Irish Mythology Research Articles

Spain, Galicia, and the "Atlantic" Joyce

Spain, Galicia, and the "Atlantic" Joyce Gayle Rogers (bio) British and Irish Writers in the Spanish Periodical Press (1900-1965). Escritores Británicos e Irlandeses en la Prensa Periódica Española (1900-1965), by Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos and David Clark. Oleiros/A Coruña: Netbiblo, 2007. xxiv + 126 pp. £40.00. La Literatura Irlandesa en España, by Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos. Oleiros/A Coruña: Instituto Universitario de Estudios Irlandeses Amergin: Netbiblo, 2007. xi + 97 pp. £40.00. Vigorous Joyce: Atlantic Readings of James Joyce, edited by M. Teresa Caneda Cabrera, Vanessa Silva Fernández, and Martín Urdiales Shaw. Vigo: Universidad de Vigo, 2010. 232 pp. €20.00. Irish mythology tells of the migration of the Milesians, who were Gaelic Celts, to Ireland through the northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula—thus, the "Hiberio-Miletians" mentioned in Finnegans Wake (FW 309.11). Some of them stayed in what became the Roman province of Gallaecia (present-day northern Portugal and northwestern Spain), whose inhabitants shared with Irish Celts similar languages and mythological cycles.1 Contemporary scholars in the Spanish province of Galicia have invoked this narrative often both in their research and in the broader spirit of their attention to James Joyce, a northern-Atlantic neighbor who attracted considerable attention from his Galician contemporaries as well. Indeed, as the books at hand demonstrate, Spanish Joyceans, especially in the past two decades, have developed a complex array of practices and critical idioms focused on issues of reception, translation, adaptation, and exegesis. Even as that is acknowledged, however, there is no uniformity among Spanish Joyce scholars: the field is, in fact, robust enough to have subdivisions, and these three books belong to what might be called more precisely "Galician Joyce," which is related to but distinct from the work of Catalan or Andalusian critics—and is itself a heterogeneous community. Together, the titles considered here comprise a sampling of this work, pointing interested Joyceans toward new avenues for archival investigations and other forms of inquiry. Non-Spanish [End Page 287] scholars—especially those who see the future of Joyce studies in new archives and methodologies—will find it rewarding to engage in the continually evolving research agenda offered by Ireland's Atlantic kin to the south. The contexts from which these three books have emerged shed light on their importance. While Joyce criticism has been acknowledged from the start as international and multi-linguistic, many essays, reviews, and creative works that originated in Spain have tended to be overlooked by Anglophone and European scholars. As Alberto Lázaro has written, the Spanish critical response to Joyce grew during the 1920s and 1930s until, beginning in 1939, Francoist autarky and censorship laws intervened, impeding the development of Joyce studies in Spain until the late 1960s.2 Publishing codes were then slowly relaxed, and, following the dictator's death in 1975, translations or re-issues of all of Joyce's major works began appearing, including the first new version of Ulysses in Spanish since 1945.3 This burst of activity coincided with an increase in the study of twentieth-century literature in English at Spanish universities, and the scholar Francisco García Tortosa of the University of Seville (now emeritus) had an important part in directing scholarship toward Joyce. He organized Spain's first conference on Joyce in 1982, began supervising multiple dissertations and theses on the author, and spearheaded the founding of the Spanish James Joyce Association in 1990 and its journal, Papers on Joyce, in 1995. A significant year for Spanish Joyce studies was 1994, when the International James Joyce Symposium was held in Seville.4 A new enclave of Joyce scholars was put on the map just two years after the Barcelona Olympics had symbolized Spain's return to the geopolitical world stage. Spanish studies of Joycean texts began appearing with greater frequency, beginning with Joyce en España 1 and 2, co-edited by García Tortosa and Antonio Raúl de Toro Santos.5 The first volume contains work on primarily Spanish topics and reprints Galician writer Vicente Risco's rich part-fiction, part-criticism "Dédalus en Compostela";6 the second...

C.S. Lewis: an Irish writer

This article examines the effect of C.S. Lewis's Irish background on his work. It attempts to contradict the assumption that this Belfast-born writer should be included in the English and not the Irish canon. It emphasises that Lewis saw himself as Irish, was seen by others as Irish, and that his Irish background, contrary to what some have written, was important to him throughout his lifetime. It goes on to demonstrate the ways in which his work was influenced by his youth in Ireland and by the Irish mythology that he loved. Furthermore, this article maintains that, as a child of pre-partition Ireland with roots throughout the island, Lewis was influenced by the country as a whole, not just his native Ulster. Finally, it attempts to understand why Lewis, a proud Irishman, did not do more to promote himself as an Irish writer.

The Stone Novel of Éire

In this paper, we shall attempt to define the place of the megalithic stone structures in the outlook of the early Irish culture. We shall include some archaic Irish linguistic elements and look at relevant myths that have survived in various early Irish sources, and, in particular, in the compilation known as The Metrical Dindshenchas (hereinafter MD). In our contribution, we shall confine ourselves to defining such notions as ‘water’, ‘fertility’, ‘the Otherworld’ that are commonly associated with the megalithic stone structures in early Irish mythology and in Irish folklore beliefs and customs. We come to the conclusion that the megalithic stones became connected with two positive sources in the pre-literate culture of early Ireland: the dark and wet source of fertility in the Otherworld situated under the ground; and the light and sunny source of the conception of the new life and of the new year in the celestial Otherworld.

The World of “Heroic Ideal” : Irish Mythology and Irish Mythological Dramas

The World of “Heroic Ideal” : Irish Mythology and Irish Mythological Dramas

Пять пятин Ирландии: новое, неожиданное предположение?

The problem of the so-called ‘five fifths of Ireland’ remains unresolved up to now, in spite of numerous attempts to find a solution to this linguistic and geographical contradiction. In Modern Irish, traditional provinces of Ireland are called cúige (‘a fifth’), but there are only four (Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht) of them. The same names of the four provinces were known in the Early Irish literature (cóiced Ulad etc). The Irish literati envisaged that contradiction and made some attempts to resolve it in early mythological and pseudo-historical sources (in sagas and poetry). According to their pseudo-historical theory, the province of Munster was further divided into ‘the fifth of Cú Roí’ and ‘the fifth of Eochu mac Luchta’. At the same time, the compiler of the saga ‘The Settling of the Manor of Tara’ proposes a theory of the sacred centre (Tara, the seat of kingship, and/or the hill Uisnech, the centre of druidism) of Ireland and of the four subject provinces or zones – North, South, East and West. The idea of of the dominant Goidelic race led T.F. O’Rahilly to propose the existence of the Midland kingdom. Rees Brothers added to this theory a veil of universal cosmology. We would like to propose another solution to this problem. It is not based upon the traditional cosmological or geographical principle of division of a country, but on another one, which can also be presented as the ‘traditional’ principle as far as the geography of the Ancient World is concerned. In reality, it may well be that Ireland was divided into five parts, but this so-called ‘native’ division of the island persisted for a short time only. The idea of the ‘five fifths’ preserved in Irish mythology and pseudo-history was supported by the symbolic role of the number ‘five’ in Irish tradition. Thus, the ‘power of word’ or a word-hypnosis influenced historical and native geographical tradition.

"Under Ben Bulben" : la montagne chez W.B. Yeats ou la rencontre du moi et du Soi

Though it is not generally considered one of Yeats’s main symbols, the mountain occurs frequently in his poetry, particularly in the last poems. By focusing on “Under Ben Bulben”, Yeats’s concluding poem, and by comparing various mountains in Yeats’s work – Oriental and Western, Italian and Irish – this article analyses the mountain as the place where the ego encounters a wider psychological dimension, the (Jungian) Self. Minimalist and conceptual, the Yeatsian mountain is reduced to archetypal forms related to the geometry described in A Vision, Yeats’s metaphysical treatise. Rooted in Irish mythology, and rising into a spiritualist ethereal world, the mountain conjoins different symbolic strata, allowing an intellectual and spiritual ascent. The article shows how, by drawing on multiple traditions and unifying them aesthetically into a complex symbol, the poet strives to embody the universal voice of the Self

Lady Gregory's Deirdre: Self-Censorship or Skilled Editing?

Lady Gregory’s Deirdre:Self-Censorship or Skilled Editing? Karen B. Golightly Lady Gregory's treatment of the Deirdre story in her Cuchulain saga has often been cited as an example of self-imposed censorship; critics have variously explained her adaptation of the story as indicative of her own antifeminist inclinations, her tendency to romanticize, or her intention to uphold Victorian ideals of femininity and propriety.1 However, the texts from which she drew her material, considered along with her own commentary on the writing process, reveal a different story. When Gregory created "The Fate of the Children of Usnach," she did indeed draw on tales written by Standish O'Grady, Alexander Carmichael, Douglas Hyde, and on Eleanor Hull's edition of versions by Whitley Stokes and O'Flanagan—but she used these texts to compile a new, more readable version, not to change the story by sanitizing Irish mythology, "favoring a chivalric courtesy that fitted her intended projection of a primitive Ireland" 2 or to defeminize the Deirdre story. She worked to, as she said, "take the best of the stories, or whatever parts of each will fit best to one another, and in that way to give a fair account of Cuchulain's life and death."3 Gregory's motives for creating this collage of the Cuchulain story appear honorable: to create a more readable and realistic version, and to preserve Irish folklore and culture. Rather than furthering an agenda, Gregory recorded what she firmly believed to be a consistent version of this ancient saga. She employed the Kiltartan dialect both to embody the traditional Gaelic in English, and to [End Page 117] mirror the way that she originally heard the stories as a young girl. Gregory defended her culling in the preface of Cuchulain of Muirthemme, saying, "I left out a good deal I thought you would not care about for one reason or another, but I put in nothing of my own that could be helped, only a sentence or so now and again to link the different parts together (CM vi). Many of her contemporary critics, including Yeats and Douglas Hyde, lavished praise on the finished work. Yet, she herself questioned these established male scholars for their failure to undertake such an important project: and indeed if there was more respect for Irish things among the learned men that live in the college at Dublin, where so many of these old writings are stored, this work would not have been left to a woman of the house, that has to be minding the place, and listening to complaints, and dividing her share of food.. (CM vi) In his preface to Gregory's 1907 book, Yeats gave a brief history of the written recordings of the Cuchulain saga to establish the precedence that Gregory's version made: Translators from the Irish have hitherto retold one story or the other from some one version, and not often with any fine understanding of English, of those changes of rhythm for instance that are chances of the sense . . . But few of the stories really begin to exist as great works of imagination until somebody has taken the best bits out of many manuscripts . . . It has been as necessary also to leave out as to add, for generations of copyists, who had often but little sympathy with the stories they copied, have mixed versions together in a clumsy fashion. (CM vii) Yeats—who rejected taking on the project himself, and who had initially doubted Gregory's ability to successfully complete the work—praised Gregory's version, noting her clever editing and censoring as well as her use of the Kiltartan dialect to create a story worthy of representing Ireland's Cuchulain: Lady Gregory has done her work of compression and selection at once so firmly and so reverently that I cannot believe that anybody, except now and then for scientific purpose, will need another text than this, or than the version of it the Gaelic League is about to publish in Modern Irish. (CM viii) Gregory also resisted the advice and discouragement she received from Douglas Hyde, who told her, "Of course an epic should not be translated in colloquial...

Outside History: Edna O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation

Edna O'Brien is not a name one often hears in discussions of postmodernism. Nevertheless, her 1995 novel House of Splendid Isolation, which some reviewers have described as a new departure for O'Brien, contains postmodernist ele ments.1 For instance, the novel resembles a pastiche in its almost random jux taposition of diary entries, snippets of poems, a children's fable, Irish mythol ogy, a 1921 IRA volunteer's journal, and personal notes included without any introduction, interspersed throughout its short, staccato sections of narrative.2 These italicized insertions make it difficult to fit the story within the framework of a known history, a defamilarizing strategy often employed in postmodernist fiction. narrative itself proceeds in an achronological way through frag mented bits and pieces that the reader must fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. This fragmented style, which reminds one of the crosscutting technique in contemporary cinema and television, makes House of Splendid Isolation at times confusing. novel opens with a short section titled The Child, in which an initially unidentifiable voice speaks prophetically, as if from the grave. fol lowing section titled The Present begins by describing the Northern Irish IRA gunman McGreevy hiding under a tree as he is pursued by a police heli copter. Then we meet the Irish garda officer Rory Purcell who is presented in a domestic scene with his wife, son, and daughter. Purcells are watching a

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: the Politics of Morality in Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore

The recent plays of Martin McDonagh have fascinated and repelled critics for nearly a decade. His idiosyncratic blend of rural Irish mythology and ‘in-yer-face’ aggression has both caused consternation and won high praise, but the motivations and inspirations of McDonagh's work have not been widely discussed. Here, Catherine Rees addresses some of the common critical assaults on one of his most contentious plays, The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), and seeks to rescue the playwright from misunderstanding and heavy-handed critical treatment. She also aims to clarify some of the issues surrounding this politically charged and controversial work, and discusses it within the wider context of British and Irish drama. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Contemporary Irish Literature: Diverse Voices’ conference at the University of Central Lancaster in April 2003. Rees has presented on various aspects of McDonagh's work at a joint American Conference for Irish Studies and British Association of Irish Studies conference, and is currently working on a PhD about his plays at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Irish literature, mythology, folklore, and drama

Irish literature, mythology, folklore, and drama

"When Ireland Was Still Under a Spell": The Poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

In the Southern Review's 1995 special issue on contemporary Irish poetry and criticism, a recurring theme is the woman poet's continued efforts to focus attention on the place of women in Irish culture. That effort has often entailed rejecting the traditional iconography employed by male poets in favor of incorporating women as symbol—Mother Ireland, Queen Medbh, Grainne O'Malley, the Hag of Beare—and imaginatively restoring their presence to the Irish landscape. The Southern Review includes a "comhrá" or conversation featuring McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill, in which both discuss their relation to landscape, to language, and to the worldview of Irish mythology. McGuckian attempts to characterize the human relation to the natural world in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill:

Irish literature, mythology, folklore, and drama

Irish literature, mythology, folklore, and drama

Yeats and Maud Gonne: (Auto)Biographical and Artistic Intersection

Unlike many other heroines, Maud Gonne lives a separate life with her distinct personality in Yeats's works. Yeats's poems and letters and memoirs disclose a relationship of temperamental and ideological differences between two a relationship of unrequited love and out-of-body experience, sexual longing and unfulfillment complicated with dynamics of their spiritual interests as well as psychosexual anxieties. It was a politically charged and mystically coded relationship. This essay attempts to present different stages of Yeats's poetic presentation of Maud Gonne, her own autobiographical description of her relationship to poet, and way his frustrated love complemented his poetic philosophy. It shows how idea of Maud Gonne served as a direct inspiration for Yeats's poetic creativity and how a sense of devotion, defeat, and melancholy pervades his work, allowing him to recreate an idealized past. This essay attempts to give a picture not only of Yeats's lyrical portrait of her but also his struggle to understand all she stood for. ********** The intertwined careers of Yeats and Maud Gonne and their artistic and biographical relationship have been a subject of much critical investigation. The relationship, emotional or otherwise, of any great lyric poet with women treated as lovers, muses, companions, and fellow-workers has always been deservedly so. Moreover, as Richard Ellmann points out, unlike heroines of Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris, who Yeats thought did not have any separate lives of their own, Maud Gonne does indeed live a separate life with her distinct personality in his works. (1) His poems and letters and memoirs disclose a relationship of temperamental and ideological differences between two--a relationship of unrequited love and out-of-body experience, sexual longing and unfulfillment complicated with dynamics of their spiritual interests as well as psychosexual anxieties. It was a politically charged and mystically coded relationship, fraught with fear, anger, disgust, underside of an idealising romantic passion. (2) The present essay does not claim to be a real investigation of a problem involved in that highly complex relationship. Instead, it attempts to present different stages of Yeats's poetic presentation of Maud Gonne, her own autobiographical description of her relationship to poet, and way his frustrated love complemented his poetic philosophy. Talking about Mask and Image in The Trembling of Veil: Four Years, 1887-1891, Yeats in a romantic spirit declares, We begin to live when we have conceived of life as tragedy. (3) Accordingly, he began to live from January 30/February 1, 1889, day he met Maud Gonne (1865-1953) first time through introduction of John O'Leary. (4) As he discovered Irish mythology through O'Leary who was his personification of Romantic Ireland, (5) so too he discovered through him woman who was to change his life for ever. He refers to fine spring morning of that fateful day as time from when the troubling of my life began. (6) In a retrospective analysis he says that from his youth he was looking forward to an experience in love that would, no matter how painful, shape him as a poet. So be must have dreamed of an exciting and unusual woman to love, just as he must have disliked ordinary, conventional marriage defined and bound by its traditional domesticities. (7) Accordingly, he fell in love with a woman who also had come to see marriage, at least by 1905, as destructive for many women, (8) would never become his wife despite his repeated proposals and would still continue to inspire an intense passion and provide him with images and themes for his poetry. It was Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful, well-to-do and independent-minded Dublin actress and a violent Irish nationalist, who was to fit Yeats's desire and change his whole attitude to life and poetry. …

Irish literature, mythology, folklore, and drama

Irish literature, mythology, folklore, and drama

Le Mercure Solitumaros de Châteaubleau (Seine-et-Marne) : Lugus macrophtalme, visionnaire et guérisseur

At Châteaubleau (Seine-et-Marne), Gallo-Roman site of several sanctuaries of native tradition, a variety of objects were found - a patera with an inscription, a bronze statuette, a coin and an anatomical ex-voto - related to Mercurius Solitumarus, a Gallic deity, whose name was romanized and means "with great sight" or "the all-seeing". To illustrate this epithet the archaeological evidences show this god with enlarged eyes. A comparison with other Gallic and Gallo-Roman representations and parallels in the literature of Irish mythology suggest that this Mercurius of Châteaubleau is identical with Lugus, the omnicompetent god of the Celts, who is endowed with visionary power. Occasionally Lugus is also health-giving god, especially for ophtalmic diseases.

Old Tales for New People: Irish Mythology Retold for Children

Old Tales for New People: Irish Mythology Retold for Children

A guide to Irish mythology

A guide to Irish mythology

James Stephens's Diminutive National Narratives: Imagining an Irish Nation Based on the "Orient"

JAMES STEPHENS'S DIMINUTIVE NATIONAL NARRATIVES: IMAGINING AN IRISH NATION BASED ON THE "ORIENT" Joseph Lennon Critics usually regard James Stephens as one ofthe most whimsical and entertaining of the modernist Irish writers. Consequently, his writings are rarely read for their social and national impUcations. While whimsy certainly comprises much of his poetry and prose writings,1 a good portion of Stephens's work, particularly his later short stories, portrays social reaUties of early twentieth-century Ireland. In these stories Stephens's characters struggle against poverty, unemployment and class subjugation amidst tropes of Indian and Irish mythology. Throughout his career, Stephens wove myth into reahstic stories seeking to construct narratives ofthe emerging Irish nation. These narratives borrow heavily not only from versions of Irish myth, but also from OrientaUst versions of"Eastern" philosophy and mythology. Stephens used these mythological and philosophical tropes to represent Ireland's present in hopes of writing Ireland's national narrative. In this respect, his works provide a complex and specificaUy Irish answer to Homi K. Bhabha's rhetorical question: "How does one write the nation's modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal?" ("DissemiNation" 293). I Stephens's stories of his "nation's modernity" were written on the threshold of the contemporary and the epochal, relying both upon nativism and OrientaUsm. Homi Bhabha's use of the term national narrative signifies a narrative in the broadest cultural sense, that is a narrative which permeates a culture, embodying its identity and hegemony . Every nation has a national narrative as weU as many stories of nationhood or what I will call diminutive national narratives. These diminutive narratives both signify and represent a nation, but cannot fully pervade a culture or embody its identity. As Ireland broke from England, Stephens and other Irish writers self-consciously attempted to "write the [new] nation" in their narratives. What they wrote had a significant effect on Ireland, primarily because many oftheir diminutive narratives were later incorporated into the Irish Republic's programs of official nationaUsm; for example, Yeats's poetry and Lady Gregory's plays about the west of Ireland became part of the RepubUc's image of rural Ireland. But to consciously create the identity of a nation or its national narrative is, of course, an impossibiUty. Both the identity and the narrative of a nation evolve through the events and accidents of history, emerging through the shared experiences of its members, not through conscious constructions of a few individuals. A national narVol ·. 20 (1996): 62 THE COMPAnATIST rative resonates for individuals in a nation, interpellates or hails them as citizens, and becomes the center of their collective identity. Understanding the need for a unified national culture in Ireland, Stephens and other Irish writers tried to unify the nation by writing narratives which linked Ireland's past to its present. Theorists of nationhood as far back as Ernest Renan in 1882 have noted the need for a coherent past in nation building: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common ofa rich legacy ofmemories ; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value ofthe heritage that one has received in an undividedform [emphasis added]. ("What is a Nation" 19) Stephens projected mythical pasts—interestingly, both Irish and Indian —onto Irish culture as a way of reimagining Ireland. The new Ireland that he revealed to the Irish pubUc presented an undivided heritage of pre-colonial Ireland. In a seemingly strange move, Stephens often substituted OrientaUst visions of Hindu spirituaUty for Irish mythology. But this actually was a common move for the Theosophists and Irish spirituahsts. The reUgions of India, China, Japan, Turkey and other countries of the "Orient" represented models of pre-colonial, pre-modern, and pre-Christian Ireland for these spiritual theorists. Because they did not view the "Orient" coevally, they believed they could find a spiritual panacea for the ailments ofmodern Western European culture. Stephens, in particular , assumed that the classical Indian caste system could be...

Liberals, the Irish Famine and the role of the state

The Irish mythology of the Great Famine of the 1840s explained the failure of the British government to prevent the deaths of some one million people in terms of a Whig government and ruling élite driven by a commitment to laissez-faire ideology which left them indifferent to the loss of Irish lives. At its most extreme, this mythology attributed a wilful genocide to the English. The term myth as used here does not necessarily imply that the account is untrue. Rather, the myth comprises a combination of fact, fiction and the unknowable in a narrative of such power that, for the people who accept it, the myth provides a guide to future understanding and action. In this respect, Irish mythology about the English and the Famine is rooted in facts: the resistance of the Whig government to any interference with the market; the staunch commitment to ideology of central figures in the making of famine policy such as Charles Trevelyan (assistant secretary to the treasury) and Sir Charles Wood (chancellor of the exchequer) and shapers of liberal opinion such as the political economists Nassau Senior and James Wilson (editor of The Economist); and the indifference to Irish suffering, and indeed the hostility to the Irish, as demonstrated in the language of the radical M.P.J.A. Roebuck.

Dictionary of Celtic mythology

Celts were one of the founders of European civilization, the first North European people to emerge into recorded history. They have survived today only on the western seaboard of Europe: the Irish, Manx, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons. most extensive literary remains survive in Irish and Welsh, the earliest survivals from the sixth century. From Celtic legends have come not only the stories of Cuchulainn and Fionn Mac, of Deirdre of the Sorrows and Grainne, but the stories of Arthur and Tristan and Iseult. author also wrote The Celtic Empire: First Millenium of Celtic History 1000 BC-51 AD, A Guide to Early Celtic Remains and Dictionary of Irish Mythology