Storytelling gives us a sense of place

Irish writers like James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Sally Rooney are known around the world, but Ireland's English-language literary tradition is, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon. The first written evidence of the Irish language dates from the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., and Irish is the oldest written vernacular language in western Europe. For more than a millenium prior to the colonisation of Ireland a twin tradition of Irish-language oral and written literature flourished. While the written tradition all but disappeared from public view during the 17th and 18th centuries, the oral arts of storytelling and song carried a wealth of cultural knowledge to subsequent generations.

As late as the mid-20th century, these oral arts were still important pastimes, often practiced together in household settings, particularly in rural Ireland. Irish language storytelling encompasses a broad range of material and styles, from sagas and other longer mythical tales to humourous stories and accounts of significant local and national historical events. Though Irish traditional music has thrived in recent years, seachaithe or storytellers are now much fewer in number and their art is frequently restricted to more formalised settings like the competitions of Oireachtas na Gaeilge.

For the Irish pilot study of the HEART project, we saw an opportunity to reclaim storytelling as a central, informal community practice. We were interested in the transformative potential of combining storytelling with a musical accompaniment or interpretation—encouraging participants to engage with an unfamiliar tradition through the lens of a more widespread artform. Our project was inspired, in part, by dinnseanchas ('the lore of high places'), a particular genre of Irish storytelling in which the stories give meaning to the name of a particular place.

Read about our pilot process and the resulting performance here. If you are interested in storytelling, the National Folklore Collection of Ireland, digitised and made available online by the Dúchas project, contains a wide array of tales in written and audio form.