Irish Children's Literature and Culture

New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing

Keith O'Sullivan, Valerie Coghlan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415877893
• eBook ISBN: 9781136825095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Irish Children's Literature and Culture looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with major genres, forms, and issues, including the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, ethnicity, and globalization. It contextualizes modern Irish children's literature in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, as well as in relation to Irish writing for adults, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area.

What constitutes a "national literature" is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as "Irish children's literature" in comparison with Ireland's contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. The contributors to the volume examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and children's literature internationally, raising provocative questions about the future of the topic. Irish Children's Literature and Culture is essential reading for those interested in Irish literature, culture, sociology, childhood, and children's literature.

Valerie Coghlan, Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin, is a librarian and lecturer. She is a former co-editor of Bookbird: An International Journal of Children's Literature. She has published widely on Irish children's literature and co-edited several books on the topic. She is a former board member of the IRSCL, and a founder member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature, Children's Books Ireland, and IBBY Ireland.

Keith O'Sullivan lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin. He is a founder member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature, a former member of the board of directors of Children's Books Ireland, and past chair of the Children's Books Ireland/Bisto Book of the Year Awards. He has published on the works of Philip Pullman and Emily Brontë.

Chapter One

Mythologizing Ireland

Ciara Ní Bhroin

Irish myths and legends were first published for children during the Cultural Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as manifestations of national distinctiveness. The role of myth in nation building and its particular significance in postcolonial societies has been well documented (Fanon 2001; Brown 1991; Kiberd 1996; Foster 2002). The reclamation through myth, and in Ireland’s case, also, through translation, of a glorious (imagined) pre-colonial past acts as an inspiration for national self-determination. Romantic retellings in the English language of Ireland’s ancient myths and legends, by writers such as Lady Wilde (1821–1896), Standish O’Grady (1846–1928), and Lady Gregory (1852–1932), inculcated national pride by awakening Ireland’s youth to the richness of their literary heritage and, significantly, to the heroism of their noble ancestors. Many Anglo-Irish Protestant writers of the Revival saw in myth a means of evoking a unified pagan Celtic past capable of transcending the sectarian divisions of their time. ‘If we will but tell these stories to our children,’ wrote William Butler Yeats in his preface to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), ‘the land will begin again to be a Holy Land as it was before men gave their hearts to Greece and Rome and Judea’ (1970, 16). Writers of the Revival, therefore, mythologized Ireland’s past with a view towards shaping its future. However, although Irish mythology proved the inspiration for a body of literature for adults that came to be celebrated around the world, its adaptation for young readers was, until very recently, characterized by its national orientation rather than its literary innovation.

Parallels have been drawn between the Revival period and the reinvention of Ireland a century later, widely referred to as the Celtic Tiger (Kiberd 1996, 3–4; Foster 2002, 35).¹ Unprecedented economic prosperity in the 1990s, closer integration with Europe, and a redefinition of Anglo-Irish relations, culminating in the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement of 1998, resulted in a new national confidence and increased status internationally. The international profile of Mary Robinson’s presidency (1990–1997) and the success of Irish musicians, actors, writers, and filmmakers on the global stage contributed to the climate of confidence. An international market increasingly receptive to Irish culture led to the development of a new, commercially successful Celticism, very different from the spiritual, mystical Celticism expounded by Matthew Arnold² (1822–1888) and romanticized by leading writers of the Revival. At a time when Celticism itself was coming under increased scrutiny by scholars (Brown 1996; James 1999), the packaging and branding of Celtic culture intensified. This reached its zenith in the international Riverdance phenomenon; its dazzling blend of the traditional and modern seemed to epitomize the New Ireland and created an international appetite for things Celtic. Ireland was marketed to tourists as a modern metropolitan destination with the advantage of a rich and ancient cultural heritage. Increased economic resources enabled the development of a national heritage industry to which myth was central.

Unsurprisingly, this period saw a proliferation of glossy, lavishly illustrated Irish myth and legend collections for children, partly aimed at a tourist market, as well as the growth of a genre of fantasy incorporating Irish mythology. Cormac MacRaois estimated, at the time of writing in 1997, that there were at least thirty books dedicated to the retelling of mythological tales on the children’s shelves of Irish bookshops, alongside a burgeoning quantity of contemporary fantasy fiction drawing upon mythological sources for its characters and themes (330). Irish myth and legend collections for children, however, have been generally characterized by a tendency to recycle the same narrow selection of tales³ and to underplay the pagan supernatural elements, in particular the divinity of the Celtic deities. Indeed, the myths most often retold for young children—‘The Fate of the Children of Lir’ and ‘Oisín in Tír na nÓg’—are those concerned with the transition to Christianity. By contrast, the Celtic supernatural, in both its divine and demonic aspects, features strongly in contemporary fantasy fiction, much of which is directed at an older readership and draws on a range of mythology largely neglected by anthologists.

Adapting ancient Irish myths for children is certainly not without its challenges. The originals reflect the mores and values of a pagan era in which warfare was glorified and human sexuality uninhibited. The graphic violence and forthright sexuality in some myths make them difficult to retell for a young readership. The danger is that the colour and vigour of the original stories may be lost in the attempt to mediate them to a young audience with modern sensibilities. Further difficulties relate to questions of style and language. In its transition from oral to written literature and its translation from Old Irish to modern English, Irish mythology has undergone successive metamorphoses that may need to be considered by those attempting to further adapt the tales for future generations. The fact that the corpus of Irish mythology that has been translated and annotated is only a small fragment of a much vaster tradition highlights the importance of broadening the range of tales retold for children.

Irish mythology can be categorized into four main cycles: the Mythological Cycle—tales concerning the Tuatha Dé Danann, a divine race of the goddess Danu, believed to have inhabited Ireland before the arrival of the Gaels or Milesians; the Ulster Cycle—a corpus of heroic tales about the Ulster tribal warriors who dominated Ireland until their defeat in the fifth century and whose foremost champion was Cúchulain; the Fenian Cycle—tales concerning the elite band of warrior hunters known as the Fianna, their celebrated leader Fionn Mac Cumhaill, and his son Oisín; and the Cycle of the Kings—stories of Irish kings, the most celebrated of whom was Cormac Mac Airt, the mythical High King of Ireland who it is believed reigned in the period 227–266 AD.⁴ The Ulster and Fenian Cycles are the best known of the four and have been the most popular sources for writers for both adults and children, partly because of the cult of the male warrior central to the construction of the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cúchulain of Ulster’s Red Branch Knights and Fionn Mac Cumhaill of the Fianna, both defenders of territory, were regarded as ideal embodiments of the Celtic spirit and mythologically associated with Ireland’s destiny. By contrast, the relative neglect of the Mythological Cycle may be partly due to the fact that its central tract, a twelfth-century pseudo-history of Ireland entitled Leabhar Gabhála Éireann, traces a series of invasions of Ireland culminating in the arrival of the Gaels, who were responsible for driving the Tuatha Dé Danann underground. The notion of the Gaels as conquerors may have been less palatable to nationalists who regarded the Irish as victims of a British conquest.

Perhaps even more significantly, the Mythological Cycle concerned battles between divine and demonic races—the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomhóire—and was thus more difficult to reconcile with the Catholic hegemony of post-independent Ireland than the Ulster and Fenian Cycles featuring heroes more easily humanized. Of course, the tendency to underplay the pagan Celtic supernatural in Irish mythology was not an exclusively post-independent phenomenon; the ancient Celtic dislike of the written word and exclusive reliance on an oral tradition meant that from the time Irish myths were first recorded by monastic scholars in the sixth and seventh centuries, the supernatural elements were diluted and often Christianized. Scholars of Irish mythology have argued that the Christian redactors could have been ignorant of or even hostile to Irish paganism and may have deliberately redefined the world of the supernatural to make it less potent (Green 1992, 17; Mac Cana 1997, 107; Ó hÓgáin 2006, 277). Thus, the Tuatha Dé Danann, after their defeat at Tailteann, were driven underground and continued to reside, not as gods, but as sídhe, associated in the popular imagination with the fairies of folklore. Until recently, the more potent tales of the Mythological Cycle were neglected by children’s writers in favour of those more easily Christianized. The epic supernatural battle of Moytura,⁵ therefore, though the centrepiece of the Mythological Cycle, has been a much less popular choice of subject than the more sentimental and decidedly more peripheral story of the ‘Children of Lir’.

‘The Fate of the Children of Lir’ has come to be regarded almost exclusively as a tale for children and is familiar to most adults in Ireland today through school textbook versions. It occurs in almost all collections for children and is the inspiration for more cover illustrations than any other story (followed closely by ‘Oisín in Tír na nÓg’). The exact origins of the tale are unclear. There is a popular misconception that it is one of the oldest Irish tales because it belongs to the Mythological Cycle and is one of the three great sorrows of Irish storytelling.⁶ Una Leavey, for example, in The O’Brien Book of Irish Fairy Tales and Legends (1996), dates the tale as at least two thousand years old. Most scholars, however, date the first written version back to the fifteenth century.⁷ It is thought to be derived from a medieval legend concerning swan children, which may have originated in the Netherlands or northeast France, combined with elements of an Irish medieval tale about a character who underwent a swan-like transformation.⁸ The author of the fifteenth-century text incorporated elements of the Tuatha Dé Danann mythology into his tale, and although the text had little influence on the Irish oral tradition, the story has become the best known from the Mythological Cycle among recent generations—mainly because of the many schoolbook retellings in the decades after independence and in recent years because of its prevalence in children’s anthologies.

The tale has many elements common to fairy tales—the persecuted children who are placed under an enchantment, the archetypal wicked step-mother, who in this case is also their mother’s sister, and the grieving father. Unsurprisingly, Lir’s divinity is underplayed in children’s versions of the myth with some retellings for younger children portraying him as a human king.⁹ The mythical battle of Tailteann, which drove the Tuatha Dé Danann underground, and Lir’s embitterment due to his failed bid for the kingship are omitted from children’s versions, which begin with the death of Lir’s beloved first wife and his remarriage to her sister, Aoife. Aoife is generally portrayed as malevolent and jealous from the outset, although in earlier texts she was initially a nurturing mother figure until jealousy of Lir’s affection for his children and a mysterious year-long illness drove her to place an evil enchantment upon them. Versions for very young children, such as Yvonne Carroll’s in the Gill and Macmillan edition of Irish Legends for Children (1994) and Malachy Doyle’s in Tales from Old Ireland (2000), omit Aoife’s biological relationship to the children altogether, with the latter describing her as ‘a stranger to those parts’ (7). Similarly, Aoife’s partial regret at her evil deed is rarely acknowledged; her portrayal as unrelated by blood to the children and unambiguously evil may perhaps be regarded as less sinister for a child readership. In all versions of the myth Aoife overshadows Lir as a powerful and manipulative personage and Fionnuala is the strongest of the four siblings. This is in line with the strong portrayal of women generally in Irish mythology, whether as formidable foes or brave, intuitive heroines.¹⁰

While modern retellings of ‘The Fate of the Children of Lir’ are generally less sentimental than those of the past, most have some form of Christianized ending. The ringing of a church bell heralds the end of nine hundred years of hardship for the swan children, who resume their human forms, but as ancients facing imminent death. In most versions, they are converted to Christianity before they die; some contain a very overt Christian message. In Carroll’s retelling (1994), for example, the hermit’s prayers and the holy water he sprinkles on the swans ‘miraculously’ (12) transforms them. To assuage their fear of death, he ‘told them about God and his love for all people’ (13). The children of Lir die and are reunited with their parents in heaven. In retellings by Ita Daly (2001) and Felicity Trotman (2008), Fionnuala requests that the siblings be baptized before their deaths, while Una Leavey’s ending is less explicitly Christian:

The good man had scarcely blessed them before they died. Tenderly he buried them in one grave.

That night five stars swooped across the glittering sky. He knew that Lir and his children were together again, in some beautiful far-off place. (1996, 54)

The ageing and death of the siblings are omitted in other retellings for children and replaced with a happy fairy-tale ending. In versions by Sheila MacGill-Callahan (1993) and Bairbre McCarthy (1997) the spell is broken when a flock of swans forms a bridge in the sky joining two mountains, the Man from the North and the Woman from the South. The children are reunited with their father and live happily ever after. MacGill-Callahan, whose book was first published in the United States, introduced a playful Disney-like whale character, Jasconius, who saves the children from death. While alternative versions of all tales are to be welcomed, it is arguable that in diminishing its tragic import, these versions rob the myth of much of its power and mystery.

The transformation of the beautiful swans into ancient human beings, in most versions of the tale, is somehow more horrific than the original enchantment placed upon the children, perhaps because it is a sudden and therefore shocking reminder of the inevitability of old age and death. An exception is Michael Scott’s extended retelling, The Song of the Children of Lir (1983), in which their original metamorphosis is described in detail from the perspective of the horrified children, while the end of the enchantment is romanticized and a sense of peace and happiness is evoked.

PJ Lynch’s illustration, in Marie Heaney’s The Names Upon the Harp (2000, 27), of the four withered ancients buried as a unit in one shroud is highly effective, for it is finally as a collective, rather than as individuals, that the children of Lir are remembered. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the story had such resonance for the people of Ireland in the early days of independence. Centuries of hardship inflicted on the children by a usurper struck a chord with post-independent nationalist sentiment, and the Christianized ending suited a state dominated until recent decades largely by Catholic social thinking. The story, nevertheless, has a poignant, haunting quality, which no doubt partly accounts for its continued prevalence today.

The Celtic Otherworld was a fluid, ambivalent place transcending spatial and temporal boundaries and often perceived as located on an island, beneath the ocean or beneath the earth.¹¹ It features in many myths but most famously as Tír nanÓg (Land of Youth) in the story in which Oisín, son of Fionn, sojourns there for three hundred years with the daughter of its king.¹² In this idealized mirror image of the human worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Mythologizing Ireland
• Chapter 2. Borderlands: Dead Bog and Living Landscape
• Chapter 3. Cleaning up the Mess? The Child and Nation in Historical Fiction Set between 1890 and 1922
• Chapter 4. ’What Foot Does He Dig With?’ Inscriptions of Religious and Cultural Identity
• Chapter 5. Young Adult Fiction and Youth Culture
• Chapter 6. Fictionalizing Families
• Chapter 7. ’Binding with Briars’: Romanticizing the Child
• Chapter 8. Evil Innocence: The Child and Adult in Fiction
• Chapter 9. ’Walking . . . into the Night’: Growing Up with the Gothic
• Chapter 10. Contemplating Otherness: Imagining the Future in Speculative Fiction
• Chapter 11. Meanings and Means: Children’s Poetry Now
• Chapter 12. Picturebooks that Transcend Boundaries
• Chapter 13. Insularity and Internationalism: Between Local Production and the Global Marketplace
• Biographical Notes
• Index