The Cemetery and the Fear of the Dead

Fear is a characteristic feature of many legends. And the fear of the death is probably our deepest fear. Death is a crucial event in folk culture, as it triggers an existential crisis which must be duly managed. The living need to distance themselves from the dead in order not to lose their own “presence” in the world. To maintain this distance, people can rely on a dedicated place, the cemetery, where the fear of the dead can be mastered and framed in a sacred dimension. Cemetery may be regarded as a liminal, hybrid space, connecting life and death, the human and the divine, the visible and the invisible. Hence, it can turn into a critical, dangerous place, a “legend landscape”, where odd, mysterious, frightening encounters are possible or, at least, believable. This is especially so if one enters a cemetery at night, when it is forbidden to the living and the darkness creates the perfect stage for fearsome presences. In the ATU 1676B narrative type, an individual bets to enter a cemetery at night in order to show her/his courage and/or refute the belief of the dead as ghosts, but this gamble results in a death from fright. A different case concerns the fate of those who face the night in the cemetery with genuine courage and respect towards the dead, as in a folktale collected by W.B. Yeats (ATU 326), and a (true) story of a woman sleeping in the cemetery (Motif Index C735.2.5). Overall, the cemetery emerges as an ideal setting for a cautionary tale, through which local communities meditate on key issues such as death, fear and belief/non-belief

The Cemetery and the Fear of the Dead

Fear is a characteristic feature of many legends. And the fear of the death is probably our deepest fear. Death is a crucial event in folk culture, as it triggers an existential crisis which must be duly managed. The living need to distance themselves from the dead in order not to lose their own “presence” in the world. To maintain this distance, people can rely on a dedicated place, the cemetery, where the fear of the dead can be mastered and framed in a sacred dimension. Cemetery may be regarded as a liminal, hybrid space, connecting life and death, the human and the divine, the visible and the invisible. Hence, it can turn into a critical, dangerous place, a “legend landscape”, where odd, mysterious, frightening encounters are possible or, at least, believable. This is especially so if one enters a cemetery at night, when it is forbidden to the living and the darkness creates the perfect stage for fearsome presences. In the ATU 1676B narrative type, an individual bets to enter a cemetery at night in order to show her/his courage and/or refute the belief of the dead as ghosts, but this gamble results in a death from fright. A different case concerns the fate of those who face the night in the cemetery with genuine courage and respect towards the dead, as in a folktale collected by W.B. Yeats (ATU 326), and a (true) story of a woman sleeping in the cemetery (Motif Index C735.2.5). Overall, the cemetery emerges as an ideal setting for a cautionary tale, through which local communities meditate on key issues such as death, fear and belief/non-belief

L’<em>immram</em> nell’Irlanda del XX secolo Una lettura comparativa dei romanzi di Flann O’Brien

This paper seeks to offer a unitary vision of Flann O’Brien’s novels through a comparative reading with the <em>immram</em>, a genre from the Irish literary tradition with which O’Brien’s work bears numerous meaningful affinities and analogies. Particular attention is devoted to the <em>Immram curaig Máele Dúin</em>, whose fundamental characteristics we find, in variable measure and manner, in O’Brien’s novels. The intolerance of linearity of plot, the digressive spirit and progression of the narration, the taste for literary artifice and meta-literary play, the centrality of the theme of guilt and above all the complete fluidity of time-space confines which are violated and continually re-defined are essential elements of O’Brien’s narrative which can be recognized, albeit in nuce, in the <em>immram</em>

Polifonia nelle antologie di W.B. Yeats: il dialogo complesso tra folklore e letteratura

Compiling and publishing a folk narrative anthology is anything but a trivial, neutral undertaking, especially if this is set in a period of great literary and cultural fervour as was the late XIX century in Ireland. With his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892) W.B. Yeats gives rise to a complex narrative system in which, necessarily, heterogeneous, if not contradictory voices and points of view meet, and the editor’s task is precisely to make this polyphony work. In the anthologized stories one observes the overlapping and interweaving of narrative levels that reflect a wide range of ideas, beliefs, knowledge, values from which emerges a picture of cultural and social Irish stratification, as well as of relationships being established between the lower and ruling classes, folklore and literature, orality and literacy. After examining in general the folk narrative anthology as an inherently polyphonic object, I propose a specific reading of the Yeatsian collections, focusing in particular on the paratextual apparatus, namely on the borders, the frames of the text – where interactions take place between several narrative levels, as well as historical, cultural, and social meanings – in order to identify, if possible, elements of unity and coherence in a system constitutively plurivocal and open to a variety of interpretations

Between Folk and Lore: Performing, Textualising and (mis)Interpreting the Irish Oral Tradition

Folklore, as a historical and cultural process producing and transmitting beliefs, stories, customs, and practices, has always thrived and evolved in the broader context of history and culture. Consequently, tradition and modernity have long coexisted and influenced one another, in particular in the world of folk narratives, orality and literature, storytellers and writers. Since the nineteenth century, folklorists (a category including a variety of figures) have collected, transcribed and published pieces of oral tradition, thus giving folklore a textual form and nature. However, folk narratives continue to be also a living and performed experience for the tradition bearers, a process giving rise to ever new and different expressions, according to the changing historical, social, cultural, and economic conditions. To be sure, folklore – and folk narrative – needs to be constantly lived and performed to remain something actually pertinent and significant, and not only within the oral and traditional contexts. Interestingly, between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, folklore increasingly came to be regarded as and transformed into an inheritance, a valuable, national heritage particularly fitting for those countries, such as Ireland, in search of a strong, national identity. In this light, folklore and folk narratives, beside their routine existence within their original contexts, were consciously “performed” by the official culture, which employed them in politics, education, literature, etc. In the process, it could happen that folk materials were dehistoricised and idealised, “embalmed” according to Máirtin Ó Cadhain, and even trivialised. This situation was turned into a fruitful and significant source of inspiration for the literary parody of Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O’Brien) who, in his Gaelic novel, An Béal Bocht, revealed the funny yet distressing truth of the Irish folklore being misunderstood and betrayed by the Irish themselves

New Perspectives on Irish Folklore, Estudios Irlandeses 12.2

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