The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

Author(s): Hana F. Khasawneh

Source: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review , Spring 2014, Vol. 103, No. 409, Changing
Ireland (Spring 2014), pp. 81-91
Published by: Messenger Publications

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24347743

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 The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

Hana F. Khasawneh

Irish oral tradition inevitably interacts with literary culture. It is the integral
relationship between orality (sound) and literacy (print) that is the main
focus of this article. The relationship between oral and written culture is
complicated by their coexistence and interdependence. The oral tradition
remains influential on written literary genres and is influenced in turn by
the written word. The printed text is not the only way in which this happens;
there are many literary genres, including popular stories, songs, old sayings
and legends that can be found in written form. Thus, we cannot understand
orality and literacy as mutually exclusive. Monika Fludernik speaks of
'pseudo-oral discourse', defined as 'the evocation of orality in literary
narrative'.1 She lists some features through which the impression of orality
can be achieved in written texts. It 'can be based on the combination of
several techniques. In English literature, it requires the avoidance of literate
vocabulary and complex syntax. Thus, pseudo-oral narrators ... are often
garrulous, repetitive, contradictory and illogical. They keep interrupting
listener or audience familiarly; they seem to have an intimate rapport with
the fictional world, to which they apparently belong and also do not shy
away from expressing their feelings and views empathetically, thus setting
themselves off from the typical narrators of literary texts - aloof, bland,
reliable, neutral'.2
The Irish oral performance occupies a middle space between oral and literary
forms and it is certainly one of the most well-known of this type. Central
to oral tradition is its performance, that keeps it alive. Irish oral tradition
involves visual and auditory dimensions that tend to heighten its emotional
and dramatic impact and bring a high degree of audience participation. This
is also vital to the performance, essentially a communal experience. It brings
oral literature closer to dance, music and drama, which are more enjoyable
than the fixed written forms of literature.
Orality deals specifically with culturally defined forms of speaking, not
with speaking in its everyday sense. Walter Ong points out that 'oral cultures
concern themselves with doings, with happenings, not with being as such:

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Hana F. Khasawneh

they narrativise their own existence and their environment'.3 Irish oral culture
is more likely to contain borrowed elements, due to its ease of transmission
and retention by memory. Ong is reluctant to use the word 'literature' when
discussing the narrative form of the oral tradition, using 'text' instead, for its
rich association. 'Text' suggests the act of weaving, while literature signifies
the physical inscription of alphabets. He observes that there are two types of
orality: primary orality, untouched by literacy; and secondary orality, which
depends on writing and print for its existence. Language, understood in terms
of images and words chosen can be said to represent artistic expression. Used
in a particular way, they echo Ong's concept of 'oral culture'. Similarly, Ruth
Finnegan says that 'Orality and literacy are not two separate things; nor (to
put it more concretely) are oral and written modes two mutually exclusive
and opposed processes for representing and communicating information. On
the contrary, they take diverse forms in different cultures and periods and
are used differently in different social contexts and, insofar as they can be
distinguished at all as separate modes rather than a continuum, they mutually
interact and affect each other and the relations between them are problematic
rather than self-evident' ,4 According to her, it makes sense to consider artistic
production that relies on the oral language as oral literature. 'When one reads
- or better, hears - some of the oral literary forms in such [oral] contexts,
one cannot help but admit that expression of insight and understanding by no
means necessarily depends on writing'.6
While the connections between oral and textual traditions in Ireland have
been the focus of much scholarly work, less consideration has been paid
to the theoretical concept of orality and the corresponding significance of
oral texts in modern Irish culture. Ireland's rich and varied oral traditions
have had important influences on its modern culture. Whether through song,
folklore or in the performance and transmission of music, the oral mode has
played a vital role in the past, which continues to resonate in the present,
including in the work of Irish visual artists. However, it would be incorrect to
separate the literary and oral in any absolute manner. Indeed, the oral mood
is connected with the literary in Ireland, a country with one of the oldest
vernacular literary traditions in Europe. The oral tradition destabilises the
existing grand written narratives. It prefigures a public sphere that is textual,
yet it acknowledges that there are alternative forms of knowledge and cultural
transmission outside that sphere.
The Irish oral tradition is significant for what it stands for and for what

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 The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

it actually is. It is unique in that its literary tradition and oral forms have
intersected. Like most oral traditions, the Irish form has its roots in a primary
orality which, as in many cultures, either remained purely oral or has been
replaced by a literary performance culture. The oral narrative tradition
functioned in pre-Christian and medieval Irish society and in modern Ireland
and could be found among Gaelic-speaking peasants and fishermen who bore
vivid testimony to a long-lived tradition of stories and narrative techniques.
The medieval narrator was a professional storyteller and member of a
professional group of poets known as filid, who - along with the musicians
- constituted a wider class of the people of arts. The filid had relied on oral
transmission but, after the coming of Christianity and the Latin alphabets,
they came to articulate literacy and learnedness. The oral tradition becomes a
national storehouse for folk customs. On the one hand, it becomes authoritative
through its survival outside the print tradition. On the other hand, the only
way it can be appreciated is to be recuperated from being merely a venerable
deposit through the authority of the written word.
What constitutes an Irish oral tradition is hard to define. The term 'oral
tradition' had been used in the first half of the seventeenth-century to denote
church practices outside the strictly religious. Its modem sense comes from
the late-eighteenth century, when the distinction broadens to embrace popular
practices and written authoritative discourses. While the term retained some of
its associations with Catholicism, it broadened into a general term describing
the transmission of the practices of an illiterate rural populace. George Denis
Zimmerman points out that John Brand was one of the first writers to use it in
is his republication of Henry Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares to describe the
customs and beliefs of such a populace. Penny Fielding writes: 'The oral is
never simply one thing and what orality signifies in nineteenth-century writing
cannot be understood without considering its uses as an agent in the creation
and re-creation of cultural norms and values. The oral is always the other: of
writing (speech), of culture (the voice of nature), of the modem (a pre-modem
past'.6 James Hogg recalled a meeting between Sir Walter Scott and Hogg's
mother. Responding to Scott's interest in whether a particular song had ever
been printed, she scolded his interest in printing ballads that were orally
transmitted: '[There] war never ane o'my sangs prentit them yoursel', an ye
have spoilt them aawthegither. They were made for singin' an' no for readin';
but ye hae broken the charm noo, an' they'll never sung mair'.7
John Brand sets the oral tradition over against a more public authoritative

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Hana F. Khasawneh

written word. He claims that 'These [folk customs], consecrated to the

Francies of Men, by a Usage from Time immemorial, though erased by public
Authority from the written Word were committed as a venerable Deposit to the
keeping of oral Tradition '.8 His distinction between print and oral tradition
is a good starting-point to discuss oral culture in Burns' poetry, as well as
Melmoth the Wanderer. Brand claims that the written word has a greater claim
to public agency and yet is fundamentally unable to erase all forms of popular
tradition from the national record. The written word prefigures a public sphere
that is textual and yet it also acknowledges that there are alternative forms of
knowledge and cultural transmission outside that sphere.
Colin Graham observes that Yeats' Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish
Peasantry is useful for observing the relationship between the authentic
folk-tale and the authorising medium in which it is presented to the public:
'Yeats's ambiguous control over the authenticity of his material reveals in
its triple-level of authentication (tales, storytellers, folk-tale collectors) that
authenticity thrives on the textuality and substance of its medium... Textuality
seems to provide the material existence which authenticity needs in tandem
with its resistance to definition - its mystique is maintained and evidenced,
while what is actually "authentic" is filtered through further authenticating
process (folk-tales are themselves authenticated democratically by their
tellers, then approved and re-authorised by their collectors/editors'.9
Peasant culture plays a distinct role within the modern social sphere. By
writing and publishing oral folk materials, it preserves both an organic base
for the national community and, in its appropriation by the written medium to
which it is seen as a counterpoint, it gives the nation a sense of its modernity.
The incongruity of such positioning between the organic tradition and
modernity is only apparent. An amorphous body of stories, songs, stories and
practices can only become an oral tradition that is uncontained by commercial
modernity through its definition in print. Diarmuid Ο Giollâin notes the
relationship between folklore and nationalism: 'There was a liberating and
validating dimension to the discovery of folklore, legitimising the traditions
of a population that had usually been denigrated, giving them the status of
culture and allowing ordinary people to participate in the building of a nation.
Folklore archives were ideologically informed but represented the cultural
production of the common people and formed a unique body of documentary
evidence, which by their very existence offered an alternative to a view of
history and culture as the work of great men'.10

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 The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

The introduction Burns provided for his poem locates the peasant's desire
for knowledge of the future in the rude state of society, showing the influence
of Scottish Enlightenment social theorists : 'The passion for prying into
futurity makes a striking part of the history of human nature in its rude state,
in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic
mind, if any such honour the author with a perusal, to see the remains of it,
among the more unenlightened in our own'.11 He presents these practices as
a-historical, thus recovering folk practices for an enlightened historicity.
The early twentieth-century saw the publication of autobiographies by
members of the Irish- speaking community living on the Great Blasket
Island. Oral tradition is not static but dynamic. Careful attention must be paid
to the ways in which both the oral and the literary are utilised in a Blasket
autobiography to assert the agency of its author. There are moments in The
Islandman that reflect the shift in communicative method from orality to a
type of literacy. These moments are genuine occurrences, not presented in
service of a theory of communications but not unconscious either. While
many accounts of the Blaskets are at pains to emphasise the oral modality
of communication, Tomâs Ο Criomthain was literate and in his work he was
operating in some sort of literate mode. As Ong has observed, the transition
from oral to literate allows for increased self-awareness and this gives 0
Criomthain a vantage point from which to survey his life: 'Technologies are
not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness....
Writing heightens consciousness'.12 Ong never distinguished between
his religious sensibility and his scholarship. He claims that listening is an
activity closer to the divine than seeing and concludes that 'the mystery of
sound is the one which in the ways suggested here is the most productive
of understanding and unity, the most personally human and in this sense
closest to the divine'.13 He argues that thinking and its manifestation in
communication is related to the word, both as a linguistic word and as an
incarnation of the Second Person of the Christian Trinity.
There has been a tendency to marginalise the oral in favour of the written.
Oral tradition is classified as a sub-tradition that encompasses inferiority
rejected by the literate class. Graphic representation makes words appear
similar to things, because we think of words as the visible marks signalling
words to decoders. Written words are a residue, while oral tradition leaves no
such residue or deposit. Gearôid O'Crualaoich stresses that Irish culture has
' always been embedded, so to speak, as a set or archipelago of interconnecting

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Hana F. Khasawneh

and interrelated islands in a surrounding sea of orality'.14

Irish orality has had something of a vexed and uncharted intellectual
history. Harold Innis maintains that 'The oral tradition emphasised memory
and training. We have no history of conversation or of the oral tradition
except as they are revealed darkly through the written or printed word. The
drama reflected the power of the oral tradition but its flowering for only a
short period in Greece and in England illustrates its difficulties... A writing
age was essentially an egoistic age... Richness of the oral tradition made
for a flexible civilisation but not a civilisation which could be disciplined
to the point of effective political unity....Writing with a simplified alphabet
checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in
the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the
channels of thought of readers and later writers'.15
A major aspect of orality, particularly evident in the Irish oral tradition,
is that of interiority, that is the meaning derived from the subject's own
existence and experience with the sound of words. There are other sensory
influences, depending on association, but interiority is primarily an aspect
of phonic experience, an integral part that renders Irish oral performance
effective. Interiority is related to sound and the way sound can be immersive.
Ong says that 'the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings'
feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word'.16
Most Irish folk tales begin with 'once upon a time, a long time ago', or
something similar. The musical quality of Irish dialect must be considered
when discussing interiority. The melody with which the story or song is heard
and received is influenced by dialect which is related to interiority. Richard
Bauman classifies Irish orality as 'verbal art' that cannot be classified as
ordinary speech.17 Irish oral performance is not necessarily a performance in
which there is a performer and a listener, as these roles are troubled in Irish
performance. The effectiveness of storytelling lies in the unconventional
relationship between the performer and the audience.
The trustworthiness of oral tradition was questioned due to its reliance on
memory and intergenerational transmission. Irish orality possesses a Utopian
function similar to written culture. What is peculiar about Irish orality is that it
is a generally unrecognised compromise between orality and textuality. This
observation deepens our understanding of orality and textuality by stressing
that history is not always textual nor are oral genres always forms of story
telling. The term 'orality' refers to the structures of consciousness found in

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 The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

cultures that do not employ the technologies of writing. Ong's work reveals
that despite the success of written language, the vast majority of languages
are never written and, even in a country such as Ireland where writing has
a venerable pedigree, 'the basic orality of language is permanent'.18 He
describes primary orality as the purest form, in which the oral is used as the
primary communication and literate forms are not used for communication.
Emphasising the need to recognise this, he insists that 'Written texts all
have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the
natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings'.19
In the oral mode, there is no fixed text which can be repeated word for
word. This reflects the manner of composition - an oral poem is in constant
performance. Ong observes that neither individuality nor originality are
admissible in an oral culture. What is forgotten will be lost permanently:
'Since public law and custom are of major importance for social survival but
cannot be put on record, they must constantly be talked about or sung about,
else they vanish from consciousness'.20 Writing exteriorizes memory and
stores knowledge in letters and words. In an oral culture, it is not possible to
separate meanings, as they exist in particular situations among human beings.
Oral poetry, in contrast to poetry disseminated by print or electronic media,
presupposes a homogeneous community of restricted size. Oral poetry can
never be 'world literature', as oral poets have more powerful roles than do
poets in literate societies. This reflects a new relationship between the poet
and the audience.
Jerome Rothenberg observes: 'Among us the poet has come to play
a performance role that resembles that of the shaman... The poet like the
shaman typically withdraws to solitude to find his poem or vision, then
returns to sound it, gives it life. He performs alone... because his presence
is considered crucial and no other specialist has arisen to act in his place. He
is also like the shaman in being at once an outsider, yet a person needed for
the validation of a certain experience important to the group. And even in
societies otherwise hostile or indifferent to poetry as "literate", he may be
allowed a range of deviant, even antisocial behavior that many of his fellow
citizens do not enjoy. Again like the shaman, he will not only be allowed to
act mad in public, but he will often be expected to do so'.21
Ong had the most elaborate theory of orality in the tradition with his key
ideas of the sensorium, the transformation of the word from its oral to written
and beyond, the impact of print, the rise of secondary orality and the presence

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Hana F. Khasawneh

of sound, the interaction of sound, culture and thought and the polemic bias
of oralism. His coinage of the 'second orality' became the most important
means for characterising electronic communication. Although most of our
daily communication is carried out orally, writing is accorded the highest
authority and provides the norm not only for the evaluation of discourse but
for value-judgments in general. Written texts will have to be related directly
or indirectly to the world of sound to yield their meanings. Reading a text
means converting it to sound aloud or in the imagination. This attitude
towards writing has for a long time prevented due consideration of orality.
The use of oral language is not restricted to spoken utterances nor to the
literate language employed in written texts.
It is possible to find formal, quasi-literal language used in free oral
discourse, as in scholarly discussion. This new approach has produced an
extraordinary interdisciplinary exchange and new alliances in research. Since
it was assumed that writing simply represents spoken language in visible
form - an assumption that underlines Ferdinand de Saussure's postulate of
the primacy of oral language - the difference between speech and writing has
largely remained uninvestigated. Saussure calls attention to the primacy of
oral speech which underpins all verbal communication, holding that writing
has simultaneously 'usefulness, shortcomings and dangers'.22
Subsequent writers attempted to evoke the authentic Irish voice not only in
narrative and dialogue but also in some cases to capture in writing the tradition
of oral story-telling. The idea of imposing a truth on these Irish stories and
folktales was of little importance, as the reality of these magic tales and fairy
spirits was very different. In Ireland, the traditions of storytelling and oral
performance date back to pre-Christianity, when storytellers, or filidh, for
whom memory was necessary, were part of a privileged class. When literary
traditions emerged, these oral artists were forbidden to write down their stories
to preserve their art and the value of memory. Some residual authenticity is
established because the authenticity of those performances remains in the
cultural memory. Once literary forms began to infiltrate Ireland during the
Middle Ages, the role of storytelling and orality shifted. A fili was not only
an oral performer but a man of reading and learning. These traditional tales
were interlaced with legendary, legal and genealogical allurement that it was
the fili's responsibility to transmit. This transition led towards the integration
between literary and oral forms. It is because of this intersection that Irish
oral performance is both literary and oral.

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 The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

With the rise of Christianity, oral poets disappeared but the filidh managed
to survive and they became repositories of knowledge. Given the difference
between oral and written language, the challenge was to transfer features of
speech to the written page. How well the illusion of speech was evoked on
paper is an often overlooked achievement of the author's art. A number of
Anglo-Irish writers attempted to create authenticity by glorifying the effect
of the Irish tradition of oral story-telling. Anglo-Irish literature relied heavily
on oral story-telling, an important social activity in traditional Irish life. This
event of story-telling is called céilidh. Padraig Colum states that the céilidh
is an evening entertainment, 'told in the professional way, with the timing,
the gestures, the stresses that belong to an ancient popular art', stories told in
the setting most appropriate for such narratives, 'a tumbledown cabin lighted
only by a candle but more often by just the peat on the hearth'.23 Henry
Glassie claims that the stories themselves are 'narratives artfully ordered to
do the serious work of entertainment, pleasing their listeners in the present,
then carrying them into the future with something to think about'.24 He says
that such narratives are not quite prose and not poems but poetic stories
shaped for the ear rather than for the eye.
The founders of the Abbey Theatre, William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory
and John Synge attempted to connect their drama with Irish oral traditions
by adapting Irish folk-tales and legends. Yeats believed that the invention of
the printing-press had severely damaged literature. In his essay 'Literature
and the Living Voice', he proposed to turn the theatre into a place in which
the revival of an oral presentation of literature could be started. Apart from
the performance of plays, this project also included storytelling: 'We must
have narrative as well as dramatic poetry and we are making room for it in
the theatre in the first instance, but in this also we must go to an earlier time.
Modern recitation is not, like modern theatrical art, an over-elaboration of
a true art, but an entire misunderstanding. It has no tradition at all [...] We
must go to the villages or we must go back hundreds of years to Wolfram
of Eschenbach and the castles of Thuringia. [...] Their reciter cannot be a
player, for that is a difficult art; but he must be a messenger and he should
be as interesting, as exciting as are all that carry great news. He comes from
far-off and he speaks of far-off things with his own peculiar animation and,
instead of lessening the ideal and beautiful elements of speech, he may, if he
has mind to, increase them. [...] His art is nearer to pattern than that of the
player. It is always allusion, never illusion; for what he tells of, no matter

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Hana F. Khasawneh

how impassioned he may become is always distant and for this reason he may
permit himself every kind of nobleness. In a short poem he may interrupt the
narrative with a burden which the audience will soon learn to sing'.25
The drama of Lady Gregory focuses on problems of the authority and
continuation of traditions. The ballad is the paradigmatic form in which Irish
oral culture appears in plays like The Rising of the Moon and The White
Cockade. The ballad is a communal form that can be sung easily and passed
on with comparatively little loss in form and content. The form of Lady
Gregory's plays indicates an unwillingness to interrupt the course of action
with longer narratives or songs. Ong argues that drama was the first literary
genre whose structure was made possible by written communication: 'The
unity of action in conventional drama, its continuously ascending plot with
a climax and a denouement, could not be constructed before the invention of
writing. Oral cultures are not able to tell longer stories in a linear temporal
sequence. Oral narration is non-chronological, episodic and repetitious'.26
To conclude, a distinction should not be made between oral and literary
transmission. It is hard to break the habit of considering Irish literature in
terms of fixed texts that are written and read. Orality and literacy are not two
opposing entities but two ends of a continuum where the oral and written
words interact with each other. Our fixed glance at letters has made us unable
to appreciate the difference between oral and literate cultures. The Irish oral
performance is an effective storytelling medium. It produces powerful and
beautiful verbal performances of high artistic work which are no longer even
possible once writing has taken their visual possession. Writing turns out to
be a device for preserving the oral tradition and learned men as filidh come to
depend upon the written word.

Dr Hana F. Khasawneh
teaches in the English Department of Yarmouk
University, Irbid-Jordan.

Notes

1 Monkia Fludernik, 'Conversational narration/oral narration', in Peter

Huhn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jory Schonert (eds), Handbook of
Narratology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), p.65).
2 Ibid.
3 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Routledge, 1982), p.8.

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 The Irish Oral Tradition and Print Culture

4 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.97.
5 Finnegan, op.cit., p.64.
6 Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth
Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.4.
7 James Flogg, Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott (Stirling: E.Mackay,
1909), p.53.
8 John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Including the Whole of
Mr Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1777), iv.
9 Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, and Culture
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p.144.
10 Diarmuid Ο Giollâin, Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity,
Identity (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), p.76.
11 Robert Burns, 'Hallowe'en', in Andrew Noble and Patrick Schott Hogg
(eds), The Cannongate Burns (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001), p.81.
12 Ong, op.cit., p.82.
13 Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and
Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p.324.
14 Gearôid 0 Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise
Woman Healer (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), p.98.
15 Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: Toronto University
Press, 1991), p.34.
16 Ong, The Presence of the Word, p.73.
17 See Richard Bauman, 'Verbal art as performance', American
Anthropologist 77.2 (n.s.) (1975), 290-311.
18 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.7.
19 Ong, op.cit., p.8.
20 Ong, The Presence of the Word, p.204.
21 Jerome Rothenberg, Pre-Faces and Other Writings (New York: New
Directions, 1981), p. 134.
22 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p.23.
23 Padraig Colum (éd.), A Treasury of Irish Folklore (New York: Crown
Publisher, 1954), xx.
24 Henry Glassie, Irish Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 123.
25 W.B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp.213-15.
26 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 142-44.

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