Introduction

"Laments are poetry of final parting" (Honko 1974, 9). In different parts of the world they have been included in the rites of departure surrounding crucial turning points in life, such as marriage, death, setting off to war and so on. In most societies ritual lamentation has been part of the role performance of women and a central element of their culture. In Ireland the art of improvised poetic lamentation by women was highly developed and persisted well into the twentieth century. As a poetic and song genre, it is part of the Irish language tradition and is termed caoineadh, the origin of the English word keen. Both terms - "lament" and "keen" - are used interchangeably in this article.

The lament for the dead has been the subject of comment by visitors to Ireland since the twelfth century (O Muirithe 1978, 20-9). In the nineteenth century laments collected from oral tradition began to be published. These were mainly in English translation (see, for example, Croker 1824, 174-81; 1844), but a fragment of a lament in Irish is given in semi-phonetic script in volume 1 of Mr and Mrs S.C. Hall's Ireland: Its Scenery, Character &c. Further lines of a lament in Irish were published by John O'Donovan in The Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society, and in 1892 a version in Irish of Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire ("The Lament for Art O'Leary"), the most famous surviving lament, was published together with an English translation in Mrs Morgan John O'Connell's The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade (Hall 1841-3, 1:228 note 5; O'Donovan 1858-9, 27 note 10; O'Connell 1892, 2:327-40). Wake scenes including lamentation by keening women were also described. In the twentieth century attention has been paid to various aspects of the lament for the dead in Ireland by a variety of scholars, especially in recent decades (Bromwich 1947-8; 1948; O Tuama 1961, 7-31; O hAilin 1971a&b; O Madagain 1978; 1981; Bourke 1988a&b; 1993; O Coileain 1988; Lysaght 1995a&b).

To introduce this complex subject I have chosen an account by the Irish playwright John Millington Synge of the funeral of an old woman of eighty on the island of Inishmaan in the Aran Islands about the turn of the century. This is noteworthy because it was performed by an isolated Gaelic community in which lamentation for the dead was obviously part of the fabric of life, and in the absence of the priest which may have enabled what is probably one of the most dramatic performances of the lament on record for the nineteenth century.

After Mass this morning an old woman was buried. She lived in the cottage next mine, and more than once before noon I heard a faint echo of the keen. I did not go to the wake for fear my presence might jar upon the mourners, but all last evening I could hear the strokes of a hammer in the yard, where, in the middle of a little crowd of idlers, the next of kin laboured slowly at the coffin. To-day, before the hour for the funeral, poteen was served to a number of men who stood about upon the road, and a portion was brought to me in my room. Then the coffin was carried out sewn loosely in sailcloth, and held near the ground by three cross-poles lashed upon the top. As we moved down to the low eastern portion of the island, nearly all the men, and all the oldest women, wearing petticoats(1) on their heads ... came out and joined in the procession.

While the grave was being opened the women sat among the flat tombstones, bordered with a pale fringe of early bracken and all began the wild keen, or crying for the dead. Each old woman, as she took her turn in the leading recitative, seemed possessed for the moment with a profound ecstasy of grief, swaying to and fro, and bending her forehead to the stone before her, while she called out to the dead with a perpetually recurring chant of sobs.

All round the graveyard other wrinkled women, looking out from under the deep red petticoats that cloaked them, rocked themselves with the same rhythm, and intoned the inarticulate chant that is sustained by all as an accompaniment . …