / Discussing us or that sheep dead in a hollow / With its yellow ear-tag and delicate black feet." Here, we also hear the powerful influence of that best of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, in "Adam's Curse." In these two examples, then, we hear Longley at his most poetic and in relation to the best in English-language poetry; however, more times than I would like, these poems seem merely descriptive or of little consequence. For example, consider the poem "Dream": "I dreamed I had written a poem / About the beech tree in our garden. / I tried to find it in our notebook, / I sensed the beech tree taking shape, / Three hundred years of summer leaves." Even if the reader summons the frequent appearance of the beech tree in Western literature and perhaps its specific importance in Irish mythology as providing the slices of bark on which Ogma, a god of poetry and writing, wrote, and even if the reader summons the idea of the body of three hundred years of Irish poetry taking leaf in a time of growth and the poet's own season adding to it—even if the reader brings all of this to the poem, is it enough then for this particular poem to attain effective resonance? The problem poses the larger question: Is mere description or mention of cultural symbols enough for a poem? It's a matter of aesthetic value and province, perhaps. The better question might be, Is the language of the poem optimal? When thinking of descriptive poetry and image, I sometimes recall the influence of Rodin on Rilke, and how Rilke sought to write poems that realized the object of their gaze as fully as did Rodin's sculptures. Rilke's object-poems (dinggedichte), poems like "The Spanish Dancer" and "The Panther," find the language, the shape of sound, that brings the objects (and their interiors) optimally and vividly present. Perhaps that is the project at which some of Longley's poems succeed and others don't; however, to end with another example of Longley's success, I quote a two-line poem, "Eyelid," about the poet's daughter examining the dead...

Mythopoetic Images of Irish Mythology in American Fantasy (the Case of Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber" - Corwin Cycle)

The article is devoted to the study of key images of Irish mythology, widely used in fantasy literature, in particular, in American novels written in the second half of XX-th century. The paper considers the images of ship, tree and raven. Special attention is paid to their artistic interpretation in the novels of a famous American science fiction writer, the representative of New Wave - Roger Zelazny. The paper examines the etymology of these images, their origins in Sumero-Akkadian, Jewish and Greek mythologies, their main symbolic meanings and further interpretation in Zelazny's key novel - "The Chronicles of Amber". As a result, the complex characteristics of the three images both in the ancient mythologies and in the context of first five parts of the novel by the American science fiction writer, namely in the Corwin Cycle, have been provided. The findings achieved show that ship turns out to be connected with the key image of the novel - the Pattern, among other things symbolizing the process of initiation of the main characters. The tree, in its turn, acts as the primary basis of the Amber universe, its multilevel structure. Finally, the raven, the alter ego of the main character - Prince Corwin - stands for his destiny, filled with contradictions and relentless battles.

El mundo bajo la máscara: el vórtice creativo en Le Fantôme de l’Opera

"The independent Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, one of the greatest examples of European animation, has created a series of films based on Celtic Irish mythology throughout their short but prosperous career. In their films they reflect the stories of fairies and druids intertwined with the reality of a country tormented throughout history. In this article we’ll analyse these myths, the sources they’re based on, and how the studio uses them and updates them to tell new stories based on the stories of yore."

History and Religious Imagination: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Revival—an Overview

ABSTRACT An overview of Bernard Shaw’s involvement in early twentieth-century Irish history, both political and cultural. Pressure building since the death of Parnell in 1891 would lead to Ireland’s independence from Britain and the establishment of the Irish free State in 1922, with Shaw’s Irish friends Horace Plunkett, Augusta Gregory, George Russell (“Æ”), and especially W. B. Yeats all prime movers in major new national cultural institutions that sprang up around the turn of the century. Through these four as well as his Irish wife, Charlotte Shaw, Shaw became involved in both the affairs of the nation as well as in Irish drama, especially Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats and his work were particularly important for Shaw’s contributions to the Irish literary revival, in which, whether in satirical, comic, or tragic modes, his Irish plays comprehend Irish mythology, history, imagination, and religious salvation.

Ghosts of Tao House

Ghosts of Tao House

Exploring children’s knowledge of Irish and European symbols: a comparison of Irish-medium and English-medium primary school children

ABSTRACT Knowledge of symbols, which can be influenced by school ethos, informs identity construction in primary school children. This study aimed to explore Gaelscoil (Irish-medium) and English-medium primary school children’s familiarity with Irish and European symbols. Thirty 9–12-year-old children in Ireland participated in this study; 15 from two Irish-medium and 15 from an English-medium primary school. A draw-and-tell data collection design was used and qualitative data was analysed using the constant comparative method. Results indicate children from both school types shared a number of Irish symbols, namely Irish emblems, Irish mythology, sports and material aspects of culture. Irish-medium primary school children had two further Irish symbol categories, the past as a symbol and physical characteristics of Ireland. European symbols shared across children from both school types included signifiers of the European Union (EU), monetary symbols and European countries. The Irish-medium primary school children had two further categories, Europe through an Irish lens and European cuisine, while the English-medium children had one further category, sport. The results suggest that by middle childhood, children in both school types have knowledge about a number of symbols associated with both national and European identities. Implications for future research are discussed.

Rowing in the Breca Episode from a Narrative Perspective

Rowing in the Breca Episode from a Narrative Perspective

"TRUTH IS AN ODD NUMBER": MODERNISM AND THE EARLY POSTMODERNISM OF FLANN O BRIEN S AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS

This paper explores Flann O’Brien’s novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) in a unique position located right between modernism and postmodernism. Influenced by Irish Modernism as well as Irish Nationalism, the novel carries some significant elements from Irish mythology into the present day and creates a superimposition of the historical and the modern. Moreover, its postmodern take on creative processes and the autonomy of characters within itself reveals the novel’s highly metafictional and self-reflexive in nature, which at first seems to be in conflict with its modernist roots. In addition, the distinctive postmodernist essence of At Swim-Two-Birds can be considered to be the precursor to John Fowles’ Mantissa. Moreover, the clash of modernist and postmodernist elements in the novel emphasizes the difference between the two movements as O’Brien uses postmodernist techniques to challenge the modernist ones he, himself, uses frequently. In this regard, he demystifies concepts such as myth, literary creation and being a young artist through its humorous yet critical take on the unnamed narrator.

The enigma of Sir William Robert Wills Wilde (1815-1876).

William Wilde, father of Oscar Wilde, made a significant contribution to ophthalmology and otology. Qualified as a surgeon. educated in statistics and showing sympathy for the Irish population, Wilde was appointed a Commissioner for the 1851 Census, which covered the time of the Irish Famine (1845-1852). Wilde, steeped in Irish mythology, used his knowledge to develop a close rapport with the Irish peasantry. However, his life was a paradox; he supported the British Government's approach to the Famine and at the same time he showed humanity to the Irish peasantry. In his personal life he was implicated in an abortive libel case involving a young female patient who had accused him of rape. Wilde lived as though he had two separate lives: on the one hand the successful surgeon, famine Commissioner and cataloguer of Irish antiquities, and the other a countryman and disciple of Irish mythology. Wilde was highly preceptive especially in his views on the recording of medical data and outcomes in clinical practice. We argue that Wilde was probably unmatched in the variety of his talents but was also perplexing in the various actions he took during his life and that indeed Wilde was an enigma.

The Role of Solar Deities in Irish Megalithic Monuments

In the great body of Irish myths that became part of an oral tradition and would, much later, be documented and preserved, associations can be found between Sun gods and solar heroes and the great Neolithic monuments of Ireland, including Newgrange, the most well-known monument in the large complex of passage tombs in the valley of the Boyne River that today is known as the World Heritage Site, Brú na Bóinne. In all four cycles of Irish mythology, from the Tuatha De Danaan of the Mythological Cycle to the kings of Tara in the Historical Cycle, repeated mention is made of Brú na Bóinne, the home of the Sun gods, Dagda and Lugh, and the place of the conception and birth of the warrior hero, Cú Chulainn. This chapter examines the roles the monuments played in the myths and their strong association with mythological solar figures and asks if the myths can tell us something about the meaning the monuments held for people from different periods of time.

The Poetics of Print: The Private Press Tradition and Irish Poetry

The Poetics of Print:The Private Press Tradition and Irish Poetry Conor Linnie (bio) In the archive of the Dun Emer and Cuala Press at the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Trinity College Dublin, there is a folder containing three large scrapbooks dated from 1903 to 1905.1 Written in purple and blue pastel across the worn hardback cover of the first book is the Gaelic script Leab.ar Dún Éimire. Inside, the opening page reframes the title with a profusion of pink sorrel in watercolor, the sinuous forms of the pale green stalks weaving a floral pattern of petals and buds. Translated into English as The Book of Emer's Fort, the three scrapbooks give a vivid insight into the daily life and workings of an arts and crafts cooperative: the Dun Emer Industries. The industries were established in 1902 by Evelyn Gleeson, who was joined by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats and Susan Mary "Lily" Yeats to manage the guild's three departments in weaving, embroidery, and printing. Gleeson named the industries after the famed figure in Irish mythology, Emer, who was renowned for her beauty but also for her wit and skill in needlework. The pages of each scrapbook bustle with creativity: handwritten poems and short stories are illustrated with sketches and paintings; photograph collages are pasted alongside design templates; advertisement mock-ups market a variety of crafted products from tapestries and tufted rugs to footstools. The scrapbooks were assembled by Elizabeth Yeats, who took charge of the guild's printing department: the Dun Emer Press. She outlined the ambition of the press in its first prospectus of 1903: "Though many books are printed in Ireland," Yeats begins, "book printing as an art has been little practiced here since the eighteenth century. The Dun Emer Press has been founded in the hope of reviving this beautiful craft."2 Specializing in the production of hand-printed [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Book of Dun Emer (1903). The Library of Trinity College Dublin Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. The Book of Dun Emer (1903). The Library of Trinity College Dublin [End Page 40] limited-edition books made from native materials and circulated to an exclusive readership, Dun Emer Press inaugurated the Irish private press tradition in the twentieth century. This tradition is brought into focus by the digital exhibition The Poetics of Print: The Private Press Tradition and Irish Poetry, launched by the School of English and the Library of Trinity College Dublin.3 The Poetics of Print explores the interlinked histories of four private presses—Dun Emer, Cuala, Gayfield, and Dolmen—and their role in the development of modern Irish poetry from 1902 to 1969. The exhibition presents more than sixty unique images of archival and published material in a compelling digital narrative, drawing from the collections of the Library of Trinity College Dublin along with material from a diverse range of external institutional, commercial, and private sources. The Poetics of Print allies digital humanities (DH) research with the burgeoning field of Irish book history to showcase the influence and achievements of the Irish private press tradition. In its conception and design, the exhibition draws particularly from recent international digital projects associated with the critical expansion of modernist studies, which have elevated the role of DH to provide new archival and interpretive resources for our understanding of the material world of the modern book. The decisive turn of "the new modernist studies" toward a radically expanded materialist and historicist reading of the movement has reinvigorated scholarly interest in the print culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Digital platforms and tools have in turn become central to the visualization, collation, and analysis of the myriad publishing contexts of modernism. Launched in 2017, The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) originated as an archive of materials generated by Leonard and Virginia Woolf 's Hogarth Press and is currently developing into a broader critical archive of early twentieth-century publishers.5 MAPP's growing digital repository now includes a critical biography of the Dun Emer Press accompanied by a selection of digitized artifacts from the Gilsenan Yeats...

‘Scattred All to Nought’: Feminine Waters, Irish Sources, and Colonialism in Edmund Spenser’s River Mulla

Abstract This article examines Edmund Spenser’s use of Irish mythology, particularly in relation to feminized rivers, in order to conceptualize how he constructs English colonialism as necessary for Ireland via the poetically constructed river Mulla. More specifically, it examines ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again’ and The Faerie Queen, Book IV, Canto xi through the lenses of ecofeminism and a reading of the medieval Irish text Acallam na Senórach. This article argues for understanding the reappearance of the river Mulla from ‘Colin Clouts’ to FQ IV.xi as a materialist effort to dominate the place and space of Ireland through writing. It further argues that the Acallam is a potential source text for Spenser’s own endeavours with his river Mulla. Specifically, Spenser repurposes place-names and Fenian myths from medieval Ireland in his literature, which acts as another form of colonial domination to subsume Irish identification. It is particularly important that this lens is applied to Irish waterscapes, as the ability to reconstruct Ireland rhetorically and poetically in English literature allowed Spenser to ‘map’ Ireland and bring even the finicky Irish land- and waterscapes firmly under English control in violently masculine manners, which are enacted via enforced marriages.

Was Guðmundr á Glasisvǫllum Irish?

This article tackles the question of a possible Irish origin for the Old Norse literary figure Guðmundr á Glasisvǫllum. The images of Guðmundr, his realm Glasisvellir, and the sometimes associated territory of Ódáinsakr fluctuate in various ways in the different saga narratives in which they occur. The variability of the Guðmundr á Glasisvǫllum narrative has caused scholars to debate its possible origin for over a century. The more widely supported notion is that a mythological compound around Guðmundr must have originated in Irish mythology and folklore rather than being an indigenous, Nordic construct. The present article aims to follow up on this discussion, comparing the original Old Norse source material and that found in Gesta Danorum to Irish accounts that might have influenced them. By highlighting the differences between the Guðmundr á Glasisvǫllum complex and the suggested Irish sources, the degree to which it seems likely the motif could actually have originated in Irish thought will be assessed. Norwegian folk tales about the magical island Utrøst will then be considered to highlight the possibility of a more local background for Guðmundr and his realm.

Ireland, Modernism, and Imperialism in Standish O’Grady’s The Queen of the World

Abstract Standish O’Grady’s narratives of Irish mythology have been regarded as the inaugural works of the Irish literary revival, with considerable dispute among scholars as to the nature of O’Grady’s influence. In 1900, O’Grady published a futuristic fantasy entitled The Queen of the World under the pseudonym Luke Netterville. This work has been largely neglected in studies of the Irish revival and its relations to the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. The following essay examines the modernist aspects of O’Grady’s novel in relation to contrary tendencies towards imperialism and rebellion that it exhibits. In the process, I discuss the fantastic, gothic, and racial aspects of The Queen of the World, particularly as they reflect the complex nature of O’Grady’s political thought and influence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This includes discussion of the novel’s affinities with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race as well as Irish gothic works by Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. I address the Chinese dimension of the novel in terms of Orientalism and the British Empire, while also considering it in the context of O’Grady’s influence on Patrick Pearse, leader of the 1916 rebellion against British rule in Ireland.