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Paper short abstract:

In both the Central Himalayan region and in a part of northwest Ireland, named places associated with form chronotopes that are “laid over” quotidian space. In one, these form a field of myths to be drawn on in ritual; in the other, they give a real/virtual setting for ancient story.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will compare two situations in which landscape features set the context for narrations involving an “other scene”: a sacral chronotope in one case, glimpses of a legendary past in the other. In both cases, the languages used are of the Indo-European family, and the traditions in question are relatively conservative; in both cases, stories and maps are made to correspond.

In the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon in northern India, rituals involving the local divinities begin with a “song to the twilight” in which a series of locations are named with a brief evocation of the god or gods associated with it. This virtual movement among mountains and vales sketches out a living mythology, a sacral scene co-present with quotidian concerns.

In the northern part of County Donegal in northwestern Ireland, a number of features—islands, headlands, beaches, valleys—bear names that link them to an oral legend first recorded in print in the early nineteenth century and that seems to be the preserved transform of a medieval Irish tale of pre-Christian origin.

In both cases, old stories, that is, stories that people today take to be old, are inscribed on the landscape. While in the Himalayas the landscape is mobilized as an immediate ritual resource, in the Irish case a scattering of place-names offers a coherent but ghostly and virtual presence of the past. In both, an “other scene” is laid across the surface of this world, offering possibilities of reorientation.