Tomnascela, the burial place of the story-teller: how much that tells us of the degree to which the weaver of yarns and the bearer of ancient tales was once respected. The one Tomnascela that I know of is in Wicklow, but there are doubtless mounds and raised stones all around the country which go by the same name. We are nothing without the stories which bind us together, for people think of stories as a vertical process which links us with the past, which of course they do: but their real importance lies in their horizontal dimensions, in which the telling of a story creates a shared community of listeners, with common values, common loyalties, common identities.
The common narrative today is the soap opera, which formulaically must adhere to the rules of commonality - which is no doubt why indigenous local soap operas are popular throughout the world. And the internationally successful ones convey either a diet of pre-masticated, aspirational consumerist pabulum - big bucks, big beaches, big breasts - or a narrative almost without context and local feeling, such as the Australian televisual dripfeed. Brazil has its soaps too, but they are far too Brazilian for export.
Rival narratives
Story-tellers were the newspapers, the television, the radio, the theatre, the cinema of our ancestors. What they told people about their past linked them not merely with an often imaginary history, but with other members of the story-teller's audience, separated in time and geography but united in attentiveness and belief. The story-teller, generally speaking, is gone; but the story-telling is not. And even in the solar wind of popular culture, blistering the world with a celebration of celebrity and show business, there are still intense local story-telling cultures, where stories are preserved and transmitted, informally and often unconsciously, at hearth and hostelry. What is Drumcree but a clash of rival narratives? What is north Belfast but a quilt of competing tales, often told with gunfire?
Traditionally, November is story-telling time in Ireland; Hallowe'en in Irish means November night. The significance of Hallowe'en, unusually for an eve, is not the day which follows, All Saints' Day, but the day of the evening itself, which is of course All Souls' Day. Our ancestors might, if only to keep the priest happy, respect the following day, which was a holy day of obligation - but they marked and celebrated the previous and far older day, the day of all souls, when together they could talk of and commemorate their common ancestors who bequeathed to them their sense of shared community. And maybe they needed that sense of community, reinforced by the Hallowe'en festivities, to get through the coming winter, with its daily tale of a dying sun and a cold, ungenerous soil.
Collins Barracks
"Scealta Shamhna" is a festival of story-telling which has been taking place in Dublin each November since 1991; and this year it moves to the National Museum's new home in the old Collins Barracks. If you haven't yet visited it, I have one word of advice: do. The main square must be one of the great open spaces of Dublin, with a good, plain restaurant in a delightful colonnade, though now that God has decided to plonk the Baltic Sea on us every hour it is unlikely that most of would relish eating al fresco there at the moment. Eat indoors and just gaze at the space, pure space, uncluttered with trees, statues or walls. Architectural emptiness is a much under-rated aesthetic.
The main venue for this weekend's celebration of storytelling and song is the old Riding School, with other events taking place in the museum itself; and logically, as this year of the bi-centenary of 1798 draws to a conclusion largely - and blessedly - unmarked by celebrations of bloodshed, the first item in the programme is "The Boul Prouta Diggers," a story of the Presbyterians of Co Antrim who rose in 1798. Presumably the title is in Lallans - my own Lallans dictionary does not reach to "prouta" - though in my search for it I discovered that prou means to call in cattle, ptrueai means to call in cattle, and ptrumai means, well, to call in cattle. A most interesting language, Lallans.
Island poet
"The Boul Prouta Diggers", devised by William Drennan, starts at 3 p.m. on Saturday, and the next afternoon, when some of us might be participating in our own particular narrative of history at St Patrick's Cathedral (it being Remembrance Sunday), Pomme Clayton will be examining the heroine figure in Indo-European fairytales, with music by Will Menter. That evening at 5 p.m., Nuala Hayes and Ellen Cranitch will tell, recite, perform Mary Lavin's tales A likely Story and The Widow's Son. And that evening, from the Orkneys - where, by God, they know the meaning of winter - David Campbell and the Wrigley Sisters will celebrate the life of George Mackay Brown, the island poet and story-teller.
Story-telling is the web of communities, the hawser and the guy-rope and the stay. Most of us know so little about it, and think so little of its implications, yet it forms the context of our lives; this newspaper only has relevance within the broader narrative, and multiple sub-narratives, of our society. If you care to sample the storytelling of experts, you can discover more from 01-8782581.