'Dead Clay and Living Clay': Máirtín Ó Cadhain's criticisms of the work of the Irish Folklore Commission
Briody, Mícheál (2014)
Briody, Mícheál
The Donner Institute, Åbo Akademi
2014
Kuvaus
Dr Mícheál Briody is a lecturer at the Language Centre of the University of Helsinki. He is a graduate of University College Dublin and the University of Helsinki. His research interests and publications cover: the history of European folkloristics; the oral narrative traditions of Gaelic Ireland and Scotland; Irish cultural history; biography and memory; as well as aspects of Irish language and literature. He is the author of The Irish Folklore Commission 1935−1970: History, Ideology, Methodology (SKS 2007) as well as numerous articles.
He is at present engaged in researching a monograph on storytelling in the Irish and Scottish-Gaelic traditions and is also preparing an edition (with a commentary) of the folkloristic writings of the writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain.
He is at present engaged in researching a monograph on storytelling in the Irish and Scottish-Gaelic traditions and is also preparing an edition (with a commentary) of the folkloristic writings of the writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain.
Tiivistelmä
In Ireland the creation of one of the world’s largest collections of oral traditions by the Irish Folklore Commission (1935−70) was intimately bound up with the declining fortunes of the Irish language as a spoken vernacular and the young independent Irish state’s efforts to revive that language. This paper deals not with the Trojan achievements of the Commission, but with certain criticisms of its work levelled against it by someone with impeccable Irish-language credentials and someone who was also steeped in the Irish-language oral tradition since childhood; namely the creative writer and intellectual Máirtín Ó Cadhain. In this paper I will outline some of Ó Cadhain’s criticisms of the work of the Irish Folklore Commission as well as place them in context.