DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12497 SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE Towards a new “folkloric turn” in the literature of early modern Ireland Sarah Covington The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, New York Abstract Correspondence Sarah Covington, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003. Email: sarah.covington@qc.cuny.edu This essay offers new suggestions in the study of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century English and Irish literature through a specifically folkloric lens. While scholars of medieval and modern texts in Ireland have made much progress in uncovering and debating the presence of popular oral traditions (and orality in general) in their respective sources, those who focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have yet to fully explore the same attributes in their own rich body of literature. This essay will therefore survey the sources, methods, and directions which a “folkloric turn” can take, especially as it incorporates a range of models that can be used to analyze orality, residues of popular traditions, and the utilization of particular motifs to open a new prism onto the period. While there are certainly challenges in utilizing this approach, folklore has the potential to contextualize and deepen our understanding of sources that include antiquarian records, travel accounts, ballads, legal depositions, English and Irish poetry, and even the modern folkloric tales to which they relate. 1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N The study of early modern Ireland has witnessed an exciting resurgence in the last 20 years, and we owe literary scholars credit for illuminating great swathes of it. Historians, archeologists, and other scholars have contributed to this wave as well, particularly in their explorations of material culture, violence, gender, and archipelagic or three‐kingdoms history. Meanwhile, Vincent Morley, Patricia Palmer, Marc Caball, Michelle O'Riordan, Brendan Kane, Sarah McKibben, and others continue to remind us about the vital and indeed indispensable value of Irish‐ language material, which allows us to question existing assumptions and interpretations about the early modern period (Morley, 2017). Yet Ireland also remains open to new directions, and the kinds of questions and neglected themes that other disciplines and perspectives may bring to its texts. Specifically, and as Guy Beiner has most notably Literature Compass. 2018;15:e12497. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12497 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lic3 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 of 13 2 of 13 COVINGTON reminded us, folklore and popular oral traditions could reveal valuable and even transformative insights when applied not only to Irish‐language material but also to the most well‐worn of early modern English texts relating to the country (Beiner, 2009). While modern literary scholars have paid attention to those narrative forms, and scholars of early Irish literature are keenly attuned to the workings of myth and folkloric elements in their own texts, students of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐ century literature—the focus of this essay—have with a few exceptions yet to fully engage with the question of folklore in any deep or sustained way. In taking up this call, literary scholars thus could lead the way here as well. Folklore and literature were once close companions, with literary scholars turning to popular oral narratives in order to understand the motifs, plots, narrative devices, and genres that might have influenced poetry and other written forms. Stith Thompson, the great scholar of folklore and co‐developer of the Aarne–Thompson motif‐index system, was himself a professor of literature. But even in 1940, his was a somewhat lonely path, as he lamented to the Modern Language Association that “It has always seemed to me strange that American literary scholars have given so little attention to the study of the folktale.” Part of the problem lay in literary scholars' (understandable) privileging of written and often elite texts, with folklore considered either residual or supplementary, or itself borrowing of literary productions (Thompson, 1940, pp. 866–867; Bacchilega, 2012, pp. 177–179). Folklorists themselves devoted their attention to the narrative aspects of tales, yet many of them eventually turned away from the literary, to focus instead on those tales' performativity, orality, or anthropological elements. As Ó Giolláin (2000) has pointed out, folklorists in Ireland (and elsewhere) thus began to view themselves through the category of ethnographer or cultural historian, rather than as text‐dependent literary scholar. And to be fair, it is important to respect disciplinary divides and maintain certain divisions between oral and the written sources, folkloric and literary texts—or, by the same token, between undateable and more precisely dateable narratives, between the popular and the elite, tradition and innovation, the anonymous and the (mostly) authored, the variational and the (relatively) fixed narrative, and the different methodological approaches attendant upon each (Rosenberg, 1991, pp. 7–17). Despite the increasing estrangement, many scholars in both fields nevertheless persisted in their explorations of the dynamic between popular traditions and literature. Medievalists have probed into the folkloric dimensions, for example, embedded in the Miller's Tale, the Arthurian romances, and Chrétien de Troyes (Mandel & Rosenberg, 1970). The great Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow once argued that Beowulf, or rather Grendel, is derived from Irish storytelling tradition (Bringéus, 2009). With regard to earlier Irish literature, it has been accepted as a given that, as Bo Almqvist once asserted, in Ireland “we have ancient literatures, rich in folklore motifs, which, thanks to the different character of the types and genres represented in them, complement each other excellently” (Almqvist & Ní Dhuibhne, 1991, p. xxvii). In addition to the abundance of scholarship that focuses on mythological themes, Tom Peete Cross' Motif‐index of Early Irish Literature, working in part off the Stith‐Thompson index, remains an essential resource in tracing folkloric elements, while the work of Joseph Falaky Nagy provides a methodological model as he scrutinizes Fenian lore for its more oral and social dimensions (Cross, 1952; Nagy, 1985). Scholars of modern Irish literature have also sought out the presence of vernacular oral expressions in polished printed forms. With the increasing embrace of folklore and, not unrelatedly, nationalism in the nineteenth century, writers such as Yeats—to cite the most famous example—transcribed and heavily edited tales (themselves literary products) and included them, along with mythology, into their own work (Thuente, 1989). Later on, Joyce and Flann O'Brien remained deeply partial to jokes, tongue‐twisters, tales, proverbs, and riddles that comprise the verbal arts. More recently and from the historiographical end, pioneers such as Angela Bourke have incorporated folklore into powerful historical narratives and grounded it in the very forefront of their analysis. Of course, it should be emphasized that literary scholars of early and modern Ireland are each working with entirely different sources— for example, older sagas dating from the Old and Middle Irish periods, or the romances of the twelfth through seventeenth centuries, versus modern literature and folklore. They also ask different questions of those texts and arrive at their own distinct conclusions, with scholars of latter‐day Ireland uncovering the influences of earlier texts and oral traditions on modernity itself. Yet both analyze the formal and thematic elements of their respective texts in order to question the multimodal relationship between oral and literate knowledge. In doing so, they uncover the “symbolic capital of stories and seanchas” as they coursed through spoken and written narratives COVINGTON 3 of 13 and held resonance for the communities that produced and received them (Bourke, 2001; Cronin, Crosson, & Eastlake, 2009; Markey & O'Connor, 2014). Scholars who focus on material in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have begun to address the question of orality and textuality in their own texts, but the subject of folklore tends to still lag behind. The situation has not changed greatly since 1992, for example, when the journal Béaloideas published the proceedings of a 1991 conference that brought together scholars of Irish literature and folklore. The issue contained an important piece on migratory legends in medieval literature, by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, but then vaulted forward to “Supernatural Legends in Nineteenth‐Century Irish Writing,” with an excursion into (modern) “Legends of the Supernatural in Anglo‐Irish Literature” (1992, pp. 57–74; 1992, pp. 93–144). One suspects that the vast stretch between these two periods constituted a lacuna on the part of early modern scholars more than an oversight by the conference's conveners or journal's editors. This essay will therefore offer some modest suggestions for how this oversight can be addressed by situating English and Irish texts through a specifically folkloristic lens. Specifically, the following survey will discuss sources amenable to such an approach, questions that might be asked of those sources, and the methods that might be applied to each. Finally, it will offer some examples of where these sources and methods could be taken, and why such an approach is important in revealing previously overlooked dimensions within these texts. Geoffrey Keating (Seathrún Céitinn) was considered the first to coin the term “béaloideas” (which he spelled “beuloideas”) in 1629, but the modern word “folklore,” and the conceptual and disciplinary framework that developed around that term, would not emerge until the nineteenth century (Cunningham, 2000, p. 116; Blyn‐ LaDrew, 1996, p. 5; Ó Giolláin, 2000, pp. 46–48; Ó Giolláin, 2012; Ó hÓgáin, 2002). The two words are not quite synonymous in any case, with béaloideas literally translating as “oral education” or tradition, thus excluding any mention of the common people (folk), material culture, or other aspects encompassed in the modern word “folklore.” Keating also referenced the term more generally to mean “oral narration,” and in this sense, he attributed it to bardic elites performing before their patrons rather than those less elevated “folk” and their homespun yarns or superstitions (Blyn‐LaDrew, 1996, p. 12). Over time, the meaning of béaloideas changed and became more overtly folkloric in the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, especially after the first volume of Béaloideas was published in 1927 by the Folklore of Ireland Society. Meanwhile, the term seanchas—an entirely different semantic word in its own right—also came to be aligned with “the orally preserved social‐historical tradition,” even though Keating most likely used the term to connote traditional, elite history (Delargy, 1969, p. 4; Blyn‐LaDrew, 1996, p. 12; Ó Giolláin, 2000, p. 48). As Cristina Bacchilega has pointed out, it is important to make distinctions within these worlds of orality of which béaloideas and seanchas were only one part, for while there can certainly exist an overlap between folkloric and literary elements, “not all oral traditions are folk,” just as “not all folkloric literature is oral” (Bacchilega, 2012, p. 450). There is also a significant distinction—which is often confused—between, for example, folklore and mythology, fables, fairy tales, and romances, even if interconnections may exist between them all. Fionn mac Cumhaill, for example, belongs to Irish mythology, though his transmission and incorporation into popular Irish folk tales places him in those latter realms as well (Murphy, 1953; Nagy, 1985); similar is St. Patrick, whose own trajectory moves from hagiography to classical Irish texts to popular tales and sometimes back again, often with surprising and distinctly non‐ religious variants (Gillespie, 2005, p. 164; MacKillop, 1986; Ó Súilleabháin, 2011). Despite the rich existence of an English and Irish‐language oral tradition in Ireland, what we would today call folklore—legends, proverbs, jokes, songs—was frequently scorned in the early modern period as base entertainment not worthy of textualization. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Seán Ó Coileáin has pointed out, oral traditions associated with “ordinary” or everyday life would not have been deemed fit for manuscripts produced by and directed towards an elite if heterogeneous class of readers, even if Irish‐language poets did begin to write for a wider readership and occasionally employ commonplace speech (1984, p. 114). And many elites held to the views of Keating, whose quest to write “the truth of the state of the country” and counter negative accounts of Ireland compelled him to focus on more elevated Irish traditions and people and correct Giraldus Cambrensis' earlier account of Ireland's alleged “inferiors and wretched little hags”—a narrative that was reinforced by near‐contemporaries Fynes COVINGTON 4 of 13 Moryson and Spenser (Cunningham, 2000, p. 106; McKibben, 2015). On the other hand, Keating's An Forás Feasa, as will be seen, was not entirely averse to traces of what could be considered folkloric or at least “popular” elements. Two hundred years after Keating, and quite ironically given his intimacy with Ireland and its oral traditions, the great Ordnance Survey memoirist John O'Donovan would himself dismiss much of the folklore he encountered in his pre‐Famine canvassing through Ireland. As he wrote in one letter, I must lay it down as a kind of postulate, if not [axiomatic] that respectable written authority is preferable to any oral tradition, since the more I look into the traditions preserved among the peasantry to account for the names of places, the less I think of their title to historical credit. For O'Donovan, “historical credit” rested in the Annals of the Four Masters, a chronicle of historical lore compiled by Mícheál Ó Cléirigh and others in the seventeenth century, even if the Annals itself might have been based in part on oral tradition (Cunningham, 2010, p. 135; Gailey, 1982; Moore, 1938, p. 163; Zimmerman, 2001, p. 114). O'Donovan, however, also knew, as his contemporary Margaret Stokes wrote to his colleague George Petrie, that “an Irish tradition is a vocal history,” and indeed, even at the level of folklore, while such a tradition “may be corrupted it is never unfounded” (Doherty, 2004, pp. 123–124). Meanwhile, others more amenable to folklore were embarking on their own efforts in the early nineteenth century to record stories and publish them, the most notable collectors being Thomas Crofton Croker—dismissed by O'Donovan as “that little fairy elf”—as well as Patrick Kennedy and later on Jeremiah Curtin and Lady Gregory (Ó Giolláin, 2000, pp. 94–113; Delaney, 1983). Folklore in Ireland, however, reached its efflorescence—and institutionalization and professionalization—after the Republic's independence, with the government's establishment in 1935 of the Irish Folklore Commission under the direction of the charismatic James Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga). His and others' efforts led to a scholarly and systematic collection of folkloric material that resulted in one of the great world archives, the National Folklore Collection (NFC), containing tens of thousands of tales and songs in English and Irish that were gathered and transcribed over the course of the twentieth century. The commission's remit later extended to the six counties of Northern Ireland, aided in great part by the collecting of the NFC's Michael J. Murphy; though not free of contention, due in part to political divisions as well as a frosty relationship between Delargy and the great ethnologist E. Estyn Evans, the collection nevertheless is more representative of the entire island than many claim (Briody, 2008, pp. 290–294). With a still‐constant influx of new material and projects—urban folklore, travelers' stories, and now (non‐elite) protestants in the Republic—the National Folklore Collection remains very much a living archive today. Early modern scholars would benefit from using the NFC's well‐cataloged manuscript sources or especially its website, www.duchas.ie, even though these sources firmly belong to the time and place in which they were recorded and transcribed. Even so, connections can be made. Many early modern events or people—the Flight of the Earls, Hugh O'Neill, Elizabeth, and (especially) Oliver Cromwell—appear in the NFC sources, revealing much about the nature of popular memory, narrative, and subaltern resistance across time. A morphology can also be constructed by identifying earlier and later iterations of themes, motifs, and narratives, even as one acknowledges that stories change across time, their meanings altered according to particular social, political, and cultural contexts. Keating, for example, discusses the high king Labraid Loingsech as having horse's ears—an image that recalls King Midas with donkey's ears, or the Welsh King March Ab Meirchion, similarly with horse's ears (Cunningham, 2000, p. 125). But then the image recurs in the NFC archives, specifically referencing “Labhraidh O'Loingseach” but this time as a joke. How, then, did the story get from there to here, from Keating (and earlier) to the National Folklore Collection, and what did it mean to communities as disparate as Keating's readers or early twentieth‐century storytellers, and all else in between? What, moreover, does the story tell us about the dissemination of such dense and erudite material into the popular culture, and the trajectories it assumed? And what do these and other recurrences reveal about tradition, or narrative permutation and audience reception? The great historian Marc Bloch once advocated in favor of what he called the “regressive method,” which entails the tracing of stories or motifs from later to earlier in order to reconstruct a genealogy of evidence, in this case of fragmentary folkloric allusions and records. Scholars can therefore begin by exploring the NFC sources for early COVINGTON 5 of 13 modern‐related narratives or popular traditions and then track them back through the centuries; by the same token, one could begin with early modern folkloric fragments—the horse‐eared king, or genres such as mummers plays— before taking them forward (Gailey, 1969, p. 8). It should be emphasized, as Peter Burke has pointed out, that this tracing effort does not mean that one should “cheerfully” assume that different stories or themes apply in the same way across time or should simply be placed in any kind of self‐evident lineage. Rather, the use of the regressive method “allows us to criticize or interpret the documentary sources,” and to “[suggest] connections” and fill out gaps that exist between them (Burke, 2009, pp. 125–129). Absent an early modern version of the NFC archive, fragments of earlier popular stories or motifs can be located in topographical, historical, and antiquarian‐related writings by men such as Keating, by Old English humanists such as Richard Stanihurst, or by English and Welsh outsiders or newcomers such as Meredith Hanmer, Edmund Campion, John Hooker, and of course Spenser. Many who focused on writing the history of Ireland, at least earlier on, borrowed from Giraldus Cambrensis at the same time that they could scorn him as a source. For Keating and others such as Philip O'Sullivan Beare, Giraldus was a foreigner who had slandered Ireland; for the seemingly more amenable Campion, he was simply “stuffed with much impertinent matters” (Snyder, 1920, pp. 155–156). Even so, Campion, Stanihurst, and others continued to utilize Giraldus, and anyone who traces popular traditions in these later works would have to seek after possible recurrences in the twelfth‐century Norman‐Welsh historian, whose tales could include such legends, for example, as the drowned city at the bottom of Lough Neagh, sunk by God in a flood for the sins of the people (Cambrensis, 2000, p. 39). Antiquarian and travel accounts might have been composed earlier, but they attained greater cultural and anthropological sophistication in the later seventeenth century and beyond. James Ware (1594–1666), a protégé of James Ussher and compiler of histories by Hanmer, Campion, and Spenser, was highly interested in the customs, early history and writings of Ireland; but his own endeavors represented a new perspective influenced by the scholarship of contemporaries such as John Selden, and in more “authoritative” ancient and early Irish texts rather than “Works of Later ages” (Parry, 1995). Ware's Antiquities and History of Ireland is therefore a valuable and still relatively under‐ utilized source for scholars who wish to locate popular customs of an earlier age while analyzing their presentation by a seventeenth‐century writer. While Ware was not above denouncing the “miraculous” stories of the country, and his study ends with the Norman invasion, his account, in the words of Mark Williams, presents an Ireland that is “a civilization of elaborate Druidic rituals and ancestral tradition,” of “incomparably skilled musicians,” and “superstition” itself “deemed worthy of enquiry” (Williams, 2010, pp. 45–46). Folkloric elements and oral traditions thus appear, if elusively at times, within the learned layers of a Ware or the quasi‐anthropological details of those writers influenced by Giraldus. A more direct access to the popular can be found in travel writers who did not consult texts so much as the people and places themselves—even if their own writings were no less mediated in their way. Many of these writings spill over into the eighteenth century, but they remain useful in locating beliefs and practices that could be connected to literary texts, or again, to simply fill in the gaps of those texts. To cite one of the more well‐known examples, John Dunton's Dublin Scuffle (1699) and Teague Land (1698), provide us with descriptions not only of daily life but also of ceremonies, rituals, and foods (Carpenter, 2000; Carpenter, 2003). Subsequent accounts by Joseph Cooper Walker or Thomas Percy often include folklore in their writings, even if such tales are presented as quaint residuals of the “ordinary” people (Ó Giolláin, 2012, p. 413; Carpenter, 2000; Carpenter, 2003). Ballads in English and Irish provide another relatively direct portal into early modern Ireland's vernacular culture, even though John Moulden reminds us that the term “ballad” formally referred to a piece of manuscript or printed paper that transcribed the song, and not the song itself. In other words, the ballad was not wholly oral, even though of course it was ultimately spoken or sung (Moulden, 2016). Illustrating one method and approach that scholars could take towards this material, Andrew Carpenter has examined the oral dimensions of four eighteenth‐century Limerick chapbook ballads, whose parallels and interminglings between written, printed verses and local phraseologies and phonetic pronunciations often led to “garbling” results (Carpenter, 2010). By the same token, Pádraig Breatnach has pointed out similarities between Ó Bruadair's “Nach Iogantach É mar Theannta Grinn” and a song well known both in the oral tradition and in the medieval carole dance (Breatnach, 1981; Henigan, 2012, p. 46). 6 of 13 COVINGTON Many of the most well‐known or studied ballads belong to the later century and to the Jacobite movement specifically and have been examined most effectively by Breandán Ó Buachalla, Vincent Morley, and Éamonn Ó Ciardha, among others. Scholars may nevertheless study earlier iterations of these political forms as they employed popular images as well as the friendlier song meters of caoineadh (lament) or amhráin (song) (Ó Ciardha, 2013, pp. 143– 145; Ó Buachalla, 1996). The caoineadh, or keen, was itself very much an oral (and highly gendered) genre, distinct from elite elegies, and containing popular and folkloric elements; Rachel Bromwich, Angela Bourke, Julie Henigan, and others have examined the form in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond, though pre‐ 1700 early modernists might take it back further, especially since Giraldus himself cites a number of examples (Wong, 2006, p. 655; Bromwich, 1947; Bourke, 1993, Henigan, 2012). Other sources may also be mined not simply for folkloric but for evidence of orality more generally. The 1641 uprising resulted in the victims of its violence offering their testimony in subsequent depositions: an oral circumstance in its own right, given the public nature of the proceedings. Marie‐Louise Coolahan has most productively examined these testimonial records, as she traces degrees of literacy and illiteracy and offers new insights into the process by which the deponents' oral statements were subsequently “shaped into writing” (Coolahan, 2010a; “Language and Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions,” 2010). One of those later and heavily embellished writings was composed by John Temple, whose descriptions of atrocities—children ripped from their mothers' wombs, for example—constituted well‐worn legends and biblical tropes in oral (and written) traditions across the centuries (Noonan, 2004). Coolahan's emphasis elsewhere on the gendered aspect of these statements is also important and might be combined in further research with Mary Ellen Lamb's work, which focuses on the meanings and performance of women and storytelling traditions (Coolahan, 2010b; Lamb & Bamford, 2008). Coolahan's tracking of orality through speech patterns and disjointed narrative moments is one of her most significant contributions and touches on what Walter Ong once called the “oral residue” that could be discovered formalistically within the texts themselves (Ong, 2002, p, 38). Many narratives, of course, began orally at one time, just as textual products were meant to be read aloud. But as Joseph Nagy once pointed out with regard to medieval literary texts, the substantive and stylistic presence and persistence of oral traditions and orality could become subject to quite heated scholarly debate (Carney, 1955, pp. 276–277; Ó Coileáin, 1986; Nagy, 1986; Finnegan, 1976; Slotkin, 1983). Leaving aside the controversy, one method in tracing the oral in these texts is to follow the tenets of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, in their monumentally influential application of oral‐formulaic composition to literature. Together, they argued for the existence and identification of a storehouse of themes and formulae—or “a group of words … regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea”—all of which are drawn upon by a storyteller not by memory but at the moment of performance (Parry, 1987, p. 272). Their approach, applied to Homeric epic as well as Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, and Albanian folk tales, may at times hold limited applicability when it comes to the case of Irish literature. Yet Kevin O'Nolan, to cite one example, effectively traced repeated themes and formulae to the Irish hero tale, while Nagy urged scholars to watch for “recyclable and variable descriptions of recurring scenes or situations, such as setting out to sea, fighting, feasting, and so on” (O'Nolan, 1969, pp. 1– 19; Nagy, 1986, p. 283). Nagy and others refer primarily to sagas, and the Parry‐Lord thesis in general is itself highly divisive. But some of its methods could be useful in isolating oral “formulae” and narrative patterns within later texts and tracing them to a specifically folkloric or popular origin. By the same token, the application of theoretical and empirical approaches to spoken and written language on a linguistic level would be equally interesting, especially in the wake of the groundbreaking work of Douglas Biber, who applies computational techniques and multi‐ dimensional analysis to identify linguistic features and patterns across a spectrum of different registers (Biber, 1988). Finally, early modern literary texts themselves could be mined for the folkloric gold they contain, yielding rich new readings. In English literature, popular and legendary allusions in Shakespeare have been extensively examined, from the Baker's Daughter legend (not to mention ghosts) in Hamlet to the Whitsun Pastorals in The Winters Tale, and from the story of the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice to the trickster figure in All's Well that Ends Well (Brown, 1976; Muir, 1981). And then there are the witches, of course. Spenser, too, has been given similar readings, in works such as A View of the Present State of Ireland. Andrew Hadfield, meanwhile, has argued that Spenser was familiar with COVINGTON 7 of 13 Irish folklore in poems such as “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe,” while Elizabeth Porgas Watson has discussed Spenser's use of folkloric (and literary) motifs such as sea monsters, the Return from Faerie Land, or the trope of the fearful bride (Hadfield, 2012, p. 223; Watson, 1999, pp. 285–290; Watson, 2006). These approaches could be pursued even further and deepened in turn by questions asked of the folkloric presence in texts, discussed below. Irish‐language prose and poetry also promise rich rewards for a folkloric reading and can no longer be ignored even for those who work primarily with English texts on or about Ireland. Historical works such as Tadhg Ó Cianáin's Imeacht na nIarlaí (The Flight of the Earls), or Lughaigh Ó Cléirigh's Beatha Aodha Rua Uí Dhomhnaill (life of Red Hugh O'Donnell), could be read through their own folkloric borrowings—of outlawry for one—while Raymond Gillespie and Bernadette Cunningham have called attention to the rich prose material contained in such early modern sources as the Annals of Ulster, Annals of Connacht, the Annals of Loch Cé, and the Four Masters, all of which deserve further attention for the many layers and borrowings that they contain (Cunningham & Gillespie, 2003). The raucous satire known as Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis (The Parliament of Clan Thomas), composed in the seventeenth century, is itself a rich source that carries more overt references to the kind of outsider groups and “churls” that populated rustic life, even if these “upstarts” appear through the lens of savage mockery (Williams, 1981). In addition to translated poetic and prose sources from the Irish Texts Society—available on sites such as archive. org, though they are by no means comprehensive—researchers may turn to resources such as the Bardic Poetry Database, sponsored by Trinity College and created by Katherine Simms and Damian McManus. Particularly helpful in terms of the latter site is a searchable function that lists a large number of motifs common to bardic poetry—feasts, curses, patrons—but also to folkloric elements such as battle phantoms or the prophecies of clouds, as in the early seventeenth century “Néll longphuirt ós Loch Eachach” (Ó Donnchadha, 1931, p. 180). Poets who wrote after Kinsale and the Flight of the Earls through the disasters of the seventeenth century were distinguished from their predecessors by the grief of personal and professional dispossession. Eoghan Ruadh Mac an Bháird and later on Aogán Ó Rathaille or Dáibhí Ó Bruadair most famously reflected these tendencies, which also brought with them stylistic innovation and, according to Marc Caball, a more forceful cultural nationalism (Caball, 1998). The transmission of these early modern texts into folklore culture could in turn provide further insights into the nature of literacy and folk orality. Alan Bruford, in his classic Gaelic Folk‐Tales and Mediaeval Romances, for example, connected the genre of romantic tales or “sgéalta romáinsoíchta,” and specifically Arthurian romances, which flourished from the late medieval period through the nineteenth century, often in folkloric form. Bernadette Smelik has herself asserted that fifteenth‐ and sixteenth‐century manuscripts of Irish Arthurian romances could only have been written down in manuscript, given their narrative complexity; more intriguing is her speculation that Irish writers became acquainted with stories about king Arthur through the gaelicized English [such as the De Burgo or Maguire families in Connaught] and that they decided to borrow this Arthur‐figure and put them in their own stories, thus making Arthur an “Irish” king, an “Ard‐Rí,” who could serve as an example for both Irish and gaelicized English. (Bruford, 1969; Smelik, 2007, p. 63; Byrne, 2015, pp. 183–199) By the same token, later stories which portrayed Arthur in a negative light, as a king either humorous or dishonorable, carried their own stinging resonance, given the circumstances of sixteenth‐century Ireland. Smelik suggests that more research should be devoted to these Irish Arthurian romances, not least in tracing their connection to (in her opinion) an elite audience around the soon‐to‐be‐dispossessed earls. But the “folkloricization” of Cing Artúr, Ceann Artair, or Caoin Artúr in Ireland, or his transmission and repurposing through popular oral traditions in the NFC and elsewhere, merits attention, alongside the generic and formulaic afterlives of other characters as well. Finally, researchers might devote more attention simply to the folkloric motifs that course through early modern English and Irish texts, much as modern literary scholars have devoted such attention to the work of Wilde, Synge, and of course Yeats. There are dangers to this “motif‐chasing” approach, however. For one, and as Alan Dundes once pointed out, it is not enough for a scholar to simply identify motifs in the Stith‐Thompson index and then trace them to a piece of literature. For Dundes (2007), scholars “must examine how a given author has used folkloristic elements” and then define “how these … elements function in the particular literary work as a whole.” Identification, in other 8 of 13 COVINGTON words, “is only the beginning, only the first step,” and must be followed by literary and historical contextualization, and above all, interpretation (pp. 67–76). Motifs are also not static or residual deposits which an author mines in order to “add local color” or suggest “remoteness of time and place”; rather, they comprise an active and dynamic agent that shapes the narrative itself and acts intertextually (De Caro & Jordan, 2004, pp. 16–17). The questions that scholars must ask of these sources as a result of Dundes' conditions could therefore be based upon André Morize's still‐valuable taxonomy of source material usage as it is utilized in literary texts (Morize, 1922): How do authors borrow from and weave folkloric motifs into their own inventions? In larger sense, do they combine popular traditions with a multiplicity of other sources or genres, and if so, how do they use these in conjunction with each other? And in what ways do they deploy folklore to create or re‐create character or plots, or use riddles, jokes, songs, or legends to drive the narrative forward in particular ways? (Rosenberg, 1991, p. 55). Finally, could one identify, in the characters or author, what Jessica Tiffin has called a kind of “folkloric voice” which acts as a “self‐aware invocation of oral tradition in the tone and phrasing of the tale”? (Tiffin, 2009, pp. 138–139). In addition to searching for the folkloric in individual works, a comparative approach across texts and focused on one theme, image, or motif might yield rich rewards (Maley, forthcoming). But again, one must proceed with care. Francis Lee Utley once warned that disparate narratives—folkloric or literary—should not be reduced to a common motif, especially since this method threatens to simplify both narratives and motifs (Utley, 1964, p. 605). Von Sydow himself once dismissed the method that he termed “Plockmetoden,” or “the gathering together of seeming similarities isolated from widely separated backgrounds and from them arriving at grandiose conclusions” (Macneill, 1965, p. 350). Even so, if used with care, oral traditions and motifs could produce significant insights into literature and history, in the manner of Patricia Palmer's study of severed heads and their representation across literary texts (though not popular oral traditions), or Clodagh Tait's exploration of the dead, based in part on folkloric sources from antiquarian or other records (Tait, 2002, p. 75, 110–111; Palmer, 2014). Examples of other tropes that bear further analysis could include animals, which are rich in folkloric associations. Spenser, for instance, dismisses how “the Irish doe use to make the wolf their gossip,” and he would have been familiar with Geraldus' mention of a wolf speaking to a priest. In his Itinerary … Containing his Ten Yeeres Travell (1617), Fynes Moryson mocks those in Ireland who believe that the men of Ossory were “yeerely turned into Wolves” (Moryson, 1908, p. 187). Apart from digging deeper into the larger folkloric and symbolic significance of wolves across different narratives and traditions, scholars may make larger historical connections, for example, concerning the refusal in Ireland among many to kill wolves, or the gradual extinction of the animals in the eighteenth century. Explorations of other such symbolically loaded or totemic creatures, notably the fox or horse, could dovetail as well with the current field of animal studies in Ireland and elsewhere and similarly be connected to the plentiful number of animal fables in the NFC archive (Kirkpatrick & Faragó, 2016; Macneill, 1965; Maley, forthcoming). Animals straddle the universal and the historically particular, but so do other motifs. To cite another example, woods make a significant appearance across the early modern literature of Ireland, as they do elsewhere; but the period also witnessed their drastic diminishment from war, violence, plantation, and confiscation (Smyth, 2006, pp. 93–102). Woods serve an important function in mythology and ancient and medieval literature as well, though folkloric motifs in early modern texts could reveal much about the concerns of authors who deployed them in particular ways (Everett, 2015; Tierney, 1998, p. 57). Indeed, there are many such authors who speak of woods: in Spenser, we find Redcrosse Knight's adventures in the Wandering Wood; in a more overt reference to present‐day conflicts, Spenser (or rather, Ireneus) refers in A View of the Present State of Ireland to mantle‐wearing outlaws who “lurketh in the thicke woods,” or, in a famous passage, how “Out of every corner of the woods and glens [casualties of the war in Munster] came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them.” Patricia Palmer reminds us that John Dymmok spoke of “plashings” which “blocked [the colonialists'] passage through the woods” (Palmer, 2001, p. 48). In John Derricke, woods also function as a refuge for “wood‐kernes” or outlaws (“So do thei kepe in wildest Nokes”); but woods also serve as the final refuge, or trap, for a bedraggled and dispossessed Rory Oge O More. Woods were also important in early modern martyrological literature that described fugitive priests in the Elizabethan, early Stuart, and Cromwellian periods (and beyond). And related to that in turn, woods were the refuge COVINGTON 9 of 13 of rapparees and referenced in ballads and poetry (Simes, 2006). In Irish poetry, Ó Bruadair, meanwhile, decries the end of the coign and livery system by describing how “Crafty, lazy rascals love to lurk in the woods for plunder”—thus changing the inhabitants of those arboreal realms from Irish outlaws to English outsiders (MacErlean, 1910, p. 72; Hartnett, 1982). Ó Rathaille echoes the sentiment of intrusion in turn by writing of “the foreign raven nestled in the thick wood of Ross” (Leersen, 1986, p. 267). These examples serve to illustrate, in Diarmuid Ó Giolláin's words, that “Literature has always been enriched by folklore”—the early modern no less than the ancient, medieval, and modern (Ó Giolláin, p. 34). To therefore overlook the folkloric voice from even the most elite texts is to neglect one of the many important facets that these narratives contain. Early modern literary scholars—and historians—have much to learn from the discipline of folkloristics in general, including the very rich theoretical paths it has forged (Dorson, 1972). And while folklore and literature will always be “rival siblings,” to quote Bruce Rosenberg, the scholar who understands their different formal properties and critical traditions can only add to our understanding of early modern texts as a whole (Rosenberg, 1991; Benson, 2003; Abrahams, 1992). The endlessly circular transmission of narratives or tropes across overlapping spheres of print, manuscript, and the spoken word is equally important: not only did oral folkloric traditions—such as the horse‐ears of kings—breathe through these very disparate texts, but so did the texts themselves possibly originate from and definitely return to folklore again (Ó Ciosáin, 1997; Fox, 2000; Woolf, 1986; Fox & Woolf, 2002, pp. 21–38; Barnard, 2017). Even early modern writers came to haunt the folklore, their afterlives living on in popular lore or the NFC archives, despite the snobbery of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair who dismissively spoke of sráidéigse, or street poetry. The very idea of the Irish bard itself reflected popular and elite perspectives, with Osborn Bergin once describing the poet as a “a dealer in magic, a weaver of spells and incantations, who could blast his enemies by the venom of his verse” (Bergin, 1970, p. 3). The poet and his weaponized words –and his prophecies– continued in oral folk traditions, with one modern song‐story from Connemara warning that “You had far better be dead when your father arrives, because he'll make a poem that will take the flesh from your bones” (Farrell, 2017, p. 141). Meanwhile, in one tale that memorializes a poet while bringing in other literary tropes, the blind Ulster poet Séamus Dall Mac Cuarta is said to have been visited in a dream by a beautiful woman who vanished when he awoke but bequeathed him his poetic gift in her wake (Leersen, 1986, p. 274). This bardic power even extends to Spenser, who is portrayed in the NFC archives as losing his watch, believing it to be stolen, and laying a curse on the town of Doneraile (NFC Schools 0372, p. 224). Unfortunately—and now that the great poet has been plunged into a sea of orality, and Irish orality at that—words do not come as easily as they once did, as he now curses in his folkloric voice. “May fire and brimstone/Never fail/To find its mark/in Doneraile,” the watch‐less Spenser rails. “May beef and mutton/Lamb and veil [sic]/Be never eat/ In Doneraile” (Ó Crualaoich, 2009, p. 17; Schools' Collection, vol. 0372, p. 224). ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS I wish to thank both anonymous readers of this essay, in appreciation of their very useful comments. ORCID Sarah Covington http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9768-5656 WOR KS CI T ED Abrahams, R. D. (1992). The past in the presence: an overview of folkloristics in the late 20th century. In R. Kvideland (Ed.), Folklore processed (pp. 32–51). Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjakkisuuden Seura. Almqvist, B., & Ní Dhuibhne, E. (1991). Viking ale: Studies on folklore contacts between the northern and the western worlds. Suffolk: Boethius Press. Bacchilega, C. 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Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. COVINGTON 13 of 13 Williams, M. (2010). History, the interregnum, and the exiled Irish. In M. Williams, & S. P. Forrest (Eds.), Constructing the past: Writing Irish history, 1600–1800 (pp. 27, 27–48, 48). Woodbridge: Boydell. Williams, N. J. A. (1981). Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies. Wong, D. (2006). Literature and the oral tradition. In M. Kelleher (Ed.), Cambridge history of Irish literature (Vol. 1) (pp. 633–676). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, D. (1986). Speech, text and time: The sense of hearing and the sense of the past in Renaissance England. Albion, 18, 159–191. Zimmerman, G. (2001). The Irish storyteller. Dublin: Four Courts. Sarah Covington is Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, as well as director of the QC Irish Studies program. Specializing in early modern England and Ireland, she has published two books: The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth‐Century England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004) and Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth‐Century England (Palgrave‐ McMillan, 2009). Her forthcoming monograph will trace Oliver Cromwell and memory in the Irish historical, literary, and folkloric imagination over three centuries. How to cite this article: Covington S. Towards a new “folkloric turn” in the literature of early modern Ireland. Literature Compass. 2018;15:e12497. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12497