You, Alice. I'm really delighted to take part in this symposium, I think these these subjects and topics are so important.
And it's it's really great to be able to do some to have a comparative look at the different regions and countries.
So just to give some context for my graphic research project on fairy law and landscapes.
I mean, my background is in folklore study. I was in a folklore department for a long time and moved into study of religions.
So I'm quite interested in different, you know, categorisations of spiritual beings and and,
you know, different approaches and frameworks for the study of beliefs and traditions.
And so that motivated me to look at the folklore material in a different way.
And so I part of my project is to interview people about experiences like encounters
with with fairy beings as well as broader traditions about the other worlds.
So I'm I'm interested in looking at this material as an indigenous knowledge systems.
So that's what I'm going to focus on today. So sights upon Ireland's landscape and indeed the land itself are imbued with meanings,
these meanings and understandings are interconnected in the native Irish world.
Local histories, family lineages and cultural memories are entwined with the otherworldly and the mythic.
The spirits realm, Daisy's pagan kings and mythological battles are interconnected with old place names,
sacred hymnals and areas of the Irish landscape.
While some might view the other worldly and magical aspects of Irish culture to be some dwindling remnant of the past,
my ethnographic research has shown these meanings and connexion to place to be a living
part of Irish tradition and a significant feature of the lived experiences of many people.
Ireland's troubled history of colonisation and resultant denigration of its people has been a
major factor in the shaping of attitudes when it comes to Gaelic tradition of the other world.
Imagine. Such traditional beliefs were utilised in anti Irish sentiment and through centuries of British rule,
the Irish people were disparaged, portrayed frequently as backward and savage with ignorant beliefs.
This has to some extent fed into stereo types of comic depictions of the drunken Irishman, the Fighting Irish.
As with the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, it's Fighting Irish football team,
local images which are conflated with the leprechaun of Irish legends.
Belief in fairies has been ridiculed for different reasons on a different context.
Since the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment era,
such tradition have been associated with superstition or misunderstandings of the workings of nature,
as well as being anti progressive and anti modern. Other processes of cultural and religious change have also had their impact on
perceptions and understandings of other world of magical traditions Roman Catholicism,
hegemonic religious tradition in our lives. Since mediaeval times, though, mixing into a cigarette,
syncretic form of popular religion that absorbed many older religious elements still worked to disparage the paganism that preceded us.
Many place names associated with deities,
the spiritual world of the fairies were given alternate names that negatively associated them with [INAUDIBLE] or the demonic.
One example is a cave called um Nargus and disguised as a gas cave or the Cave of the Cats, which is near the pagan royal sites of Wrath Crooked.
I'm disguised as Bath Crooklyn in County Roscommon, which has the alternate name Hell's Motorcade's or the Irish Entrance to [INAUDIBLE].
As discussed by Patrick McCafferty in his study of Caves and Arnon's archaeology,
myth and folklore in the mediaeval manuscripts such as the metrical Dan Jenkins, which means place named Lore.
It is just described how the mighty Morrigan, an ancient goddess of battle, emerges from the Cave of Crooker.
Her fish a boat along with pigs and malevolent, magical birds in the nation worldview.
The spiritual world is coterminous with the earth and accessible through caves in the mountains or hollow hills of the landscape.
The reinterpretation of so-called fairy places within a Christian cosmology that connects
them to the diabolical led to the further marginalisation of indigenous knowledge of place.
Through various nationalist, literary and artistic movements, their husband, romanticisation of Irishness,
particularly of the magical and mythological elements embedded into Irish Gaelic culture,
which has been romanticised in its connexion to the Celtic past.
Something that we've heard about already from Julius Ward in relation to the romanticisation of the Welsh.
So all of these processes complication the connexions between people and place.
Today, Ireland is often humorously categorised from outside as a land of simple, jovial folk who believe in fairies,
while discourses within the country often draw on similar light-hearted constructions of these particular cultural traditions,
with a thinly veiled nervousness of being associated with such superstitions, so-called superstitions.
We even have a leprechaun museum in Ireland.
So these things are often discussed in a light-hearted way.
The marginalisation of traditional worldviews and the demotion of spiritual connexion to
place to superstition has a long and complex history with a multitude of factors at play.
The terms, folklore, mythology and pish Ohga, which is the Irish word for superstitions,
are used to describe such cultural material in the Irish context,
but rarely has it been regarded or approached by scholars as indigenous knowledge or native or ancient wisdom of place.
The terms indigenous and native are contentious and emotive in the Irish millia when it comes to the island's inhabitants, cultures and identities.
Conflicting claims are made about what is intrinsically Irish.
What it means to be Irish, usually defined against foreign or imported traditions and identities.
Due to Ireland's political and social socio cultural history,
there is an unease around definitions of indigenised you that rest on ancestry, heritage and place.
Though acknowledging and accepting the complexities of politicised identities
and disregards the problematic nature of strict definitions of Irishness,
there seems no reason not to place spiritual meanings of place on the traditional
relationship with the land into the framework of an indigenous knowledge system.
There are cultural strands or symbolic threads in the modern day that connect people to
locality and the lands that likely have their origins in the Celtic or pre Celtic past.
Christian scribes wrote the mediaeval accounts of the ace, she an old Irish language term for a mythical race of beings.
The people of the mounds later translated as fairies talk.
Thompson notes that the translation into fairies, quote was damagingly misleading.
And the progressing colonial belittlement of the ancient Irish tradition in the English Victorian era has been well-documented.
Indeed, the English term, very poetic usage, has associations with Edmund Spencer, the the English poet best known for the fairy queen.
And Edmund Spenser was was a racist regarding the Irish as a disruptive and degraded people
and expressed a view that the starvation of the people by way of famine was a useful tool.
And so during the country. So there are many nuances to be the words used to describe such such beliefs and traditions talk.
Thompson's observations have rested on the enhancement of knowledge by way of interdisciplinary communication between archaeology and folkloristic.
It's something that has also been referred to today. And Thompson states that in Irish Gaelic, the word she means mounds or spirits of the mountains,
referring to those same mountains which archaeology describes as central features of the Neolithic and lazier Irish cultures.
He's megalithic mounds incorporations collective burial practises were constructed
with considerations given to the landscape and frequently astronomical alignments.
These features indicate calendrical ritual and religious functions,
reflecting a concern with the continuance of life cycles and with its dead, end quote.
The mythical people of the early Irish literature called the two of her Dadon people of the Goddess and or Donna,
are also associated in later folklore with the fairies through almost synonymous.
So the word she or she has distinct but related associations in that it can refer
to the spiritual beings themselves as the so-called fairy host of the other world,
or as as Tomaso Cohesive describes to an otherworld, hill or mound and to peace.
So she Akorn in modern Irish, so that the word she or sheet is not known for sure how it was pronounced in old Irish.
But in modern Irish it she this can mean the fairy beings themselves,
which are conceptualised as a collective moving across the landscape or with the fairy so-called fairy places,
the Schine being the mountains of the land on the landscape and also the quality of life in the other worlds,
the peaceful or harmonious nature of Tyrian and o'er the land of the eternal youth as its translation's a name for the other worlds.
So the just for example, in modern libraries we still have this meaning of shey, our name for the police force on guard.
The sheer can mean literally is Guardians of peace. So the old Irish terms for spiritual beings under boats are not directly translatable.
And the use of the English ferries and Ferry Road brings with us many different cultural and linguistic associations.
As mentioned in relation to semantic usages, the term she can refer to the otherworldly beings of vibration,
apology and also to the mounds which are above and below the level of the landscape that humans seek, adding to their liminal associations.
That's kind of in in the landscape. It's not as simple or as, you know, above and below the ground.
In the native language, reference can be made to both, whereas in English, different conceptualisations are involved with the terms.
Very unfair rerolled. The mythological Tony realm of the shooting is accessible via these mountains on the landscape was mentioned previously.
Some of these mounds are ringed forts, colloquially known as fairy forts.
Ring forts are the archaeological remains of circular settlements,
structures consisting of one or more round walls of earth or stone, sometimes with ditches between the walls.
They are found across northern Europe.
Some dacian to the first millennium of the Christian era or later, while others days to the Iron Age or earlier, perhaps some going back.
As far as the late Bronze Age, the Irish words for this type of settlement are less wrath than do all of which Moon fought and are,
as Patricia Lysis states, traditionally considered a dwelling place of the fairy race.
So this is in line with the mythological tradition of the people of the mountains.
As noted previously, the Irish word,
she can mean both the beings that inhabit the mountains and the mounds themselves or the entranceways into the the other worlds.
In fact, the inhabitants, as Carol Silver points out, were told to take their names from the mounds or she in which they dwelt.
Folklore collections of the 19th and early 20th centuries reflect a conceptualisation of an other
worlds community living side by side with their human neighbours and sometimes interacting.
Theories are presented as having intimate knowledge of the environment under the existing inside the land as a power or force.
Humans might be turned around or confused in a familiar place such as one's own field or enchanted by the fairies,
colloquially known as being led astray fairies, might those be understood as an animistic?
Animistic, undynamic agent encountered in the environment environment Maureen Nikolic remarks on this when she says faries like local
people were understood to be possessed of an intimate knowledge of the topographies of the areas surrounding their forts.
This is unsurprising, as according to popular traditions, fairies were often contemporaries living invisible lives parallel to those of
19th century populations and quote the land as access points to the fairy realm.
This part of the living tradition in Ireland and many of my research participants have described experiences they've had while I was in the landscape,
particularly in connexion with fairy forts and Hawthorne or fairy trees.
Berry legends have common themes of otherworldly knowledge and encounters that result in healing and benefits to human beings,
as well as the prevalence of motifs to do with misfortune and bad luck due to
unwanted fairy encounters or fairy fairy aggression rhetoric of retribution.
As Andrew Sneddon points out in his book, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland throughout throughout the early modern period,
fairy belief in Gaelic Irish culture provided a cogent explanatory mechanism for misfortune.
Even more so than Bosher stealing witches or even the evil eye from the
destruction of agricultural produce to death and illness in humans and livestock,
end quote. This is another aspect I found in my field of research, in my field research,
where farmers and others have spoken with me of their bad luck or fear of drawing bad luck.
By way of encountering otherworldly forces in their land.
So my my research project done as a I was interested in my great religions.
And I I went to Newfoundland's in order to make a more graphic documentary with the filmmaker Susanna Xalapa.
And we travelled around and interviewed people in different lands, Canada,
where there was a big wave of Irish emigration before before the famine and emigration to the United States.
And so I found that people in Newfoundland were extremely eager to speak about experiences they've had themselves or, you know, close family members.
And it's very open the way that they speak about these things.
Similarly, I did some research in Iceland on the adults and hold a fork or hidden people.
So there are many parallels also in the Nordic cultures.
And I also found in Iceland, people were very open about speaking about these things, these experiences.
And, you know, connected it with Icelandic heritage and culture and something to be proud of.
So that's the general feeling I I got in Ireland.
I know many people tell me things as part of my research, but also anecdotally, you know,
taxi driver isms and others will tell me things that they've experienced over the years.
I've heard many, many things, especially about bad luck or people getting sick or dying connected to ring forts or fairy trees being damaged.
But when people when it comes to interviewing people,
there's much more reluctance amongst my Irish research participants about being on camera, especially.
And, you know, the information being recorded. So I found just in some instances that people will tell me things.
But when we do the recordings or, you know, the official interview,
they'll tell me there's a farm further away or they'll just associate us from themselves.
This is something I'm looking into further. You know, why?
Why why are these different attitudes to this these kinds of beliefs?
And I think you just mentioned in Irish history, we've had and the case of Brigitte Cleary in 1895,
who was burned as a accused changeling, Fairey put in place of a human being.
So I think there's a process of what we might call cultural cannibalism,
where instead of rejecting the, you know, these stereotypes and disassociation between these beliefs,
some ignorance or backwardness, that instead of rejecting all that,
people internalise it and they they feel shame or as some kind of stigma about talking about it openly.
And so I mentioned at the start about the different approach and study of religions and folklore studies.
So it goes beyond different approaches to different attitudes also amongst academics, because with folk, religion in the Irish context,
something like the apparition apparitions of the Virgin Mary or moving statues are usually approached quite respectfully,
both in general discourse and they were approached as folk religion.
But when it comes to fairies, this is usually called folklore, and people might laugh if I'm talking about fairies.
So I think that's quite interesting and something thus I'm exploring further.