Clare County Library | Clare
Folklore |
Customs,
Lore and Legend of Other Clare Days: Clare's Rich Heritage |
'I now enter upon a field of topographical
research which is truly romantic
and full of interest, And again, writing from Corofin on the 10 October, 1839 he remarked: 'This place is full of historical
tradition, and the people by one thousand degrees We have already seen what high value Séamus Ó Duilearga of the Folklore Commission placed on the huge storehouse of material that he collected from the last generation of native speakers in the Doolin area. But many other parts of Clare were also rich in the Irish oral tradition. Ernie O'Malley who spent some time in Clare in 1919 as an organizer for the Provisional Government tells of the seanchas and verse he heard from the old men who dropped in each night to his host's house at Ballagh, near Kilfenora: 'Sometimes they'd laugh together and
shake their heads with delight when speaking of Pedlar McGrath [An
Mangaire Sugach] or Sean O'Twomey . . . It was then I regretted
that I had not studied Irish thoroughly. I knew next to nothing of
these poets save in translation. But here the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries lived again, for these men could tell story after story
of the poet's pranks, drinkings and songs, and describe them as if
they had lived in the same parish. They recited verses of men whose
names I did not know. Their sense of literature was on their lips
and in their faultless memory . . . It seems of interest to point out that many of the long tales collected in Clare by Ó Duilearga and others from the Folklore Commission belong to that genre of folk tales known as the Red Branch Cycle. It has been remarked that, apart from Co. Clare where they would appear to be of fairly general currency, those tales were not frequently encountered outside Ulster. They are set in the days of the legendary king Conor Mac Neasa of Ulster and his Red Branch Knights, and depict an era that belongs culturally to the final phase of prehistoric Ireland. According to Douglas Hyde, the Red Branch tales represent Europe's oldest vernacular literature, and he goes on to say that their development over a period of fifteen hundred years must be regarded as 'one of the most remarkable examples in the world of continuous literary evolution.' |
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