Celtic 113. Gaelic Women's Poetry

Barbara Hillers
Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures
Harvard University

Course Description

Explores the ways gender, genre, and tradition intersect in the poetic tradition of Gaelic Ireland and Scotland from the Middle Ages to today. After an excursion into early medieval literature, we focus on the work of women aristocrats, female genres of oral folk tradition, and contemporary poetry.

Course Evaluation

Required Texts

• Gaelic Women's Poetry from Scotland and Ireland: A Sourcebook, B. Hillers 2006. Catherine Kerrigan, ed., An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (Edinburgh, 1991).
• Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Rogha Dánta - Selected Poems (Dublin, 1991).
• Margaret Fay Shaw, Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (Edinburgh, 1999 [reprint of 1955 ed]).
• Christopher Whyte, ed. An Aghaidh na Sìorraidheachd/In the Face of Eternity (Edinburgh,1991).

Gaelic Women's Poetry: Overview of Main Course Components

I. Women’s Voice in Early Irish Literature? (3 weeks)

Who are the authors of Early Irish literature? Is it possible to speak of women as authors? What do we make of the strong and influential women figures in Irish saga? What kind of poetry is attributed to women in Early Irish saga? Can we learn something about female genres of composition from their appearance in the sagas?

II. Aristocratic Women Poets (3 weeks)

Poetry has always been the main high register literary medium in Gaelic tradition. In Ireland or Scotland, among the hundreds of known bardic professional poets of the so-called Classical period (1200-1650/1700) who left us a legacy of thousands of poems, we do not know of a single woman poet. Why was the tradition apparently exclusively male? Non-professional poets, usually aristocratic amateurs, also composed classical poetry, and these aristocratic practitioners include women, such as Isabella Countess of Argyle. With the breakdown of the traditional Gaelic system of patronage and the decline of the elite professional bardic class it fostered, a new class of semi-professional, semi-aristocratic practitioners emerged, continuing the panegyric tradition of classical bardic poetry in the vernacular and in less formal stressed metres. A significant proportion of these were women, and female poets such as Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (Mary MacLeod) played a formative role in the development of Scottish Gaelic vernacular poetry.

III. Female Genres of Oral Literature (3 weeks)

While women are notably absent from the high status registers of literature, visible only where they become subject matter of male authors, they paradoxically have left us a rich heritage of oral literature. While women participated actively in most genres of oral literature, including wondertales fairy legends, realistic tales and humorous anecdotes, and particularly song. Certain kinds of storytelling were traditionally thought of as male preserve, such as the telling of hero tales and particularly Ossianic lays. On the other hand, song was particularly associated with women, and we shall focus on three genres of the singing tradition which were dominated by women, almost to the exclusion of men: lullabies, the ritual lament of the dead, and waulking songs, sung by groups of women while fulling the woven cloth. With these three genres the performance and transmission context makes it likely that women were the authors as well as the performers of the tradition, and we shall see how they used the songs to express the tensions, conflicts and frustrations of their existence, as well as their aspirations for love and beauty.

IV. Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic Women Poets (4 weeks)

When cultural nationalists rekindled interest in Gaelic, the key figures of the Revival in Ireland and Scotland, and all of the poets of the first generation were men. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, some of the most acclaimed Irish poets writing in Irish, and many of the best poets writing in Scottish Gaelic are women. We shall focus on the work of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Caitlín Maude, and others in Ireland, and Meg Bateman and Máire NicGumaraid in Scotland.

Topics

Unit I: Women's Voice in Early Irish Literature

Week One: Introduction. Scope and Approaches. Male Poets - Female Masks
Week Two: Poetry in Persona: Lyric Verse Attributed to Women
Week Three: Women Poets in the Sagas

Unit II: Aristocratic Women Poets

Week Four: Female Lovers? Amour Courtois in Bardic Tradition
Week Five: Panegyric and Politics: Poets of the Seventeenth Century
Week Six: Elegy and Lament: the `Sub-Literary' Tradition

Unit III: Female Genres of Oral Literature

Week Seven: Waulking Songs (I): Function & Performance Context
Week Eight: Waulking Songs (II): The Treatment of Love, Sex, and Marriage
Week Nine: Spring Recess
Week Ten: The Cradle and the Grave: Laments and Lullabies
Week Eleven: Fairy Songs

Unit IV: Twentieth-Century Poets

Week Twelve: Dánta Grá? Poems about Relationships
Week Thirteen: Double Margins? Women Writing in a Minority Language
Week Fourteen: Modernism and Tradition