The Legacy of the Caoineadh in Irish Literary Tradition

Abstract

The legacy of caoineadh or keening, otherwise known as “funerary laments” performed by crying women, or “keeners”, is thoroughly embedded within a long-lasting Irish literary tradition of poetry, folktales, modern novels and contemporary folksongs, athwart an intricate webbing of autochthonous Irish ethnopoetics; that is, a poetics that represents the search for the intrinsically human character, dreams and aspirations. Within this particularly Irish ethnopoetics, lie the poesis of mourning, melancholy, loss and grief, as well as the panegyric rituals which bear fruit to these emotions, which have long been expressed, ever since the primitive advents of speech, enduring the trials of time. By examining James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, his oneiric nighttime meditation on death, one becomes aware that the poesis of mourning is deftly portrayed not only on an individual scale, but on a nation-abridging one, emphasizing a generalized state of mourning for a lost Ireland; thus, upholding and maintaining the Irish ethnopoetics of the caoineadh tradition.