Celtic 166. The Folklore of Women

Barbara Hillers
Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures
Harvard University

Course Description

Investigates women's songs and stories collected from Irish, Scottish, and Breton oral tradition. Reading (and, whenever possible, listening to) ballads, work songs, wonder tales, fairy legends, and humorous anecdotes traditionally performed by women, we explore the way women have used oral literature to enhance, underscore, sidestep, subvert, and transcend the gender roles allocated to them within their rural patriarchal communities. (All texts are read in English translation.)

Course Evaluation

Required Texts

• Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist, Margaret Fay Shaw (Edinburgh, 1999). The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story, Angela Bourke (2000).
• Bab Feiritéar: The Repertoire of a Gaelic Storyteller, tr. B. Hillers (Harvard University, 2006). [available from instructor].
• Betsy Whyte, Storyteller and Singer, compiled by B. Hillers (Harvard 2006). [available from instructor].

Recommended Texts

• Seanchas Annie Bhán: The Lore of Annie Bhán, Gordon W. MacLennan, ed. A. Harrison & M. E. Crook (Dublin 1997).
• Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture, ed. J. N. Radner (Urbana, Illinois, 1993).
• The Yellow on the Broom: the early days of a traveller woman, Betsy Whyte (Edinburgh, 1979).
• Red Rowans and Wild Honey, Betsy Whyte (Edinburgh, 1990).

Topics

Week 1: Why Folklore?

What is `folklore' and who are `the folk'? Given the anonymity of oral composition, can we speak of women's folklore? What is the connection between women's lives and the stories they tell, the songs they sing?

Week 2: The Functions of Folklore

What function does folk literature serve for the singer/storyteller and her community? Is folklore progressive or is it conservative, i.e. does it seek to question or to endorse the status quo? How do women or other disenfranchised members of a community code their messages of discontent?

Week 3: Lullabies - Songs of Anger, Love, and Fear

Why do lullabies deal with images of darkness and violence? An exploration of the contents and context of Scottish Gaelic lullabies.

Week 4-5: Hard work & playful words - Scottish Gaelic Waulking Songs

The production of tweed was an important part of the Scottish home economy, dominated by women. The woven cloth had to be shrunk by `waulking' it in a process by which a group of women tossed and pounded the soaked cloth across a wooden board. The cloth-waulking was always accompanied by song, and a huge corpus of waulking songs, composed, transmitted and performed by women, has been collected.

Week 6: The Anglo-Scottish Ballad

The singing repertoires of Scottish women such as Anna Gordon are among the earliest and most complete ballad collections in the English language. We shall look at the repertoires of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish singers, and explore the role of women as makers and performers of the tradition.

Week 7: Scottish Travellers' Singing and Storytelling

Like the Romani (Gypsies) of Continental Europe, the Scottish and Irish `travellers' are a close-knit community, making a living on the margins of the settled community. The travellers are noted for their rich singing and storytelling repertoires.

Week 8: Irish Travellers' Storytelling

Travellers' folklore and folklore about travellers: how did travellers use folklore to sustain their identity in the face of hostility and marginalization by the settled community? Is there a traditional traveller repertoire as distinct from the repertoire of the settled community?

Week 9: Characteristics of Women's Storytelling

Do men and women tell different stories? Do men and women tell (and hear) the same stories differently? What can we tell from the differences between male and female storytellers' repertoires and performance styles? Do stories have a gender?

Week 10: Female Storytelling Genres? Religious Tales and Folklore for Children

Women excel in certain storytelling genres, including religious tales and legends, and stories, rhymes and games suited for children's entertainment.

Week 11: The Meaning and Function of Fairy Legends

Fairy legend and belief: Who are the fairies? Who believes in fairies? Fairy belief as tool for dealing with reality: the moral, message, or social use of fairy legends. The Clonmel murder case: the burning of Bridget Cleary.

Week 12-13: The Breton Ballad Tradition

The gwerz (`narrative song', `ballad') is the pride of the Breton song tradition. Like Anglo-Scottish balladry, the gwerz often deals with dysfunctional relationships and violent crime. Women have long been acknowledged as the pre-eminent practitioners of the gwerz, but what exactly is the relationship between the singers' real-life concerns and their songs?

Week 14: Summing up/ Céilí