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Paper short abstract

This paper will address and engage with the panel’s wider themes by analyzing the relationship between the numinous and natural worlds in a corpus of fairy legends and memorates recorded from Sorcha Mhic Grianna (1875-1964), a female storyteller from northwest Donegal, in the late 1930s.

Paper long abstract

The permeability of the boundary between the human world and the otherworld is a defining feature of legends about the fairies (síscéalta) in Irish narrative tradition. In these stories, the fairy world encroaches on the “real” world and, by inflicting varying degrees of chaos and disorder, threatens the survival and stability of the human community, whose niche and livelihood are portrayed as being ‘ever under siege’ (Rieti 1991, 3). As noted by Barbara Rieti in the context of Newfoundland oral tradition, ‘fairy narratives reflect the struggles and hard-won survival of culture and human creation, and the tenuous imposition of order on the wilderness’ (1991, 3).

This paper will contextualize and analyze a corpus of fairy legends and memorates which were recorded from a female storyteller from northwest Donegal in the late 1930s. Sorcha Mhic Grianna (1875-1964) is best known today as a storyteller who specialized in the narration of long and elaborate international folktales and hero tales. As will be discussed, however, fairy legends and memorates form an important and as of yet unexamined part of Mhic Grianna’s narrative repertoire. In this corpus of stories, traditional fairy legend motifs and story types are blended with compelling accounts of transformative encounters with the otherworld which were experienced by the storyteller and close members of her family and community. By examining the relationship between the numinous and natural worlds in Mhic Grianna’s fairy narratives, this paper will address the panel’s broader critique of binary distinctions between natural and unnatural, ordinary and extraordinary.