From O’Grady to Pearse: The Popularization and Politicization of Mythology in Modern Ireland (original) (raw)
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Studies in Irish Mythology (Berlin: Curach Bhán Publications, 2014)
This book – the result of about ten years research – deals mostly with the mythological substratum of narratives, composed and written down in early medieval Ireland, within the broader context of Indo-European and Eurasian mythologies. Some chapters of this book were published previously as articles in different periodicals and proceedings of conferences. Studies in Irish Mythology relaunches them, reworked and updated, together with hitherto unpublished chapters, as a single comprehensive book with the aim of providing a reader towards a tentative reconstruction of an early Irish mythological worldview.
Ireland and Popular Culture / Reimagining Ireland Vol 54 [Ed. S. Mikowski], 2014
In the inculcation of a national identity, education is one of the most important instruments of state. Education curricula since the rise of the nation-state have tended to emphasize the teaching of the nation’s language and history. One of the platforms from which Ireland’s popular culture of today has been constructed can be linked to the formative decades of the country’s primary education environment where attention was devoted to the country’s history and its glorious past, with specific emphasis on the Celtic myths. Joep Leerssen argues that a national identity is a self-image or auto-image, a notion taken from imagology. That self-image has two dimensions: [1] synchronically, the distinction of a collective self from ‘others’, who are seen as represented as hetero-images, and [2] diachronically, the identification with a historically permanent filiation linking the national identity with the past. For that reason, historical memories play an important role in national self-images. In the Irish historical consciousness, the deepest layers shade into legend and mythology. And, in Ireland’s case the paucity of documented, factual history has meant that an important role is played by ancient myths involving heroic events concerning heroes mainly classified as literary figures. When newly-independent Ireland wanted to ‘de-Anglicise’ itself, the exposure to and teaching of mythology was prominent in the National School curriculum. * This paper discusses one aspect of the national self-image of Ireland as it was trans-generationally transmitted in the National School environment through the medium of the mythology tales. Celtic mythology embodied a unique Irishness without being contentious in the wider social and political spheres. These tales portrayed this unique past and their inclusion in the schoolbooks provided a platform for the policies of the inculcation of national pride, self-respect and self-image in the Irish nation, official Department of Education policy following the Second National Programme Conference and Report in 1926. Furthermore, the inclusion of the Celtic mythology tales in the schoolbooks effectively created one component for an Irish popular culture to develop as the newly established country began to find its place among the global community. It also helped to strengthen the foundation for elements of this popular cultural phenomenon that is recognised today globally as part of Ireland’s unique past, its culture and image.
Irish Mythology, Language, and History in Dubliners: A Perspective on Ireland’s National Identity
If Joyce, in Dubliners, is offering a moral history of his countrymen, then he is also implicitly offering his perspective regarding who they are as a nation, for identity can hardly be separated from collective morality. However, Joyce, along with his literary and political contemporaries, did not exist in either a vacuum or a stasis and one can only rightly view Joyce’s unique perspective in the context of his times. The first three decades of Joyce’s life were witness to an intense revival of nationalism, to various movements towards political autonomy, and to efforts by leading men and women of Irish society to redefine a sense of national identity. Scholars of both Joyce and Irish mythology have previously described the perceived linkage between those two fields of study. However, those who have written about this intersection do not seem to have attempted to discern what Joyce is saying, by way of these created linkages, about the Irish at large and about Dubliners in particular. While many of Joyce’s contemporaries were resurrecting an awareness of bold and glorious mythological heroes in support of their political vision for the early 20th century, Joyce very deliberately incorporated mythological themes of mainly darkness and death into his texts. This paper will explore exactly that point; that is, not just how Joyce incorporated elements of mythology into Dubliners, and especially into ‘The Dead,’ and how he very carefully reinforced his recurring themes of paralysis, frustration, and darkness, but how in doing so he offered his own vision for what he saw as a realistic Irish national identity.
Colonial Others and Otherworlds: Re-Encountering the Mythic in Irish Myth and Folklore Studies
2018
As primarily a descendent of literary critique and post-structural theory, postcolonial criticism tends to dissect, analyze and categorize mythology and folklore as the literature of an oral culture or pre-literate society, one that is "further behind" on the trajectory of progress as defined by civilizational stadial theory. Myth and folklore is thus often considered as story, metaphor, explanatory device or form of fiction, which solidifies its definition as something "false". In this dissertation, I argue this methodology continues a colonial imposition of western enlightenment mentalities, positivism and a particular construction of reality that operates as universal as part of the universalizing force of imperialism. This act of de-mystification decenters belief and orders different ways of knowing, making it part of the ontological violence that defines colonialism and neocolonial hegemony. Using the Irish context as example, this thesis looks at incorporating ideas from religious studies, current anomalous folklore, and new academic work in indigenous theory and indigenous storytelling as offering decolonial modes for understanding people's interaction with the mythic and new tools for continuing the postcolonial project of self-critique.
The Canon of Irish Cultiural History: some questions
Brian Kennedy in the Winter 1986 issue of Studies concluded his admirable survey of the journal's history by raising some questions of historical approach. He was critical of a 'a new historical orthodoxy' which, while sympathetic to reviews such as the Irish Statesman and the Bell, used Catholic periodicals such as the Catholic Bulletin, the Capuchin Annual, the Irish Rosary, the Irish Monthly and the Irish Ecclesiastical Record as sources for 'the mere quotable quote to prove that there was a nation of blind fools.' Kennedy maintained that these Catholic publications deserved better treatment and called for a re-assessment of them. By chance I was concluding a detailed study of the Catholic Bulletin when this article appeared, and it is, I feel, of consequence, that my research endorses the contention of Kennedy. It would be of small account, although significant, if my findings merely served to rehabilitate the Catholic Bulletin; but they cast serious doubt on several cultural assumptions commonly accepted by recent cultural analysts. Richard Kearney, despite criticism of his own historical treatment of twentieth-century journals by Kennedy, has recently renewed his plea that a proper study of history is necessary so that tradition may be a positive force in fashioning an Irish culture of the future. 'Our task,' he stated in the Irish Times of 4 November 1986, 'is to discriminate between those national myths which incarcerate and those which emancipate:2 One cannot but agree that such a critical analysis, such a 'process of innovative translation' as Kearney calls it, should be a pre-requisite for any understanding of not only such cultural concepts as the nature of Irish identity, but also of the political structures which should result from, and reflect, the analysis of cultural realities.
Humanizing the Hero: Patrick Pearse’s Reimagination of the Epic Hero for Modern Ireland
2020
In 1916 Ireland, a group of poets staged an insurrection against England that would become universally known as the Easter Rising. The leader and the face of the rebellion, Patrick Pearse, is mostly known for his political propaganda but not so widely known for his literary merit; however, throughout his poetry and nonfiction, Pearse created a new type of epic heroone who would free Ireland from Britain's shackles. Regardless of whether the insurrection was successful or not, through his writings, Pearse created a Cúchulainn and Christ figure character who used militant force to stand against colonialism and who became a sacrificial lamb for Ireland's regained independence.
MacNeill vs. Moody: Irish Historiographical Debate
There are files of historical inquiry in which tradition is the most faithful witness…my main effort is to find tradition and establish its authority. This was how Eoin MacNeill defined Irish history two years before the creation of the Irish Free State, to which MacNeill would be named the first Minister for Education. MacNeill wanted to establish Irish tradition as the authority of history. Written in 1919, his celebrated Phases of Irish History claimed that tradition was the purview of history (MacNeill used the word tradition, but the aspect to which he refers would today be referred to as collective memory). Discussing the collective memory of traditional Ireland, MacNeill gave equal weight to historical folios, Gaelic myth, and religious beliefs. The genealogies of ruling Irish families, the more eloquent and enduring nature of Gaelic as compared to English, and the myth of Cú Chulainn, the incarnation of the god Lugh who single-handedly defended Ulster in a battler where he transformed into a monster, are all cited as facts of Irish history. For MacNeill, the combination of historical facts, Celtic folk lore or mythology, and Catholic ideology, formed an Irish tradition, a uniquely Irish version of history that was subverted by British historians. Throughout Phases MacNeill references ‘facts’ from poems written about the lives of Catholic saints, the opinions Julius Cesar had of the Gaels, and mythical figures without providing a reference for these arguments yet simultaneously arguing that “matter of strictly historical recored”. While he occasionally referenced certain medieval folios, the majority of his information is presumed to be given knowledge that was unarguable, unarguable because it is part of Irish tradition. While this authority of Irish tradition as history would eventually come into question, MacNeill’s version of Irish history was a necessity in the early twentieth century, owing to the creation of the Irish nation-state.