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Welcome everybody to another episode of the IrishMyths StoryTime podcast.
Today’s story, The Lament of the Hag of Beara, is about an old woman who reflects on her advanced age and thinks to herself:
Hey, this kinda sucks. I miss being young and cool.
Or, as the journalist and Old Irish scholar Eleanor Hull described it:
“From the point of view of folk-motif as applied to poetry, it is a beautiful example of the wide-spread idea that human life is ruled by the flow and ebb of the sea-tide, with the turn of which life will dwindle, as with the on-coming tide it waxes to it’s full powers and energy. Life should always come in with the flood and go out with the ebb.”
Okay, I’ll concede that Hull did a better job summarizing.
And yes, if you caught that first line of said summary, The Lament of the Hag of Beara is a poem.
Hull dates it to the 10th or 11th century CE, but the version I’m going to recite comes from an Irish manuscript compiled in the 15 and 16th centuries.
Specifically, it’s the Trinity College Dublin manuscript number 1337.
Of course, I can’t actually read that, but the Irish scholar Gerard Murphy certainly could. So I’ll be presenting his 1956 translation of the poem—styled “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare—which appeared in his book Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Century.
And while I’m tempted to go into exhausting detail about how the Hag or Old Woman of Beara (i.e. the Cailleach Bheara) is actually a local Irish carnation of a Gaelic-Celtic divine mother goddess associated with the festival of Imbolc who also had a presence in Scotland and the Isle of Man, that’s not what I do here on this podcast.
If you want to journey down wintry whirlpools, go check out my article/YouTube explainer video on the Cailleach.
This is StoryTime.
And now, your story.
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