One reason for this may lie in the fact that tales which had previously been told in the Irish language passed over into English only to a very small extent. (p.21 note: Kiberds footnote at this point refers to Seán OSullivan, The Folklore of Ireland, London 1974, p.15.)ĭeclan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape 1995): Joyces Stephen Hero, noting the willingness of the Catholic clergy to support the League, said that the priests hoped to find in Irish a bulwark against modern ideas, keeping the wolves of unbelief at bay and the people frozen in a past of implicit faith. George Moore and John McGahern might also be cited as writers of real class whose work bears no trace of the folklore of the rural Ireland in which they grew up. Nor is Joyce alone in this proud immunity to the Gaelic tradition. Where the oral tales climaxed in blood-baths and supernatural reversals, Joyces epiphanies describe nothing more momentous than the passing of a coin.

Where the oral tradition took the spectacular as its subject, Joyce finds poetry in the commonplace.

The greatest collection of short stories to come out of Ireland, Joyces Dubliners, bears positively no trace of the oral tradition. (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi 1995), pp.61-94 - extract.ĭeclan Kiberd, Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition, in Terence Brown & Patrick Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979): See Bruce Stewart, Joyce at Tara, in Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions, ed. Declan Kiberd (1979) to Carol Schloss (2004)

Waiting For June by Joyce Sweeney