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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines anecdotes concerning faction fights in Ireland. A faction fight is a brawl between two groups intended for recreation or to settle disputes. It questions what similarities and differences exist between faction fights and why this motif endures in Irish folklore studies.

Paper long abstract

What do you get when you combine crowds, local celebrations, and free-flowing librations? In pre-Famine Ireland, this combination was often the recipe to faction fighting. Faction fighting occurs when two groups of individuals, oftentimes men, but sometimes women, agree to brawl for both recreation and entertainment to settle disputes. So popular were faction fights that even today, the term “Donnybrook,” named after the Donnybrook Fair, has entered common parlance. Consisting of around 230 entries in the National Irish Folklore Collection, the concept of a faction fight is not uncommon among the corpus of materials that make up the Irish National Folklore Collection. The purpose of this presentation is to examine this material in greater detail. What can we glean from anecdotes concerning faction fights about Irish communities of the past? How do anecdotes told by word-of-mouth differ from those written by hand? What is it about the faction fight that makes it stand out among other motifs found within the Irish Folklore Collection? Furthermore, what are some of the key differences between oral anecdotes and transcribed anecdotes concerning faction fights? What can attribute to these differences? These are but some of the questions that I am interested in.