INTRODUCTION

This book deals with what is usually called folk, traditional or vernacular song. While the definitions of such terms are constantly being revised, the popular (and until recently, even scholarly) image of this kind of song usually includes such traits as oral transmission, relatively simple lyrics created by illiterate or semiliterate composers, and informal performance within small communities. Although all of these traits may characterize traditional song, not all are necessary to it: for while folk or traditional song tends to be transmitted orally, it has also often been circulated via the written word; and although often simple, it is not invariably so and its creators have included well-known poets as well as anonymous local songmakers. Performance in community, on the other hand, is integral to the song tradition, a tradition I prefer to define more in terms of context than content. The following study will therefore question the first two of these assumptions specifically in the context of the Irish song tradition; for although certainly not unique in this regard, it offers a striking example of the ways in which the oral and the written, the vernacular and elite, can interact, aesthetically and socially, to create a tradition that draws on a wide range of linguistic, poetic and musical forms and conventions. Concentrating on the eighteenth century, when many of the songs or songgenres in the contemporary Irish traditional song repertoire first appear, I argue that while differences in poetic idiom may appear between folksong and elite or educated poetry, there is ultimately no absolute dichotomy between oral and written forms on the one hand or folk and literary authorship on the other, either within the song tradition itself or in the realm of literary poetry. Instead, I will demonstrate that in Irish poetry continuous interaction has long existed between the vernacular and high cultural spheres; that the boundaries between the two, many of which have been retrospectively imposed by scholars and commentators with little real knowledge of or affinity for the tradition, are historically fluid rather than rigid; that the distinctions are more stylistic and formal than cultural and social; and that both are driven by aesthetic as well as functional considerations. Thus one idiom (whether defined as oral, traditional or vernacular) cannot be valued at the expense of the other (written,
1

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literary or elite) on the basis of received ideas of what distinguishes one from the other. Far from being a monolithic entity, traditional Irish song encompasses a greater breadth of forms than is often assumed. Neither do written or oral origins determine either the form of the poetry or its ultimate use. Certainly within traditional singing communities songs are more subject to the aesthetic and performative values and requirements of their respective communities than to the concepts of what does and does not constitute the popular or the literary. This dynamic interaction has deep historical roots in Irish culture, roots that can be traced to the medieval period. As Lesa N Mhunghaile comments, the connection between the oral and the written in the Gaelic tradition in Ireland has been so pervasive since the advent of writing in the sixth century that it is often difficult to say what originated as an oral narrative and what was originally literary.1 This connection becomes far more apparent, however, during the eighteenth century, not only with the entrance of the songs of the dispossessed Gaelic poets2 and their English-speaking schoolmaster counterparts into the popular song repertoire, but also with the spread of literacy, which both the greater availability of education and of cheap printed forms (chiefly the ballad sheet and the chapbook) helped to promote. Therefore, while some of the material in the popular repertoire during this period is arguably derived from earlier, oral models, the circulation of song via both manuscripts and printed forms, in conjunction with oral transmission, is demonstrable. So, too, is the use of high poetic and thematic elements, such as the aisling (vision) poem by the eighteenth-century literary poets and the Latin-derived conflictus conventions by the hedge schoolmasters and their imitators. Meanwhile, the shared conventions of the caoineadh (lament) demonstrate not only interaction between oral and literate spheres but also vernacular and aristocratic ones, contributing to a form that seems to have been common to all echelons of society. The elite and vernacular shared much other common ground: literary poets from Aogn Rathaille to W. B. Yeats retained a view of themselves and their art that placed them on a higher than popular level; and yet a comparable self-consciousness of artistry can be traced in the work and commentary of local song composers like Sen Bn Mac Grianna. This self-consciousness, while at least partly interwoven with the entrance of the songs of such literary Ulster poets as Art Mac Cumhaigh and Peadar Doirnn into the traditional repertoire, may also reflect a prior and parallel sense of the importance of poetry and the role of the poet in society. This is not to entirely equate the two idioms. For example, orality does play a part, if not necessarily in the original composition of many traditional songs, frequently in their recomposition, especially when written aids are unavailable arguably making variation a more aesthetically acceptable trait in the song tradition. It is also undeniable that certain genres of traditional song are characterized by linguistic, metric and imagistic conventions (including quotidian language,

Introduction

directness of diction and the use of repetition) that make them at least generically identifiable as folksong. Whether these conventions can be strictly designated as oral or even folk, however, is another question. Not only might simplicity of expression owe something to aesthetic preference, it could also be employed by the literate, as it was by priest-poet Uilliam English. On the other hand, even some of Eoghan Rua Silleabhins more arcane compositions found favour in traditional singing communities; and the songs of hedge schoolmaster poets acquired much of their impact by departing from everyday language in their deliberate use of learned allusion and Latinate word constructions. Moreover, song fashions change, a fact that is reflected in both the contents of eighteenth-century chapbook and miscellanies and in what people were actually singing for instance, in the early nineteenth-century community Patrick Kennedy describes in his Wexford memoirs, where we find that middle-brow English-language material (including both narrative broadside ballads and more sentimental lyric fare) entered the traditional song repertoire via print. In fact, the variety of song-forms and styles in the repertoire of the singing communities of the past hundred years demonstrates that aesthetic distinctions in the traditional song repertoire are much more malleable and relative than previously believed; and that, instead of a single, monolithic aesthetic, we must recognize a reasonably wide range of individual and community aesthetic preferences. Ultimately, however, defining song repertoire on the basis of its oral or literary origins or features can distract the observer from one central fact: that, while capable of being abstracted from its social contexts, it is most wholly realized in performance. This is a theme that will recur throughout this book in relation to each of the genres I examine.

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Orality Studies: A Critical Overview

Orality and literacy are not two separate and independent 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 differing cultures and periods, are used differently in different social contexts and, in 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. Ruth Finnegan3

The study of literacy as it relates to pre-literate or oral modes of art and culture now frequently termed orality studies has burgeoned in recent years, permeating not only the fields of anthropology, literature, folklore and communications, but also sociology, social work, social history, neuroscience and religious studies. Where does such interest come from? Although the term oral tradition was first employed by Renaissance Catholic theologians to express the idea of an unwritten tradition, preserved by the Church, and of equal authority to the written Word

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of the Bible,4 the concept of oral tradition as we know it today only emerged in the eighteenth century, shaped, as Lesa N Mhunghaile notes, by a number of interlinked debates in antiquarian and literary circles on the nature of the literary source and the reliability of oral tradition as a means of preserving history.5 One debate that became particularly heated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerned the composition of Homeric epics. Drawing upon the writings of first-century historian Flavius Josephus (who had asserted that Homers works were put together just as they were remembered distinctly from songs), Franois Hdelin contended that Homer did not exist a view accepted by Perrault.6 This notion, along with the Ciceronian tradition that the Homeric poems were brought to Athens in fragments by Lycurgus and there assembled into the great epics, served, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to discredit Homer in favour of the more unified (and therefore more worthy) Virgil; it also, coincidentally, functioned as a useful bit of propaganda for those [like Joseph Addison] who were venturing to offer ballads to the serious attention of men of taste.7 By the late eighteenth century, the focus on Homer-as-ballad-singer had become strongly interwoven with the long-standing interest in bardism, now come to prominence in the age of Blair, Macpherson, Rousseau and Grey an age, notes Nicholas Hudson, of increased interest in primitive speech and culture. This interest informed Robert Woods theories about an unlettered Homer, whose language derived from a primitive age when speech, unrestrained by writing, was passionate and spontaneous.8 It embodied, according to Wood, the passionate expression of Nature, which, incapable of misrepresentation, appeals directly to our feelings and finds the shortest road to the heart.9 Such a bard was well-suited to the Age of Sensibility. Although Giambattista Vico had earlier represented Homers poems as the reflex of an entire people, both Wood and Friedrich August Wolf found a more receptive audience for such ideas at the end of the century. In this, they were no doubt aided by an increasing fascination with the oral culture of ancient peoples and the expectation encouraged by scrupulously edited, amended and purified publications such as Percys Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765): namely that ancient songs were not barbarous or rude in the way that might have been expected, but rather were compatible with refined eighteenth-century taste.10 Ultimately, Wolf s Prolegomena ad Homerum, published in 1795, not only asserted proof of the oral transmission of Homeric verse, but also revived the old notion of the epics as a compendium of loose songs, subsequently assembled into written form. Wolf s work, which argued that the Homeric works had necessarily to be the creation of later redactors who joined together the primitive oral songs into the works we celebrate for their unity of design, paved the way for the nineteenth-century debates that eventually led to the oral-formulaic theories of the twentieth century.11

Introduction

Such a glorification of oral culture was, however, a late development. A far less sympathetic view of oral society had been common in Europe since the Renaissance, when the written word, conceived primarily as an image of speech but increasingly viewed as the principal orientation to language had been exalted to the point where some seventeenth-century grammarians and rhetoricians imagined what Hudson describes as a visual language that mirrored the nature of things more accurately than any existing form of speech. The rise of the middle classes and the scriptural emphasis of Protestantism no doubt reinforced the preeminence of literacy, and illiteracy was increasingly associated with ignorance, superstition and social inferiority.12 Commentators from Samuel Purchas to Vico and Adam Ferguson viewed unlettered cultures as essentially primitive, sometimes possessing a form of hieroglyphic representation, but mainly incapable of higher forms of thought, including abstract analysis.13 As late as the 1770s, Edward Gibbon maintained that the ancient Germans had neither history nor poetry because they were without the artificial help of letters.14 Dissenters to the view of writing as a mirror of speech arose as early as the sixteenth century, becoming increasingly numerous by the end of the seventeenth: by 1700 Conrad Amman argued that speech was a natural form of expression and less liable to deceive than writing. Samuel Johnson saw writing and speech as distinct forms of discourse, while Thomas Sheridan asserted that there was no sort of affinity between writing and speech.15 Sheridan, in his promotion of oratory, even accorded primacy to speech, maintaining, for example, that literacy produced a stultifying effect on sermons a view shared by Oliver Goldsmith.16 But these were linguistic and rhetorical concerns, not cultural ones. Nicholas Hudson connects the tendency of linguists and grammarians to separate the functions of writing and speech in the mid-eighteenth century with the higher value increasingly placed upon passionate utterance by advocates of the poetry of Sensibility.17 Yet the rhetorical perspectives, which had their own history, could well have complemented rather than arisen from the movement of Sensibility, reflecting other values of the era, including an emphasis on empiricism and linguistic pedagogy.18 The aesthetics of vernacular literature also had complex roots in early Enlightenment thought and criticism (like Joseph Addisons), which exalted the natural above the artificial, the simple above the ornate and the true taste of the common people over the false taste of many educated readers, well before the subsequent ascendancy of bardism among the literate classes.19 Ultimately, it was the elevation of oral culture in the romantic and quasi-anthropological writings of Wood, Wolf, Herder and others that, as Albert Friedman notes, helped shape the concept of unlettered culture, in which poetry like Homers had long survived without the benefit of the written word;20 and which, closer to home, had produced the works of Ossian and the ballads of the ancient English and Scottish minstrels. Even as most of these

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theorists also saw oral culture as a reflection of an earlier primitive phase in the development of human civilization (that barbarous state of society which necessarily precedes the invention of letters),21 their claims offered a new perspective that ran counter to the view of a culture without letters as no culture at all. Many of the issues central to the more recent debates about orality and literacy are therefore far from new. Contemporary orality studies usually traces its roots to the groundbreaking work of Milman Parry in the late 1920s through the mid-1930s. Influenced by Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry initially focused on the formulaic and traditional nature of Greek especially Homeric epic poetry, ultimately (following intensive fieldwork work with Yugoslavian epic singers or guslars) developing the theory of oral-formulaic composition. Parrys assistant and protg, Albert Lord, continued this work, eventually publishing The Singer of Tales (1960), in which he described his and Parrys work and set forth the tenets of the oral-formulaic theory. This theory posits the existence of a repertoire of formulae and thematic material from which the singer draws to create his composition-in-performance, weaving these elements together according to both the aesthetic and metrical demands of the genre. Parrys definition of the formula a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea replaced terms like stock epithets or epic clichs used by Homeric scholars to describe the composition of Greek epic poetry22 and introduced a broader conception of the mental and linguistic processes involved in oral composition. Comparing it to language itself, i.e. substitution in the framework of the grammar, Lord saw the formula as the offspring of the marriage of thought and sung verse.23 Bruce Rosenberg, who has convincingly applied the theory to southern American folk preaching, clarified the technique further by describing its art as the skillful manipulation of metrically consistent phrases, some memorized and some spontaneously composed (based on lexico-syntactic models known by the singers), which skill enabled them to spin out narratives at great length.24 The oral-formulaic system thus encompasses not only repeated words and phrases but also patterns that make adjustment of phrase and creation of phrases by analogy possible.25 It also ensures that, as Ruth Finnegan observes, There is no correct text, no idea that one version is more authentic than another and that each performance is a unique and original creation with its own validity.26 Themes, or entire compositions, can be lengthened or shortened according to occasion or audience. If Parry and Lords theory made orality a defining feature of certain forms of literature, distinguishing oral from written poetry on the basis of formal, structural and stylistic characteristics, it also claimed that the singer must be illiterate to practise his art. This claim may have been partly motivated by a desire to raise the status of the oral singer from that of folk or peasant performer to that of the traditional creative artist, whose compositions were on a par with the best

Introduction

written poetry. Lord pointed out, however, that many of the guslars songs were aristocratic in origin, surviving longer in peasant populations not because it is essentially peasant poetry, but because the peasant society has remained illiterate longer than urban society.27 Yet this view also drives a wedge between written and oral cultures and their respective verbal arts. Written literature with its notion of the fixed or correct text, to be memorized rather than improvised in performance is seen as wholly incompatible with oral technique.28 In fact although he elsewhere qualifies this generalization Lord proclaims the oral and written modes contradictory and mutually exclusive.29 Lords book had an enormous impact on scholars, particularly in the fields of anthropology, folklore and medieval literature, who applied it to everything from ballads to Beowulf. John Miles Foley, having inherited the Parry-Lord mantle, has carried on both the work on Yugoslavian oral epic in particular and the oral-formulaic theory in general, which he has refined and qualified, while successfully straddling the fields of literature, classics and anthropology.30 Another major development in orality studies began with the work of scholars like Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong, who, approaching the subject from different but complementary angles, made even more sweeping distinctions between the oral and literate spheres than had the oral-formulaic school. Havelock proposed that the development of the Greek alphabet reflected a revolution not only in classical Greek culture but in western culture in general, effecting a radical change in the way [we] think and, by transferring the process from the aural to the visual realm, in the way we remember or store information.31 According to Havelock, Atomism and the alphabet alike were theoretical constructs, manifestations of a capacity for abstract analysis, an ability to translate objects of perception into mental entities, which seems to have been one of the hallmarks of the way the Greek mind worked.32 McLuhan, influenced by Havelock, believed that writing radically altered fundamental cognitive and psychological processes. Specifically, the technologies of alphabetic writing, especially print, trained the brain to process visual information linearly, and such linear thinking implying determination, causality, logic, detachment, delayed gratification is then applied to the rest of life.33 McLuhan further distinguished between visual, written (especially printed) culture and oral culture, as exemplified by acoustic man. His primary interest, as Ruth and Elihu Katz put it, was in the contrast between media of heart and media of mind. Paraphrasing McLuhans formulation, they remark:
In the beginning was orality, the extension of the ear, the medium of heart. Unlike print that extends the eye individualistically, word-of-mouth is sociable, pluralistic, playful, favouring generalist and operational wisdom rather than specialist and classified information. Acoustic man experiences life simultaneously rather than sequentially, and sees the world more cubistically with competing aspects in the same

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Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song single frame. Word-of-mouth favours communication in time across generations, and hence tradition and religion, whereas print pushes for communication in space, and hence towards the development of nations and empires.34

This distinction between the modern and the primitive is also evident in Walter Ongs work, although Ong, an expert on the rhetoric and logic of Peter Ramus, emphasizes the advances of literacy, with a nostalgic but resigned glance back at the world we have lost. Yet in spite of his recognition that writing can never dispense with orality and that writing did not reduce orality but enhanced it,35 he too posits an array of cognitive differences between literate and preliterate or primarily oral cultures, basing them on the radical division between visual and auditory media and their effects upon human consciousness and thought. Writes Ong:
The thought processes and expression of those in oral cultures are typically formulaic, redundant, conservative, agonistic, participatory rather than distanced, situational rather than abstract, additive and aggregative rather than subordinative and analytic [Writing] turns from oral situational thinking to increasingly abstract thinking, which moves in interlocked, sequential, linear patterns The mind formed by writing conducts even its orally expressed thinking in modes quite different from those of the oral mind, for it lives in a differently structured intersubjective world and a differently structured cosmos.36

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Yet if Ongs emphasis on the evolutionary model of human development implicitly allies him with McLuhans brand of romanticism, it also connects him with the nineteenth-century cultural anthropologists and folklorists who saw the primitive as something to escape rather than something to cherish37 and who (in keeping with the four-stages theory first enunciated in the eighteenth century) viewed civilization as a natural development from primitive oral roots to sophisticated literacy. 38 Thus, while Parry and Lord viewed writing as destructive to oral poetry and McLuhan saw it as the death-knell for the world of the heart, Ong saw it as a humanizing technology and the artifacts of the oral world, although valuable, as less highly developed:
Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations.39

Jack Goody and Ian Watt, although sharing many of Ongs and Havelocks views and clearly believing in some sort of cultural evolution, resisted a nomenclature based upon the assumption of radical differences between the mental attributes of literate and non-literate peoples, preferring to emphasize cultural and social distinctions in order to avoid the more pejorative contrast between the primitive and civilized mentalit, such as that forwarded by Lvy-Bruhl,

Introduction

who characterized primitive peoples as prelogical. They concluded that the persistence of non-logical thinking in modern literate societies can be partly explained by the fact that in our civilization writing is clearly an addition, not an alternative, to oral transmission.40 Grappling with many of the tenets of this literary hypothesis, anthropologists like Ruth Finnegan, socio-linguists like William Foley, Deborah Tannen and Wallace Chafe, psychologists like Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, and folklorists like Eric Montenyohl and Bruce Rosenberg have argued for a continuum of spoken and written culture instead of the great divide posited by the communications scholars. While acknowledging differences between the oral and written modes, they speak of them in terms of tendencies, shades, and degrees rather than entirely discrete worlds, and find far more that is common than antithetical between them.41 For example, in the realm of verbal art, they point to largely oral cultures that conduct their own sort of literary criticism and to the use of formal and stylistic conventions like formulae, parallelism and repetition in both written and oral poetry.42 Ruth Finnegan, whose chief concern is oral poetry, stresses the centrality of performance in oral as opposed to written literature, but otherwise finds that oral and written literature often in practice comprise relative and overlapping rather than mutually exclusive categories.43 Chafe and Tannen argue for the inextricability of speaking and writing in even those modes of discourse that seem most exclusively a matter of writing and reading, and the inherently social nature of all discourse.44 Indeed, there is evidence to show that strategies associated with writing [can] be found in spoken language; that, for example, Parallelism and intonations thought to be basic in poetry are also basic in faceto-face conversation. Other studies, notably by Deborah Tannen and William Labov, comparing oral narratives with both factual and fictional accounts by the same person, suggest that written imaginative literature combines the facility of involvement of spoken language with the integrative quality of writing.45 Given the fact that, as Ruth Finnegan reminds us, A degree of literacy has been a feature of human culture in most parts of the world for millennia, and that even historically the illiterate often had indirect access to the written word,46 various scholars have attempted to construct meaningful cognitive correctives for the orality-literacy dichotomy within literate cultures, conducting studies, for example, which show that severely dyslexic children who cannot read or write (and thus do not acquire the visual-spatial cognition McLuhan attributes to literacy) nonetheless often perform normally on intelligence tests and demonstrating that the transfer between [putative] written and oral competencies can occur even in the absence of reading and writing skills.47 Nor, according to a number of scholars, is logic the sole domain of the literate: G. E. R. Lloyd has argued that it was Greek oral political and legal discourse and its rules of debate and evidence which gave rise to Greek logic, philosophy and science, not widespread literacy.48

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A number of scholars have pointed out that the logic of the orally transmitted Vedic tradition is highly codified, abstract and reflective, the fact that it was historically limited to the realm of religious discourse indicating cultural rather than cognitive differences.49 To counter Basil Bernsteins contention that the mastery of elaborated linguistic codes (corresponding to literacy and middle-class culture) versus restricted codes (associated with lower levels of literacy and to workingclass society) determined an individuals ability to engage in abstract classification and logical reasoning, William Labov demonstrated that a speaker of Vernacular Black English, by any of Bernsteins metrics, a restricted code, could produce chains of logical reasoning to do honor to any academic.50 Thus the cognitive correctives (along with the ethnographic correctives) seek to vitiate the notion of the superiority of literacy over orality and of one kind of culture over another perpetuated by the literacy theorists. They also seek to demonstrate how pedagogical and other cultural processes effect cognitive changes in individuals and the ways in which literate and illiterate modes of discourse complement rather than contrast one another.51 Many differences previously attributed to distinctions between literate and illiterate (or oral) cultures have been shown to be the products of a complex social and cultural picture, of which literacy is only one element. Shirley Brice Heaths study of the literacy practices of three Piedmont North Carolina communities demonstrates the ways in which the development of literacy skills and the uses these skills are put to are moulded by both class and cultural norms and expectations.52 Concludes Foley, Literacy is not a straightforward technology of the intellect There are as many literacies as there are ways of engaging the world and ourselves through the written word.53 Meanwhile, folklorists and literary scholars alike have argued that the oralformulaic theory is not universally applicable, as initially thought, but limited to specific genres in specific cultures. For example, the application of the oral-formulaic theory to traditional ballads by writers like David Buchan and James Jones has been demolished by Albert Friedman, H. O. Nygard, Flemming Andersen and Thomas Pettit, who have shown that the set phrases or ballad commonplaces that Buchan took for oral formulae cannot stand scrutiny as part of a system of composition-in-performance, especially in light of the remarkable stability of ballad texts in contrast to texts of guslar compositions.54 There has also long been much revisionism about the applicability of the oral-formulaic theory to medieval poetry. As early as 1966 H. L. Rogers wrote:
The term formula becomes a portmanteau, enclosing within its ample capacity many different, and often undefined, sorts of lexical, morphological and syntactic similarities One is forced to suspect that the growing dogmatism about the oral-formulaic character of Old English poetry owes more to faith and presumed psychological insight than to reason.55

Introduction

11

Scholars have also questioned another major tenet of Lords theory: that, because of its tendency to fix texts and discourage variation, literacy is antithetical to and destructive of oral literature. A number of ethnologists, including Ruth Finnegan, have delineated oral cultures in which highly literate storytellers and other oral composer-performers function in an identical fashion to non-literate ones, employing the same strategies and inventiveness.56 Also, as many ethnographers have demonstrated, despite the almost universal identification of variation as an essential characteristic of oral literature, verbatim (or near verbatim) memorization is actually integral to some oral traditions. For example, in Somali and Zulu poetry the concept of a correct version is locally recognized;57 many of the Hausa-speaking Nigerians have memorized the Koran, yet do not know any classical Arabic;58 and the Sanskrit Rigveda has been transmitted faultlessly from generation to generation through purely oral means.59 Written verse can also interact with oral verse in oral literatures: In Swahili verse there is a constant interchange and influence as between orally-composed and written verse, while in Somalia, some poets have used writing as a visual aid to their oral memory.60 Clearly, as Rosenberg has remarked, Writing co-exists peacefully with orality; it is not its executioner.61 The literacy/orality debate has also engaged social historians and literary scholars. Of the historians, certainly the best-known is Elizabeth Eisenstein for her 1979 book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. While avoiding (and even taking issue with) many of the claims for literacy advanced by the communications scholars (particularly McLuhan), Eisenstein argues that print culture effected far-reaching social changes, such as standardization and reproducibility of information, as well as the wider circulation of ideas changes that manuscript, with its much more limited readership, could not achieve. Unlike Febvre and Martin, who view printing as a force for social conservatism, Eisenstein portrays movable type as the seed of cultural rebirth during the Renaissance, one that spurred the exchange of new ideas, fostered nationalism and inaugurated the general democratization of art and science.62 Subsequent historians (including Adrian Johns and Margaret Ezell) have sought to question or at least qualify a number of Eisensteins assertions, including the supposed fixity of the printed book in the Early Modern period; the accessibility of print; the sudden decline of manuscript culture; and the ability to isolate the technological, commercial, and legal influence of the printing press from a myriad of other social and political developments.63 Meanwhile, G. E. R. Lloyd has pointed to the development of writing in China 400 years in advance of Europe, which occurred without an accompanying scientific revolution.64 Many recent social historians have tended to represent oral and literate modalities as mutually interacting social and aesthetic spheres, with influence flowing in both directions. This is certainly the message of Adam Foxs Oral

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and Literate Culture in England 15001700.65 Reassessing literacy levels of the period and examining the interaction between cheap print and everything from proverbs and nursery lore to ballads, rumours and news, Fox asserts:
There was no necessary antithesis between oral and literate forms of communication and preservation; the one did not have to destroy or undermine the other. If anything, the written word tended to augment the spoken, reinventing it and making it anew, propagating its contents, heightening its exposure, and ensuring its continued vitality, albeit sometimes in different forms.66

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As Barry Reay, author of Popular Cultures in England 15501750, comments, The bipolar or binary model of the cultural make-up of Early Modern England has slowly been replaced by a newer interpretation which stresses diversity and multiplicity.67 In literary criticism an ever-increasing number of works deal with questions of orality in relation to subjects ranging from Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry to the works of Milton, Defoe and Conrad, the epistolary novel, broadside ballads, Victorian sermons and modern poetry. A number of these studies still draw upon dualistic concepts of writing and orality (and many of those concerned with medieval literature still involve oral-formulaic theory), evidence that the question of the great divide is far from settled. On the other hand, scholars like Denis Donoghue have addressed the dichotomies postulated by Ong, McLuhan, Lvi-Strauss, Derrida and de Certeau, in order to argue for a more complex view of the relationship between the oral and written modes,68 while Carl Lindhahl has contributed much to the lowering of barriers between the elite and the folk, the written and the oral, in the study of medieval literature.69 Folklorists, too, have modified their concepts of traditional or vernacular culture. Until at least the last quarter of the twentieth century, William Wells Newells 1890 definition of folklore as oral tradition and belief handed down from generation to generation without the use of writing was reconfigured but remained essentially unchanged.70 In the 1960s, Jan Brunvand defined folklore as Those materials in culture that circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of traditional performance and communication.71 The mention of groups and of performance and communication were new, but the definition retained the essential ingredient of orality. Even as late as 1972 in spite of Dan Ben-Amoss groundbreaking formulation of folklore as artistic communication in small groups72 Ruth Finnegan found that for folklorists oral tradition is not only the central focus of much of their interest, but is often taken to be the most important defining characteristic of folk literature.73 And in spite of the now-universal acknowledgement in the field of folklore that tradition is not strictly defined either by the medium of oral transmission or by

Introduction

13

post-romantic theories of communal creation, primitive survivals and other concepts of cultural passivity associated with orality and the folk mind, such attitudes have changed only gradually. David Buchan, who believed that ballads were composed in an oral-formulaic manner, claimed that the traditional ballad could not survive into the highly literate, post-industrial era because the oral mentality that allowed singers to compose ballads in performance would be replaced by one that relied on the fixed text and rote memorization.74 But while Elaine Lawless found that Buchans distinction relied far too heavily on the anthropological confusions of primitives and peasants, illiterates and the folk, her own definition of folklore as a dynamic, living, oral form that will, by its very nature, vary, while certainly true of many genres, leaves out much that is folklore and insists too strongly on variation itself (as opposed to the latitude for variation) as a determining feature.75 Ideas on the relationship between variation and stability and orality and literacy have, however, broadened considerably in recent years. This is due in part to the influence of newer academic concepts such as communications and performance theories, but also to a greater emphasis in ethnographic research upon the tradition-bearers themselves and to the study of folklore in context that is, on the circumstances in which tradition-bearers function as performers, creators and human beings. Such an approach, while hardly ignoring the importance of oral transmission, performance and composition in traditional societies, accords orality significance as only one factor in a complex cultural milieu which operates on multiple levels, partakes of multiple spheres of social influence, and consists of thinking human beings who make choices about the world they inhabit and the lives they live. Folksong scholars like Eleanor Long, Edward Ives and many others have emphasized the role of the singer in continuity, creation and re-creation of song repertoire in a recognition that, as John Quincy Wolf presciently remarked, differences in temperament, personality, and artistic judgment determine what [singers] do to their songs.76 The concepts of pure, orally transmitted folklore, uncorrupted by print culture, or of the passive, illiterate (or semi-literate) tradition-bearer have long been as untenable as they are unrealistic. Meanwhile, work on the interrelationship of print and popular song traditions by numerous song scholars has opened exciting new avenues in the study of creativity and aesthetics within traditional cultures and subcultures. Study of the effects of oral transmission continues, although with greater attention to aesthetic and social considerations and less emphasis on orality as a controlling force, separable from the traditional artist or community. Thus most folksong scholars would agree with Hugh Shields that it is becoming clearer that the demarcation of oral and literate modes of composition is not easy to draw nor probably very precise. Features apparently characteristic of oral expression occur as well in written literature which, after all, is written by people accustomed also to speak.77

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Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song

While much of the following study deals with material from libraries and archives, it will also be informed throughout by both Irish folksong scholarship and ethnography, from the simple documentation of eighteenth-century collectors to the broader social, historical and contextual studies of the twentieth. For although we have no crystal ball into the past, given the extraordinary conservatism and continuity of Irish traditional culture, knowledge of this more recent, fieldwork-based work offers us far greater insight into the practices, attitudes and aesthetics of participants in the popular song tradition, past and present, than the study of texts alone can provide. My own position has thus been informed not only by such scholarship but also and perhaps most importantly by the time I have spent with traditional singers and in singing communities. My own field research has included singers from both the Irish- and English-language singing communities, as well as Irish song collectors notably Tom Munnelly, whose concentrated work over a thirty-year period in County Clare gave him a unique depth of experience with the tradition. Because of my own orientation as a folklorist and ethnographer, this study will unavoidably reflect what I believe to be the central concern of that discipline: the illumination and celebration of human culture, particularly the culture of groups often left out of the historical or social picture.

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