Chapter 3 - The Oral Tradition

Summary

Across its many forms, from lullabies to laments and songs, the oral tradition in Irish women’s poetry is rich and various. The oral tradition constitutes a body of subjugated knowledge, in the Foucauldian sense, having been subjected to cultural relegation and erasure in the modern period. Addressing the gaps in the tradition has been a significant challenge, then, as witnessed in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘What Foremothers?’, or attempts to unearth the work of Máire Ní Chrualaoich, ‘the Sappho of Munster’. The celebrated case of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill occurs at the intersection of the tradition and the individual talent, as a unique personal occasion collides with long-established traditions of communal mourning (the caoineadh). Subsequent oral performers too have been no less outspoken on questions of marriage, women’s rights, the Famine, and other defining issues of their times, and no history of Irish women’s poetry is complete without an assessment of their contribution.