A little while ago, I attended another one of the Romancing the Gothic talks, a series I have talked about in a previous blog. This seminar was given by Stiofáin Jack and titled “Death In Irish Folklore”. Jack is a storyteller at the National Leprechaun Museum in Dublin and runs their own YouTube channel called Hog and Dice. They got their degree in folklore from UCD.
They started the seminar by explaining how they thought death was a good place to start when introducing people to Irish folklore. As Jack explained, the Irish have a very unique relationship with death, at least in comparison to other white European cultures. Funnily enough, I had only recently had a similar conversation with my Senior Branch unit. Our leader, a French woman who moved here in her 20s, told us how she had been shocked when she went to her first Irish funeral, particularly in relation to the clothes people wore. She said when she had gone to funerals growing up; everyone wore all black, so she was surprised when she went to a funeral here. Only the immediate family wore black, and other attendees were wearing colour. She told us she can still remember a woman wearing a bright red coat because she thought it was odd.
Jack went on to describe how healthy the relationship in Ireland is with death, how it is not taboo and is, in fact, discussed quite publically. I’m sure we’ve all seen the memes about it, such as how older generations seem to start every conversation with
“c’mere to me now did you hear about (insert name)”
“No what happened?”
“They died”, or how people will wake up and check rip.ie before doing anything else in the morning (which, for those of you who are unaware, is a website that contains all the details of recent death notices for the country and also provides details of where/when the funeral will be). One particular scene in media that represents this divide in the culture surrounding death Jack was talking about is this scene in Derry Girls, in which the titular Derry Girls are at a wake. They are conversing normally around a corpse, whilst James, the only one in the group who was not raised in Ireland, was freaked out. My favourite line, “you can touch her if you want” “why would I want to touch her”, really stands out to me, as that would never have struck me as weird because, at all the funerals I’ve been to, people have had no problem with touching the body; most people would, either to hold their hand, give them a hug or a kiss on the cheek or forehead.
To bring this blog back to Jack’s seminar, they started by talking about the difference between ghosts and fairies, which surprisingly is quite blurry. Fairies in Irish folklore are very different to the popular idea of fairies. Originally in Irish, they were referred to as the Aís Sidh (pronounced she) or Daoine Sidh. Sidh refers to the burial mounds that were all over Ireland and what is now a days known as fairies, leading to these early fairies essentially being known as people from the grave. The most famous example would be a banshee (where you can see the use of the term “sidh”), which can either be translated into fairie woman (bean, pronounced and Anglicised as ban, being the Irish for woman, and sidh to mean fairy) or woman of the burial mound. These sidh were seen as entrances to the Otherworld or as places the sidh lived full stop, a trope that is not unique to Irish folklore but can also be found in any culture that had a Celtic past, as far as I am aware.
For the rest of the talk, Jack had many examples from Duchas.ie, an online collective of folklore stories gathered from all around the country. The point of the website is to act as an archive for the oral tradition of storytelling in Ireland. The collection contains manuscripts, audio recordings, pictures and videos and includes content from as early as the 1930s. I sincerely enjoyed this talk, as I am interested in folklore and took folklore as one of my modules in my first year here at UCC.
Where We Will We'll Roam 