Richard Alexander Allen

This paper will look at the debate that raged on “Republican.ie”, an Irish Republican website, following the release of the book Blanketmen in 2005, which challenged the legend of the 1981 hunger strikers, a key narrative in the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community in Northern Ireland. The paper will examine the use of source material; how individuals adapt evidence to suit their preferred narrative; and how the internet plays a role in fostering this. By doing so, it hopes to explore the interplay between historical discourse and folklore, between History and Folkloristics and between the internet and oral tradition.

An interdisciplinary panel looking at differerent research projects which deal with the concept of "walking with intent". A fifteen minute paper which summarised the paper from AFS 2013 about the Orange Order parades and the messages they send out to the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community in Northern Ireland ("Ulster Says No: Gencarella’s Critical Folklore Studies and Cultural Sustainability"). For more information, please refer to that paper which can also be found in this section.

For years, academics have argued that the Nordic myths were preserved due to antiquarian interest amongst the Icelanders, but I find this argument somewhat unconvincing. Instead I shall approach the topic from a folkloristic standpoint, which argues that groups only preserve things which are in some way important to them and their identity. In what way would pagan myths be important to Christian Icelanders? Why would they preserve them? In this paper I hope to address this question by looking specifically at the myths about Loki. By looking at the textual sources for these myths, preserved in the 13th and 14th centuries, I will seek to explain what messages Icelanders at that time might have found in these myths. The first part of the paper will argue that Loki is a trickster figure by attempting to arrange the myths about him into a cycle. By doing so, I will be able to compare Loki to other trickster figures and using Jung’s theories I will make an argument for Loki’s role in Icelandic society. Hopefully, this will be the start of a larger project which will include all the myths.

This paper looks at Stephen Olbrys Gencarella’s idea of Critical Folklore Studies and its compatibility with cultural sustainability. Gencarella calls for folklorists to tackle hegemonic forms of folklore in an effort to help subaltern groups. In doing so, it could happen that a folklorist contributes to the destruction of a form of folklore. This paper will look at Protestant traditions in Northern Ireland which are highly contentious and which could be described as hegemonic. By doing so, the paper will attempt to create answer, and create discussion about, the question of whether folklorists should always strive for cultural sustainability.

This thesis is a study of an ongoing debate in the Irish Republican and wider Catholic/Nationalist/Republican communities in Northern Ireland. The debate began in 2005 and revolves around the claim that Sinn Féin, one of the main Republican parties in the region, let six of ten hunger strikers die in 1981 in order to gain votes and political power. The project examines the debate as it appears on “Republican.ie”, an Irish Republican website, and how the users form narratives about the events in 1981. It specifically looks at posts made on the website from 2008 all the way to the present day in order to trace repeating patterns of behaviour amongst the user-base, such as how the users evaluate the various pieces of evidence and the manner in which they employ this evidence in the service of the narrative they wish to tell. The project argues that this behaviour is not restricted to the users of “Republican.ie”, but will be found amongst the wider Republican community in Northern Ireland and probably everyone and therefore the behaviour discussed might reveal much about the transmission of folk narratives in the modern age and how they come into being.