Clare County Library | Clare
Folklore |
Customs,
Lore and Legend of Other Clare Days: Folklore Collection in Clare |
Prior to Westropp's survey very little of the oral tradition of Clare had been recorded apart form some folktales taken down by Eugene O'Curry, himself a Clareman, in the course of his work for the Ordnance Survey some seventy years earlier. Virtually nothing at all of the oral literature and tradition preserved in the Irish language in Clare was recorded until Séamus Ó Duilearga of the newly-formed Folklore of Ireland Society, as it was then called, came to the county in 1929 to record at the eleventh hour the last of the native speakers in the Doolin area. A large part of the material collected by Ó Duilearga in Clare consisted of long tales of international type call marchen. In Irish they were invariably called scéalta fiannaíochta from the mythical (?) Finn McCool and his warrior band who figured largely in them. On and off over a period of six years in Clare, mostly in the Doolin district, Delargy recorded nearly 500 tales as well as a large body of seanchas and extensive vocabularies in Irish. Writing some thirty years later he recalled with nostalgia his visits to Doolin and the people who came at night on ragairne to his lodgings in the home of Johnny Carey at Luogh: "I could not have got a better lodging for to this house came all the storytellers, singers and musicians for miles around . . . They are all gone now - the old are dead long since, and most of those who were young then are now in America or in England; and there are now few people in all that country who can speak Irish, or to whom I can apply with confidence for the interpretation of a rare word or phrase, and it was Irish which for richness of vocabulary and wealth of idiom had few rivals. The dead words on a manuscript page are a poor substitute for the haunting beauty of the language which lingered and died on the lips of my old friends. In those days there were no tape-recorders, no Folklore Commission, and the harvest lay unheeded and withered away. There was much to do and almost no one to help - and few to understand. But the country people whom I met understood, and they gave all they had with all their heart - le croí mór maith amach - and to what they gave the MSS. of the Commission bears witness." It was in the Doolin area also, in January 1930, that Delargy first met Stiofán Ó Helaoire (Hellery) whom he regarded as the finest Irish story-teller he had come across in Clare: "He was a poor man of ancient lineage who lived alone in a tiny cottage near the castle at Doonagore, on the steep hill overlooking Doolin, looking out across the sea to the islands of Aran. He was born in 1862 in the house in which he lived when I first met him. He spoke careful English but rarely used it; his language was Irish which he had at his command with an amazing wealth of vocabulary, well-fed with proverbs and witty phrase, enriched with sly humour lurking close to the surface of his speech. I was the first stranger to appreciate his stories, and to listen enthralled to his inexhaustible flow of rich untrammelled Irish which up till then no pen had recorded. He was one of the silent people to whom no one had listened and who had so much to say. A lot of what he said both I and Seán Mac Mathuna recorded, but how much I would give now if I had a library of tape-recordings not only of his tales and seanchas but of his ordinary conversation and that of his friends, who entertained me on many a night over thirty years ago. But there were no tape-recorders then, and I never succeeded in getting any Irish scholar to study an unknown palimpsest of tradition - Stiofán Ó Helaoire - who had much more for the student of Irish than most of the modern Irish MSS. of our great libraries. He died in 1944. Requiescat! His grave has no tombstone, but his monument is the tales of which he told as no one else did. He was the master story-teller of Corcomroe." [O'Duilearga quotations taken from 'Notes
on the oral tradition of Thomond', Journal of the Royal Society of
Antiquaries of Ireland (1965). |
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