1 00:00:00,630 --> 00:00:09,060 You, Alice. I'm really delighted to take part in this symposium, I think these these subjects and topics are so important. 2 00:00:09,060 --> 00:00:18,240 And it's it's really great to be able to do some to have a comparative look at the different regions and countries. 3 00:00:18,240 --> 00:00:26,860 So just to give some context for my graphic research project on fairy law and landscapes. 4 00:00:26,860 --> 00:00:34,800 I mean, my background is in folklore study. I was in a folklore department for a long time and moved into study of religions. 5 00:00:34,800 --> 00:00:43,350 So I'm quite interested in different, you know, categorisations of spiritual beings and and, 6 00:00:43,350 --> 00:00:48,520 you know, different approaches and frameworks for the study of beliefs and traditions. 7 00:00:48,520 --> 00:00:55,860 And so that motivated me to look at the folklore material in a different way. 8 00:00:55,860 --> 00:01:02,990 And so I part of my project is to interview people about experiences like encounters 9 00:01:02,990 --> 00:01:10,890 with with fairy beings as well as broader traditions about the other worlds. 10 00:01:10,890 --> 00:01:18,390 So I'm I'm interested in looking at this material as an indigenous knowledge systems. 11 00:01:18,390 --> 00:01:30,540 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, 12 00:01:30,540 --> 00:01:36,290 these meanings and understandings are interconnected in the native Irish world. 13 00:01:36,290 --> 00:01:44,910 Local histories, family lineages and cultural memories are entwined with the otherworldly and the mythic. 14 00:01:44,910 --> 00:01:53,190 The spirits realm, Daisy's pagan kings and mythological battles are interconnected with old place names, 15 00:01:53,190 --> 00:01:57,420 sacred hymnals and areas of the Irish landscape. 16 00:01:57,420 --> 00:02:05,490 While some might view the other worldly and magical aspects of Irish culture to be some dwindling remnant of the past, 17 00:02:05,490 --> 00:02:11,010 my ethnographic research has shown these meanings and connexion to place to be a living 18 00:02:11,010 --> 00:02:17,960 part of Irish tradition and a significant feature of the lived experiences of many people. 19 00:02:17,960 --> 00:02:23,420 Ireland's troubled history of colonisation and resultant denigration of its people has been a 20 00:02:23,420 --> 00:02:28,570 major factor in the shaping of attitudes when it comes to Gaelic tradition of the other world. 21 00:02:28,570 --> 00:02:36,500 Imagine. Such traditional beliefs were utilised in anti Irish sentiment and through centuries of British rule, 22 00:02:36,500 --> 00:02:43,720 the Irish people were disparaged, portrayed frequently as backward and savage with ignorant beliefs. 23 00:02:43,720 --> 00:02:51,080 This has to some extent fed into stereo types of comic depictions of the drunken Irishman, the Fighting Irish. 24 00:02:51,080 --> 00:02:55,870 As with the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, it's Fighting Irish football team, 25 00:02:55,870 --> 00:03:02,160 local images which are conflated with the leprechaun of Irish legends. 26 00:03:02,160 --> 00:03:07,290 Belief in fairies has been ridiculed for different reasons on a different context. 27 00:03:07,290 --> 00:03:10,980 Since the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment era, 28 00:03:10,980 --> 00:03:17,850 such tradition have been associated with superstition or misunderstandings of the workings of nature, 29 00:03:17,850 --> 00:03:26,860 as well as being anti progressive and anti modern. Other processes of cultural and religious change have also had their impact on 30 00:03:26,860 --> 00:03:32,590 perceptions and understandings of other world of magical traditions Roman Catholicism, 31 00:03:32,590 --> 00:03:37,870 hegemonic religious tradition in our lives. Since mediaeval times, though, mixing into a cigarette, 32 00:03:37,870 --> 00:03:46,660 syncretic form of popular religion that absorbed many older religious elements still worked to disparage the paganism that preceded us. 33 00:03:46,660 --> 00:03:49,450 Many place names associated with deities, 34 00:03:49,450 --> 00:03:57,610 the spiritual world of the fairies were given alternate names that negatively associated them with [INAUDIBLE] or the demonic. 35 00:03:57,610 --> 00:04:09,670 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. 36 00:04:09,670 --> 00:04:18,070 I'm disguised as Bath Crooklyn in County Roscommon, which has the alternate name Hell's Motorcade's or the Irish Entrance to [INAUDIBLE]. 37 00:04:18,070 --> 00:04:23,530 As discussed by Patrick McCafferty in his study of Caves and Arnon's archaeology, 38 00:04:23,530 --> 00:04:32,530 myth and folklore in the mediaeval manuscripts such as the metrical Dan Jenkins, which means place named Lore. 39 00:04:32,530 --> 00:04:39,570 It is just described how the mighty Morrigan, an ancient goddess of battle, emerges from the Cave of Crooker. 40 00:04:39,570 --> 00:04:46,120 Her fish a boat along with pigs and malevolent, magical birds in the nation worldview. 41 00:04:46,120 --> 00:04:54,810 The spiritual world is coterminous with the earth and accessible through caves in the mountains or hollow hills of the landscape. 42 00:04:54,810 --> 00:05:00,160 The reinterpretation of so-called fairy places within a Christian cosmology that connects 43 00:05:00,160 --> 00:05:07,550 them to the diabolical led to the further marginalisation of indigenous knowledge of place. 44 00:05:07,550 --> 00:05:14,570 Through various nationalist, literary and artistic movements, their husband, romanticisation of Irishness, 45 00:05:14,570 --> 00:05:20,390 particularly of the magical and mythological elements embedded into Irish Gaelic culture, 46 00:05:20,390 --> 00:05:25,430 which has been romanticised in its connexion to the Celtic past. 47 00:05:25,430 --> 00:05:34,090 Something that we've heard about already from Julius Ward in relation to the romanticisation of the Welsh. 48 00:05:34,090 --> 00:05:40,330 So all of these processes complication the connexions between people and place. 49 00:05:40,330 --> 00:05:49,510 Today, Ireland is often humorously categorised from outside as a land of simple, jovial folk who believe in fairies, 50 00:05:49,510 --> 00:05:57,010 while discourses within the country often draw on similar light-hearted constructions of these particular cultural traditions, 51 00:05:57,010 --> 00:06:05,980 with a thinly veiled nervousness of being associated with such superstitions, so-called superstitions. 52 00:06:05,980 --> 00:06:09,530 We even have a leprechaun museum in Ireland. 53 00:06:09,530 --> 00:06:15,820 So these things are often discussed in a light-hearted way. 54 00:06:15,820 --> 00:06:20,830 The marginalisation of traditional worldviews and the demotion of spiritual connexion to 55 00:06:20,830 --> 00:06:28,090 place to superstition has a long and complex history with a multitude of factors at play. 56 00:06:28,090 --> 00:06:35,210 The terms, folklore, mythology and pish Ohga, which is the Irish word for superstitions, 57 00:06:35,210 --> 00:06:39,240 are used to describe such cultural material in the Irish context, 58 00:06:39,240 --> 00:06:47,840 but rarely has it been regarded or approached by scholars as indigenous knowledge or native or ancient wisdom of place. 59 00:06:47,840 --> 00:06:57,300 The terms indigenous and native are contentious and emotive in the Irish millia when it comes to the island's inhabitants, cultures and identities. 60 00:06:57,300 --> 00:07:00,720 Conflicting claims are made about what is intrinsically Irish. 61 00:07:00,720 --> 00:07:07,110 What it means to be Irish, usually defined against foreign or imported traditions and identities. 62 00:07:07,110 --> 00:07:10,840 Due to Ireland's political and social socio cultural history, 63 00:07:10,840 --> 00:07:18,130 there is an unease around definitions of indigenised you that rest on ancestry, heritage and place. 64 00:07:18,130 --> 00:07:22,330 Though acknowledging and accepting the complexities of politicised identities 65 00:07:22,330 --> 00:07:27,910 and disregards the problematic nature of strict definitions of Irishness, 66 00:07:27,910 --> 00:07:33,400 there seems no reason not to place spiritual meanings of place on the traditional 67 00:07:33,400 --> 00:07:40,110 relationship with the land into the framework of an indigenous knowledge system. 68 00:07:40,110 --> 00:07:45,210 There are cultural strands or symbolic threads in the modern day that connect people to 69 00:07:45,210 --> 00:07:53,090 locality and the lands that likely have their origins in the Celtic or pre Celtic past. 70 00:07:53,090 --> 00:08:00,650 Christian scribes wrote the mediaeval accounts of the ace, she an old Irish language term for a mythical race of beings. 71 00:08:00,650 --> 00:08:05,200 The people of the mounds later translated as fairies talk. 72 00:08:05,200 --> 00:08:11,840 Thompson notes that the translation into fairies, quote was damagingly misleading. 73 00:08:11,840 --> 00:08:22,060 And the progressing colonial belittlement of the ancient Irish tradition in the English Victorian era has been well-documented. 74 00:08:22,060 --> 00:08:36,930 Indeed, the English term, very poetic usage, has associations with Edmund Spencer, the the English poet best known for the fairy queen. 75 00:08:36,930 --> 00:08:45,030 And Edmund Spenser was was a racist regarding the Irish as a disruptive and degraded people 76 00:08:45,030 --> 00:08:50,430 and expressed a view that the starvation of the people by way of famine was a useful tool. 77 00:08:50,430 --> 00:09:00,780 And so during the country. So there are many nuances to be the words used to describe such such beliefs and traditions talk. 78 00:09:00,780 --> 00:09:08,900 Thompson's observations have rested on the enhancement of knowledge by way of interdisciplinary communication between archaeology and folkloristic. 79 00:09:08,900 --> 00:09:19,260 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, 80 00:09:19,260 --> 00:09:27,330 referring to those same mountains which archaeology describes as central features of the Neolithic and lazier Irish cultures. 81 00:09:27,330 --> 00:09:32,460 He's megalithic mounds incorporations collective burial practises were constructed 82 00:09:32,460 --> 00:09:37,500 with considerations given to the landscape and frequently astronomical alignments. 83 00:09:37,500 --> 00:09:41,730 These features indicate calendrical ritual and religious functions, 84 00:09:41,730 --> 00:09:48,350 reflecting a concern with the continuance of life cycles and with its dead, end quote. 85 00:09:48,350 --> 00:09:56,160 The mythical people of the early Irish literature called the two of her Dadon people of the Goddess and or Donna, 86 00:09:56,160 --> 00:10:01,860 are also associated in later folklore with the fairies through almost synonymous. 87 00:10:01,860 --> 00:10:09,150 So the word she or she has distinct but related associations in that it can refer 88 00:10:09,150 --> 00:10:14,610 to the spiritual beings themselves as the so-called fairy host of the other world, 89 00:10:14,610 --> 00:10:21,990 or as as Tomaso Cohesive describes to an otherworld, hill or mound and to peace. 90 00:10:21,990 --> 00:10:32,370 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. 91 00:10:32,370 --> 00:10:37,500 But in modern Irish it she this can mean the fairy beings themselves, 92 00:10:37,500 --> 00:10:44,790 which are conceptualised as a collective moving across the landscape or with the fairy so-called fairy places, 93 00:10:44,790 --> 00:10:51,370 the Schine being the mountains of the land on the landscape and also the quality of life in the other worlds, 94 00:10:51,370 --> 00:11:01,140 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. 95 00:11:01,140 --> 00:11:09,040 So the just for example, in modern libraries we still have this meaning of shey, our name for the police force on guard. 96 00:11:09,040 --> 00:11:19,440 The sheer can mean literally is Guardians of peace. So the old Irish terms for spiritual beings under boats are not directly translatable. 97 00:11:19,440 --> 00:11:27,280 And the use of the English ferries and Ferry Road brings with us many different cultural and linguistic associations. 98 00:11:27,280 --> 00:11:33,430 As mentioned in relation to semantic usages, the term she can refer to the otherworldly beings of vibration, 99 00:11:33,430 --> 00:11:42,230 apology and also to the mounds which are above and below the level of the landscape that humans seek, adding to their liminal associations. 100 00:11:42,230 --> 00:11:48,150 That's kind of in in the landscape. It's not as simple or as, you know, above and below the ground. 101 00:11:48,150 --> 00:11:56,610 In the native language, reference can be made to both, whereas in English, different conceptualisations are involved with the terms. 102 00:11:56,610 --> 00:12:05,810 Very unfair rerolled. The mythological Tony realm of the shooting is accessible via these mountains on the landscape was mentioned previously. 103 00:12:05,810 --> 00:12:10,850 Some of these mounds are ringed forts, colloquially known as fairy forts. 104 00:12:10,850 --> 00:12:14,930 Ring forts are the archaeological remains of circular settlements, 105 00:12:14,930 --> 00:12:22,160 structures consisting of one or more round walls of earth or stone, sometimes with ditches between the walls. 106 00:12:22,160 --> 00:12:24,080 They are found across northern Europe. 107 00:12:24,080 --> 00:12:32,120 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. 108 00:12:32,120 --> 00:12:42,320 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, 109 00:12:42,320 --> 00:12:49,640 as Patricia Lysis states, traditionally considered a dwelling place of the fairy race. 110 00:12:49,640 --> 00:12:55,370 So this is in line with the mythological tradition of the people of the mountains. 111 00:12:55,370 --> 00:12:57,080 As noted previously, the Irish word, 112 00:12:57,080 --> 00:13:05,030 she can mean both the beings that inhabit the mountains and the mounds themselves or the entranceways into the the other worlds. 113 00:13:05,030 --> 00:13:14,470 In fact, the inhabitants, as Carol Silver points out, were told to take their names from the mounds or she in which they dwelt. 114 00:13:14,470 --> 00:13:20,410 Folklore collections of the 19th and early 20th centuries reflect a conceptualisation of an other 115 00:13:20,410 --> 00:13:26,480 worlds community living side by side with their human neighbours and sometimes interacting. 116 00:13:26,480 --> 00:13:34,600 Theories are presented as having intimate knowledge of the environment under the existing inside the land as a power or force. 117 00:13:34,600 --> 00:13:42,130 Humans might be turned around or confused in a familiar place such as one's own field or enchanted by the fairies, 118 00:13:42,130 --> 00:13:48,870 colloquially known as being led astray fairies, might those be understood as an animistic? 119 00:13:48,870 --> 00:13:59,820 Animistic, undynamic agent encountered in the environment environment Maureen Nikolic remarks on this when she says faries like local 120 00:13:59,820 --> 00:14:07,530 people were understood to be possessed of an intimate knowledge of the topographies of the areas surrounding their forts. 121 00:14:07,530 --> 00:14:15,390 This is unsurprising, as according to popular traditions, fairies were often contemporaries living invisible lives parallel to those of 122 00:14:15,390 --> 00:14:22,080 19th century populations and quote the land as access points to the fairy realm. 123 00:14:22,080 --> 00:14:30,150 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, 124 00:14:30,150 --> 00:14:35,560 particularly in connexion with fairy forts and Hawthorne or fairy trees. 125 00:14:35,560 --> 00:14:42,850 Berry legends have common themes of otherworldly knowledge and encounters that result in healing and benefits to human beings, 126 00:14:42,850 --> 00:14:47,560 as well as the prevalence of motifs to do with misfortune and bad luck due to 127 00:14:47,560 --> 00:14:53,500 unwanted fairy encounters or fairy fairy aggression rhetoric of retribution. 128 00:14:53,500 --> 00:15:01,840 As Andrew Sneddon points out in his book, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland throughout throughout the early modern period, 129 00:15:01,840 --> 00:15:07,840 fairy belief in Gaelic Irish culture provided a cogent explanatory mechanism for misfortune. 130 00:15:07,840 --> 00:15:12,670 Even more so than Bosher stealing witches or even the evil eye from the 131 00:15:12,670 --> 00:15:17,660 destruction of agricultural produce to death and illness in humans and livestock, 132 00:15:17,660 --> 00:15:24,250 end quote. This is another aspect I found in my field of research, in my field research, 133 00:15:24,250 --> 00:15:30,820 where farmers and others have spoken with me of their bad luck or fear of drawing bad luck. 134 00:15:30,820 --> 00:15:35,770 By way of encountering otherworldly forces in their land. 135 00:15:35,770 --> 00:15:42,280 So my my research project done as a I was interested in my great religions. 136 00:15:42,280 --> 00:15:52,840 And I I went to Newfoundland's in order to make a more graphic documentary with the filmmaker Susanna Xalapa. 137 00:15:52,840 --> 00:15:56,320 And we travelled around and interviewed people in different lands, Canada, 138 00:15:56,320 --> 00:16:07,960 where there was a big wave of Irish emigration before before the famine and emigration to the United States. 139 00:16:07,960 --> 00:16:20,830 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. 140 00:16:20,830 --> 00:16:26,140 And it's very open the way that they speak about these things. 141 00:16:26,140 --> 00:16:33,100 Similarly, I did some research in Iceland on the adults and hold a fork or hidden people. 142 00:16:33,100 --> 00:16:38,450 So there are many parallels also in the Nordic cultures. 143 00:16:38,450 --> 00:16:46,630 And I also found in Iceland, people were very open about speaking about these things, these experiences. 144 00:16:46,630 --> 00:16:54,310 And, you know, connected it with Icelandic heritage and culture and something to be proud of. 145 00:16:54,310 --> 00:16:59,470 So that's the general feeling I I got in Ireland. 146 00:16:59,470 --> 00:17:06,310 I know many people tell me things as part of my research, but also anecdotally, you know, 147 00:17:06,310 --> 00:17:12,760 taxi driver isms and others will tell me things that they've experienced over the years. 148 00:17:12,760 --> 00:17:22,420 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. 149 00:17:22,420 --> 00:17:25,360 But when people when it comes to interviewing people, 150 00:17:25,360 --> 00:17:34,520 there's much more reluctance amongst my Irish research participants about being on camera, especially. 151 00:17:34,520 --> 00:17:43,750 And, you know, the information being recorded. So I found just in some instances that people will tell me things. 152 00:17:43,750 --> 00:17:47,260 But when we do the recordings or, you know, the official interview, 153 00:17:47,260 --> 00:17:54,520 they'll tell me there's a farm further away or they'll just associate us from themselves. 154 00:17:54,520 --> 00:17:58,510 This is something I'm looking into further. You know, why? 155 00:17:58,510 --> 00:18:06,160 Why why are these different attitudes to this these kinds of beliefs? 156 00:18:06,160 --> 00:18:16,690 And I think you just mentioned in Irish history, we've had and the case of Brigitte Cleary in 1895, 157 00:18:16,690 --> 00:18:23,080 who was burned as a accused changeling, Fairey put in place of a human being. 158 00:18:23,080 --> 00:18:28,390 So I think there's a process of what we might call cultural cannibalism, 159 00:18:28,390 --> 00:18:37,500 where instead of rejecting the, you know, these stereotypes and disassociation between these beliefs, 160 00:18:37,500 --> 00:18:41,830 some ignorance or backwardness, that instead of rejecting all that, 161 00:18:41,830 --> 00:18:50,000 people internalise it and they they feel shame or as some kind of stigma about talking about it openly. 162 00:18:50,000 --> 00:18:57,640 And so I mentioned at the start about the different approach and study of religions and folklore studies. 163 00:18:57,640 --> 00:19:10,450 So it goes beyond different approaches to different attitudes also amongst academics, because with folk, religion in the Irish context, 164 00:19:10,450 --> 00:19:20,500 something like the apparition apparitions of the Virgin Mary or moving statues are usually approached quite respectfully, 165 00:19:20,500 --> 00:19:24,730 both in general discourse and they were approached as folk religion. 166 00:19:24,730 --> 00:19:33,930 But when it comes to fairies, this is usually called folklore, and people might laugh if I'm talking about fairies. 167 00:19:33,930 --> 00:19:41,205 So I think that's quite interesting and something thus I'm exploring further.