Caoineadh os cionn coirp: the lament for the dead in Ireland

Folklore, Annual, 1997 by Patricia Lysaght

The most elaborate surviving Irish-language "texts" date from the eighteenth century. One of them discussed here, Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire ("The Keen for Art O'Leary"), though referring to a death which occurred in 1773, was written down from oral narration only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and appeared in print for the first time towards the end of that century (O'Connell 1892).(3)

It seems that the liveliest interest in the lament for the dead was in fact shown by visitors to Ireland and other writers who, as already noted, were outsiders in cultural and linguistic terms. In fact the earliest published "texts" of the traditional lament are English translations by such people, some of whom thought little of taking from or embellishing them. Thomas Crofton Croker, for example, describes how an embellished English versification of a lament by him had drawn very favourable comment, and admits to omitting the formulaic opening line of stanzas in some of his translations (Croker 1844, xxiii and 96). In many cases, these "texts" were also taken down from oral recitation long after they were first performed and it is thus not always possible to relate the "text," or segments of it, to the various stages of the wake or funeral.

Virtually the same situation prevails in relation to laments collected by folklorists and others in the twentieth century. Although the lament for the dead persisted as an active mortuary ritual into the early-twentieth-century, no field record of lament texts or the lamentation performance in context appear to be available. It has not been possible to unearth illustrations for this period of wake scenes involving the lament for the dead, and only meagre examples of the music remain (O Madagain 1981, 311-32; see also Appendix below). Except for a few fragments providing what must be no more than a faint echo of the former vigour and fullness of the tradition, the lament was not recorded even though an active tradition of lament performance persisted into the age of sound recording (though a poor quality tape-recording of loud chanting and stylised sobbing at a graveside in Carna, County Galway in 1979 was broadcast on the national radio in 1980. ibid., 311-12). This was due partly to the reluctance of collectors to intrude upon the occasion of death, recognising the sacredness of the occasion and its ritual - and its "ownership," as it were, by the mourning group. In addition, there was the reluctance of tradition-bearers to perform the lament except in the context of death ("Sure 'tis no use keening unless the corpse is stretched out before one." Croker 1844, 101). Collectors of the Irish Folklore Commisssion, who were involved in intensive sound-recording programmes in the 1940s, found that tradition-bearers in the Irish-speaking areas of the west of Ireland from whom they had recorded an abundance of folklore material, and who were known to be able to perform the ritual lament, were rarely willing to give an out-of-context demonstration. This reluctance may have applied more to women, the traditional performers of the lament. A recent commentator records that an elderly Gaeltacht woman who had given a demonstration of lamenting for a visitor blamed a subsequent death in the family on her behaviour (O Madagain 1981, 328 note 4). Most of the documented sound recordings of keening were performed and collected by men, who may have been less reluctant than women to simulate a keening situation. One tradition-bearer, Sean O Conaola from Cois Fhairrge, County Galway, recently deceased - from whom a lament was recorded on gramophone record in 1946 (see Appendix 1) - recalls that he sung the lament over the "corpse" of the folksong collector, Seamus Ennis, who lay on the floor with his hat on his chest in an attitude of death.(4) However, it is still possible to glimpse the power of the lament as an expression of heightened emotions when older women in Gaeltacht areas occasionally break into loud stylised chanting and sobbing at the wake or funeral of a contemporary (this occurred at a wake in the Donegal Gaeltacht as recently as November 1994). Nowadays, though, the keening woman is usually alone and the lament is in rudimentary form.