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Paper short abstract

The sea is an unpredictable site of danger and bounty in Irish folklore and experience. Its lore gives us a glorious insight into relationships between the human and the natural-supernatural. Here, we explore luck and danger, and encounters between humans and a host of other actors in this zone.

Paper long abstract

The experience of living in a shore world and working and travelling on the sea, and the understanding of how and why ‘things happen’, find an expression in Ireland through action and talk: through the things people do and don’t do to preserve ‘luck’, and through the way people talk about what has happened, might happen, and might have happened. This paper will explore elements of the lore of sea and shore in Ireland, much of which is shared among other North Atlantic communities living and working in this unpredictable, dangerous, and sometimes bountiful or mysterious zone. I will work through examples from fieldwork, published sources and the National Folklore Collection, to ask such questions as;

What does ‘bad luck’ mean in this context? How might we, as folklorists, engage more with differential stances within the community?

How is this realm populated, and how are interactions with the otherworldly population patterned in narrative?

From genial underwater pipe-smoker looking for his ‘pigs’, to the thing with glowing eyes, the drowned brother warning of danger, the sea-rats that followed a man to America, and the enchanted oilskins; the sea is a site of unpredictability, danger and wonder, and a supremely fertile generator of lore about encounters between humans and the glorious range of entities that are in it.