Chapter 6 - Inside History

Summary

In 1936, Walter Benjamin, in exile from Hitler’s Germany, began his essay ‘The Storyteller’ with the apparently incontrovertible statement that ‘the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force’. As he wrote, Irish-language storyteller Éamon a Búrc, of Carna, Connemara, previously a migrant to Minnesota, was sixty, and at the height of his powers. Búrc was deeply and creatively engaged with the events of his own time and Parnell’s. This chapter considers his accounts of the Land War in County Galway and the ‘Little Famine’ of 1879–1880 to show that far from living outside history, he was a vital ‘present force’ for his marginalized community. It argues that the copious materials of the National Folklore Collection at UCD , Dublin, including transcriptions of almost 200 stories and other items by Búrc, may profitably be read ‘aslant’ for questions of mentalité in Ireland, especially in the interwar period.