Irish colour words and concepts In primary school, I was very confused to learn two different Irish words for “green”: glas and uaithne. I knew there was a difference, but I wasn’t clear what that difference was. As my schooling continued, more confusion arose: black people were referred to as daoine gorma, “blue people”…
Category: Related Material
Explorations and developments of the themes of each episode
Cows as Currency
As with many ancient societies, the early Irish did not use coinage. They still had a complex system of value, which may welll have changed over time or from area to area. One unit of value was cattle,which were used as currency up to around 1400 CE, long after the introduction of coinage. This could…
Beidh Aenach Amárach…
The Fairs of Early Irish Society The óenach, sometimes translated as “Fair”, was an important regular feature of early Irish society. There were several kinds of public gathering, including slógadh, “hosting”, where a lord would gather his able tennants for military activity, and airecht, “court”, which was a gathering of freemen for legal purposes. But…
Poetry on the Shannon
I have used the story of Sinann to inspire creative writing, especially poetry and drama, in groups of primary age children (9 to 11 years in this case). The story sparked observation and a wide variety of poetic styles. Here are a couple of examples from a school situated close to the river.
The Shannon Pot
The Shannon is the longest river in Ireland and the UK with a length of 280km. The river flows from its source in the Cuilcagh Mountains to its estuary below Limerick. This important river and its tributaries drain some 15,500 sq km or about one fifth of the island of Ireland. The traditional source of…
How Long Can A Story Last?
Defining the longevity of information passed orally from group to group, and from generation to generation, is hard to quantify. Stories change and grow. Their sources become lost in the mists of time, and yet they continue to have significance. Back in 1998, “The Year of The French”, commemorating the bicentennial of the political events…
Stories of Creation
Virtually all cultures have creation stories… There are two main types of creation myth: the cosmogenic, which is about the creation of the universe or the world; and those that concern the creation of human beings. The stories of the creation of humans often comes in the same package as that of the creation of…
The Importance of the Source
When I chose to study Early Irish, the principal reason was so that I could read the Irish stories and poetry that I so loved in their original language. As a student of literature and philosophy, I knew that translation meant interpretation. Being both cynical and a control freak, I wanted to remove the filter…
Imbás: Poetry, Knowledge and Inspiration
The “filid”, poets, of early Irish society were not poorly paid struggling artists: they were held in the highest esteem and a crucial part of culture. Indeed, the word “fili”, poet, more literally means seer, and the “ollamh”, great poet, chief poet, had equal status with the king of the “túath”, petty kingdom, and the…