#Northern Irish fiction

[voidimp]

alright. long shot. any followers(/anyone seeing this post ig) speak irish

i want to learn but it would definitely be helpful to uh. have someone to practice with lmao. i have been listening to a little podcast at work just to get a feel for it & pick up what i can (which is not much bc i have to focus on what im typing & also cant read the written notes that go along with it) but theres not very many eps & also its in the ulster dialect & i think id prefer a different one

i know a while back i reblogged some longass post specifically about resources for learning irish so i gotta go find that & dig through it... maybe tomorrow lmao. but iirc it did have A Lot & idk whats in what dialect & im not really set on one anyway at this point but if anyone has a suggestion or preference or whatever that would help narrow down my options at least lmao. like im from the us i have no immediate plans to visit ireland im too broke for that shit so its really just a matter of Whatever I Feel Like i guess??? idk. i havent really had much time to look into anything due to the ten million other things going on all the goddamn time but i would Like To

anyway. its very late i need to go to sleep but yeag feel free to like message me or send me an ask or whatever

[illogarithmil]

The UDA's a fascinating organization to study, because at any given point on its timeline except maybe 1974 and 1999-94 its seriousness and credibility somehow seems to manage to be lower than every other point on that timeline. It must be some kind of quantum effect.

[kindledspiritsbooks]

My Month in Books: June and July 2024

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe Sometimes it takes seeing something written out in black and white to fully to fully comprehend its magnitude. Growing up in Ireland, the names Jean McConville and Gerry Adams have always been known to me and I even studied the Troubles in school as part of my Leaving Cert exams but there’s something very…

[nightwingblorbo]

y’all aren’t ready for my English!AU Batfam

[meichenxi]

UK accent bias, discrimination, minority languages and the question of the 'default, normal' english speaker

today I came across something overtly that is usually a covert problem, and I wanted to take a chance to talk about the questions it raises about what it means to be 'normal' and speak 'normal english' in an anglocentric, global world.

let's start at the beginning. I was aimlessly googling around and came across this article, discussing ergodic literature:

I hope that you will see what angered me right away, but if not:

brogue? inaccessible, insufferable brogue? that is so difficult to read you might want to relieve your frustrations by harming a housepet, or striking a loved one?

what????? the fuck??????

my dearly beloathed. this is not a made up sci-fi language. this was not written for your convenience.

this is the glaswegian dialect.

this is how it is written. scots, which is very similar to this, is a language whose speakers have been systematically taught to change and hide and modify their speech, to not speak it in the classroom, to conform. this is NOT comparable to any of the made-up dialects or ways of writing in cloud atlas or any other specularative fiction. the suggestion of ir is deeply insulting.

(the line between various 'dialects' and 'languages' I speak about here is by definition sometimes political, sometimes arbitrary, and often very thin. what goes for the glaswegian dialect here in terms of discrimination goes for scots in general - which is, in fact, even more 'inaccessible' than glaswegian because it has a greater quantity of non-english and therefore non-'familiar' words. speakers of different englishes will face more or less discrimination in different circumstances. caveat over.)

you can find it on twitter, in books, in poetry; and more than that, on the streets and in living rooms, in places that this kind of england-first discrimination hasn't totally eradicated.

an imporant note - this book in question is called Naw Much of a Talker, and it was written originally in Swiss-German and then translated into Glaswegian to preserve similar themes and questions of language and identity. rather than detracting from anything I'm saying, I think the fact this is a translated piece of fiction adds to it - it has literally been translated so it is more accessible, and the article writer did not even realise. it also highlights the fact as well that these are questions which exist across the globe, across multiple languages, of the constant tension everywhere between the 'correct' high language and the 'incorrect, backward' 'low' language or dialect. these are all interesting questions, and someone else can tackle them about german and swiss german -

but I am going to talk today about scots and english, because that is how the writer of this article engaged with this piece and that is the basis upon which they called it 'insufferable brogue', the prejudice they have revealed about scots is what I want to address.

so here, today, in this post: let's talk about it. what is 'normal' english, why is that a political question, and why should we care?

as we begin, so we're all on the same page, I would like to remind everyone that england is not the only country in the united kingdom, and that the native languages of the united kingdom do not only include english, but also:

scots

ulster scots (thank you @la-galaxie-langblr for the correction here!!)

scottish gaelic

welsh

british sign language

irish

anglo-romani

cornish

shelta

irish sign language

manx

northern ireland sign language

and others I have likely forgotten

there are also countless rich, beautiful dialects (the distinction between dialect and language is entirely political, so take this description with a pinch of salt if you're outside of these speaker communities), all with their own words and histories and all of them, yes all of them, are deserving of respect.

and there are hundreds and thousands of common immigrant languages, of languages from the empire, and of englishes across the globe that might sound 'funny' to you, but I want you to fucking think before you mock the man from the call centre: why does india speak english in the first place? before mocking him, think about that.

because it's political. it's ALL political. it's historical, and it's rooted in empire and colonialism and all you need to do is take one look at how we talk about Black language or languages of a colonised country to see that, AAVE or in the UK, multi-cultural london english, or further afield - the englishes of jamaica, kenya, india. all vestiges of empire, and all marked and prejudiced against as 'unintelligent' or lesser in some way.

and closer to home - the systematic eradication and 'englishification' of the celtic languages. how many people scottish gaelic now? cornish? manx? how many people speak welsh? and even within 'english' itself - how many people from a country or rural or very urban or immigrant or working class or queer background are discriminated against, because of their english? why do you think that is?

if you think that language isn't political, then you have likely never encountered discrimination based on how you, your friends, or your family speak.

you are speaking from a position of privilege.

'but it's not formal' 'but it's not fit for the classroom' 'but it sounds silly'. you sound silly, amy. I have a stereotypically 'posh' english accent, and I can tell you for a fact: when I go to scotland to visit my family, they think I sound silly too. but in the same way as 'reverse racism' isn't a fucking thing - the difference is that it's not systemic. when I wanted to learn gaelic, my grandmother - who speaks gaelic as her own native language - told me, no, you shouldn't do that. you're an english girl. why would you want to learn a backward language like gaelic?

discrimination against non-'english' englishes is pervasive, systematic and insidious.

it is not the same as being laughed at for being 'posh'. (there's more about class and in-group sociolinguistics here, but that's for another post)

and who told you this? where is this information from? why do you think an 'essex girl' accent sounds uneducated? why do you think a northern accent sound 'honest' and 'salt of the earth'? what relationship does that have with class? why does a standard southern british english sound educated and 'intelligent'? who is in charge? who speaks on your television? whose words and accents do you hear again and again, making your policies, shaping your future? who speaks over you?

think about that, please.

and before anyone says: this is so true except for X lol - I am talking about exactly that dialect. I am talking about that accent you are mocking. I am talking about brummie english, which you think sounds funny. I'm talking about old men in the west country who you think sound like pirates, arrrrr.

(actually, pirates sound like the west country. where do you the 'pirate accent' came from? devon was the heart of smuggling country in the uk.)

so. to this person who equated a book written in scots, a minority and marginalised language, to being 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue':

and also to anyone who is from the UK, anyone who is a native english speaker, and anyone abroad, but especially those of you who think your english is 'natural', who have never had to think about it, who have never had to code-switch, who have never had to change how they sound to fit in:

it might be difficult to read - for you. it might be strange and othering - to you.

but what is 'inaccessible' to you is the way that my family speaks - your english might be 'inaccessible' to them. so why does your 'inaccessible' seem to weigh more than theirs?

and why does it bother you, that you can't understand it easily in the first go? because you have to try? or because perhaps, just perhaps, dearly beloathed author of this article, after being catered to your entire life and shown your language on screen, constantly - you are finally confronted by something that isn't written for you.

and for the non-uk people reading this. I would like you to think very carefully about what a 'british accent' means to you.

there is no such thing. let me say it louder:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BRITISH ACCENT

there are a collection of accents and languages and dialects, each with different associations and stereotypes. the clever aristocrat, the honest farmer, the deceitful *racial slur*. there are accents, languages and dialects that you hear more than others because of political reasons, and there are accents, languages and dialects which are more common than others because of discrimination, violence and the path of history.

if you say 'british accent', we - in the UK - don't know exactly what you mean. much more than the US, because the english-speaking people have been here longer, we have incredibly different accents just fifty miles away from one another.

but we can guess. you probably don't mean my grandmother's second-language english - even though, by american conversations about race, she is the whitest person you could possibly find. you don't mean my brother, who sounds like a farmer.

you mean my accent. tom hiddleston's accent. benedict cumberbatch. dame judy dench. sir ian mckellen. and they are all wonderful people - but what sort of people are they, exactly? what sort of things do they have in common? why is it that you associate their way of speaking with all of the charming eloquence of 'dark academia' or high levels of education, and my family's english with being 'backward' or 'country bumpkins' or 'uneducated' or, more insidiously, 'salt-of-the-earth good honest folk'?

we are an old country with old prejudices and old classes and old oppression and old discrimination and old hate. my brother speaks with a 'farmer' west country accent; my aunt with a strong doric accent that most english people cannot understand; my father with a mockable birmingham accent; my grandmother with a gaelic accent, because despite the fact that she is from the UK, as scottish as you can get, english is not her first language.

these people exist. my grandmother is a real person, and she is not a dying relic of a forgotten time. her gaelic is not something to drool over in your outlander or braveheart or brave-fuelled scottish romanticism, the purity and goodness of the 'celt' - but there are fewer people like her now. and I would like to invite everyone to think about why that is the case.

if you don't know, you can educate yourself - look up the highland clearances, for a start, or look at the lives of anglo-romani speakers in the UK and the discrimination they face, or irish speakers in northern ireland. like many places, we are a country that has turned inward upon itself. there will always be an 'other'.

and then there's me. raised in southern england and well-educated and, however you want to call it, 'posh'. so why is it that it is my voice, and not theirs, which is considered typically british all over the world?

I think you can probably figure out that one by yourself.

when you talk about the 'british accent', this is doing one of two things. it's serving to perpetuate the myth that the only part of the UK is england, rather than four countries, and the harmful idea that it is only england in the UK that matters. (and only a certain type of people in england, at that.)

secondly, it serves to amalgamate all of the languages and accents and dialects - native or poor or immigrant or colonial - into one, erasing not only their history and importance, but even their very existence.

dearly beloathed person on the internet. I have no idea who you are. but the language scots exists. I'm sorry it's not convenient for you.

but before I go, I would like to take a moment to marvel. 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue'? what assumptions there are, behind your words!

is it 'insufferable' to want to write a story in the language you were raised in? is it 'inaccessible' to want to write a story in the shared language of your own community?

I don't think it is.

I think it takes a special sort of privilege and entitlement to assume that - the same one that assumes whiteness and Americanness and Englishness and able-bodiedness and cisness and maleness and straightness as being the 'standard' human experience, and every single other trait as being a deviance from that, an othering. that's the same entitlement that will describe Turning Red as a story about the chinese experience - but not talk about how Toy Story is a story about the white american middle class experience.

people do not exist for your ease of reading. they do not exist to be 'accessible'. and - what a strange thing, english reader, to assume all books are written for you, at all.

and despite the fact that the text that prompted this was written by one group of white people, translated into the language of another group, and critiqued by a third - this is a conversation about racism too, because it is the same sort of thinking and pervasive stereotyping which goes into how white people and spaces view Black language and language of people of colour around the world. it's about colonialism and it's about slavery and it's aboutsegregation and othering and the immigrant experience and it's about the history of britain - and my god, isn't that a violent one. it's inseparable from it. language is a tool to signify belonging, to shut people out and lock people in. it's a tool used to enforce that othering and discrimination and hate on a systemic level, because it says - I'm different from you. you're different from me. this post is focusing more on the native languages of the UK, but any question of 'correct language' must inevitably talk about racism too, because language is and has always been a signifier of group belonging, and a way to enforce power.

it is used to gatekeep, to enforce conformity, to control, to signify belonging to a particular group, to other. talking about language 'correctness' is NOT and never CAN be a neutral thing.

it reminds me of a quote, and I heard this second hand on twitter and for the life of me cannot remember who said it or exactly how it goes, but the gist of it was a queer writer addressing comments saying how 'universal' their book was, and saying - no, this is a queer book. if you want to find themes and moments in it that are applicable to your 'default' life, 'universals' of emotion and experience, go ahead. but I have had to translate things from the norm my entire life, to make them relatable for me. this time, you do the translation.

I do not speak or write scots or glaswegian, but I grew up reading it and listening to it (as well as doric and gaelic in smaller measures, which are still familiar to me but which I can understand less). for me, that passage is almost as easy to read as english - and the only reason it is slightly more difficult is because, predictably, I don't have a chance to practice reading scots very often at all. it isn't inaccessible to me.

(I was about to write: can you imagine looking at a book written in french, and scowling, saying, 'this is so insufferably foreign!' and then point out how ridiculous that would be. but then I realise - foreign film, cinema, lyrics increasingly in english, reluctance to read the subtitles, the footnotes, to look things up, to engage in any active way in any piece of media. this is an attitude which even in its most mockable, most caricature-like form, is extremely prevalent online. *deep sigh*)

because. what is 'inaccessible'? it means it is difficult for people who are 'normal'. and what is 'normal', exactly? why is a certain class of people the 'default'? could that be, perhaps, a question with very loaded and very extensive political, social and historical answers? who is making the judgement about what language is 'normal'? who gets to decide?

I'd also like to note that this applies to everyone. it doesn't matter if you are a member of an oppressed group, or five, or none, you can still engage in this kind of discrimination and stereotyping. my scottish family, who have themselves had to change the way they speak and many of them lost their gaelic because of it, routinely mock anglo-romani speakers in their local area. I have an indian friend, herself speaking english because of a history of violence and colonialism, who laughed for five minutes at the beginning of derry girls because the girls sounded so 'funny', and asked me: why did they choose to speak like that? my brother, who sounds very stereotypically rural and 'uneducated', laughs at the essex accent and says that he would never date a girl from essex. I had a classmate from wales who was passionate about welsh language rights and indigenous and minority language education but also made fun of the accent of her native-english speaking classmate from singapore. it goes on and on and on.

take the dialect/language question out of the topic, and I think this reveals a much broader problem with a lot of conversations about media, and the implicit assumptions of what being 'normal' [read: white, anglo-centric, american, male, straight, young, able-bodied, cis, etc] actually means:

if something is written about an experience I do not share, is it inaccessible? or is it just written for someone else?

so, please. next time you want to write a review about a dialect or language you don't speak, think a little before you open your mouth.

the rest of the world has to, every time.

[werewolfetone]

A lot of fiction set during the troubles isn't bad per se it's just annoying how northern irish literature and especially northern irish historical fiction always HAS to be about the troubles or else no one wants to read it

[tropinano]

A Descriptive List of Celtic Fiction Podcasts

Reminiscent of fiction podcasts like TMA, Jack of All Trades etc... If you enjoy anything horror-comedy, general horror or narrative podcasts check these out!

note: Thank you for the reccommendations! I've added them to the list.

Scottish

Middle:Below by Tin Can Audio - A horror-comedy about a fella called Taylor, he can travel inbetween the regular world and the 'middle' realm, and seems to be the only one...until!! He has banter with a charismatic ghost man called Gill and has a pet cat named Sans(?). Good sound quality and fun times.

The McIlwraith Statements by Ghostly Thistle - A monologue narrative about Sarah McIlwraith, recounting her mysterious involvement in the famous 'IPP' study. Dark academia vibes. The narrator has an absolutely lovely voice and accent!

Caledonian Gothic - Descriptive like HFTH, storytelling but the serious tone borderlines silly. If you like I Have Seen Niagara, you might like this! States it's true crime, true stories, but also promises magic and narratives aswell.

Irish

Neighbourly by Matthew O.K Smith - A horror anthology podcast about a creepy neighbourhood and the residents within. Stunnin' narration, with really good stories. I got pretty far in and it uploads every Monday. Great stuff.

The Switchboard by Hog and Dice Productions - A 'daily radio show' horror podcast set in a LIGHTHOUSE. HELL YEAH. It's got some funky sound design and some good stories. Both this and Neighbourly have lovely Dublin accents, and nice stories as usual.

Petrified by Peter Dunne and Liam Geraghty - An award-winning horror anthology podcast with very captivating and realistic dialogue. Unsettling and uneasy feeling it gives me. Main guy Teddy from the 'Dead Air' prologue is defo northern! I want to emphasize the realistic dialogue, it's great. Haven't heard him yet, but this podcast also has CECIL BALDWIN acting in it. Give it a shot!

In Darkness Vast by Hammergrin - A sci-fi podcast with some characters with funky names like Doombuggy, Earthfrank and Nervejump. Wolf 395 vibes, Nervejump is a silly AI lady up to shenanigans. Has some fun voices and sound design. Don't know much about it but it's made in Cork!

The Outside Tapes by Liam Brett and Evan Daly - Classic casette tape horror drama. Alfie Greaves is a journalist investigating a bizarre series of events that are all somehow connected. I love Alfie's voice because he has the same accent and inflection as me so it's very lovely to listen to! He is investigating deaths, so it seems to be a nice mix of Magnus Archives and Death by Dying.

Welsh

Seren by Robin Howell - A short sci-fi about Seren flying through the stars to terraform a new planet. Going by the trailer, it sounds great! Some Cymraeg right off the bat. Great stuff. Gives off some melancholy vibes, and has a funky spaceship AI voice.

Gather the Suspects by MadeUp Audio Productions - A groovy-opening theme mixed with a promising murder mystery. Set in Wales "during a very boring apocalypse". Promises relatable characters, procrastinators, mystery and humour.

This Foul Earth by John Tucker - A comedic, easygoing series (from what ive heard so far) in which everyday Welsh people describe a story they believe deserves to be archived for future generations. Clever writing and good vibes!

as always if youse have anything to add rb and pop it in the tags, these are all very underrated and theyre all quite good and high quality! have a good evening yall

[dykepuffs]

Hello! Hope I'm not bothering you but I found your post about "How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?" and I wanted to ask you something if it's ok with you. The post cached my attention because you use the term gypsy with easiness and I'm curious about how it's that, because as far as the internet says it's a derogatory term.

It's not the first time I've seen somebody use that word, but the person who used it was Roma, if I remember correctly.

This is absolutely not to accuse you of anything, I just want to know your perspective! Thank you and have a nice day!

Hallo!

Yes, I hoped I'd answered this is my main post but, I'll answer it more explicitly and from more angles here - It'll be in sections because I have a lot of thoughts and they're not in any particular order.

I won't be using asterisks to obscure any words in this post, because precision is important and I don't want to leave any ambiguities about which words I mean, so CN for words for Romani people that are often derogatory, for the rest of the post.

1) Is Gypsy a derogatory word?

Gypsy is an untranslatable word, in that the exact lexical field covered by "Gypsy" isn't matched by any words in other languages. Sometimes, people translate tzigane, gitano, zigeuner, cíkanská etc as "Gypsy" but that's really imprecise and causes more problems - These words aren't all calques or related.

The ones which sound broadly like "sigan" (Cigan, tzigane, zigeuner, cíkanský etc) most likely come via the Balkans and the Ancient Greek word "Athinganoi/Athinganos" - Unambiguously a rude word, untouchable, a caste of itinerant fortune-tellers in the Byzantine Empire, which was applied much in the same way as "Tink/tinker" was applied to Scottish and Irish Travellers - a trade as a synecdoche of a people, and specifically a stigmatised trade at that. And they usually are very much derogatory words (but even then - you will meet Roma living in Romania and Hungary and Czechia etc who do use those words for themselves, and they will have as complicated a relationship with them as we do with Gypsy)

Gypsy... We're less sure. We know it comes from "Egyptians", first applied in Scotland and England to recent Romani migrants in the late 1400s or early 1500s (We see it in the naming of the Egyptians Acts in 1501 and 1531, which refer to both Egyptians and "Counterfeit Egyptians" - Meaning those Romani people, and the local Britons who lived with them, travelled with them and did the same itinerant trades. Presumably, the "Counterfeit Egyptians" of the previous 500 years intermixing with Romani people are why modern Romany (Romanichal, Angloromany, English Travellers, whatever you call us) are so pale compared to southern and eastern European Roma.

But why "Egyptians", we aren't really sure. Top contenders are:

1) The Romani people deliberately passed themselves off as Coptic Egyptians, hoping for welcome as fellow-Christians.

2) Local Britons mistook these brightly-dressed dark-skinned people, speaking an unknown language, for Egyptians.

3) To someone who spoke English, and maybe could recognise French, Dutch, Latin or other especially northern European trading languages, the Romanes language of the time that was closer to Hindi, with Greek and Romanian loanwords, would sound unintelligible - We think that's where we get the English word "Jibberish" and "Jibber" from, from the Romanes word "chib/jib"-"Language". But, potentially, does "Gypsy" come from "Jib-sy", taking the common English slang format of adding "-ies" "-sie" to the end of something to make a name for something from a feature of it (Like "walky-talky" for a portable two way radio, "bluey" to describe a merled dog, "pinky" for a mouse or rabbit before it has fur, "Geordie" and "Cockney" and various other local demonyms) - Potentially we are "The ones that speak the chib" - "the chibsies".

4) It was related to a preexisting racial slur, the idea of "Egyptian" to mean a bizarre, foreign, alien version of something- Hermetics were often called "Egyptian" around the same period, because of their strange rites and beliefs, which were popularly associated with Egypt (As was Hermes Trismagestus).

5) The port area in the Netherlands where they sailed to Scotland from was potentially "Little Egypt" and they were named as such for their port of departure, as migrations are often named for their port of arrival, or departure, or the boat they came on - like talking about Plymouth colonists, Windrush generation, Ellis Island immigrants.

What we do know though, is that the first people that the word Gypsy was applied to, were the ancestors of the modern English-speaking Romany and Kale people of Scotland, England and Wales (ie, my personal ancestors) - Most of whom use "Gypsy" as their preferred word to describe themselves. (Further complications: Other Traveller groups in the UK who also in some contexts will call themselves Gypsies, Water-Gypsies, Irish Gypsies, Gypsy Travellers, who may or may not see themselves as Romani but who often have interlaced family trees and traditions with Romanichal and Kale families.)

Personally, as a Romany Gypsy I usually call myself a Gypsy in English for two reasons:

1) Because in singular, I'd have to choose rom/rawni - not just man/woman but also husband/wife, because our words for adult man/adult woman are the same as the word for husband/wife, and I usually don't want to do that; I'm unmarried, but too old to call myself chavo, and I usually don't want to be explicit about my gender in that way anyway.

2) because the other words for us in English are Romani loanwords. The Romani language is still stigmatised in England, and doubly so Angloromanes, our paralanguage/mixed-language/creole - Children raised speaking it are described as being in "linguistic poverty", we are disciplined at school for "speaking in code" (i still have a speech impediment in Romanes that I don't have in English, after being tortured and humiliated by teachers at school for speaking Romanes. Even getting out a couple of words, I stutter and fail, from shame) - and the police and courts describe our language as "thieves' cant" and further punish us for speaking it, they still treat people speaking it as evidence of planning crimes, a final vestige of those Egyptians Acts which levied the death sentence on anyone speaking Romany.

So when a gorjer prefers that I call myself Rromani rather than Gypsy, I hear that as a demand to perform my language for them, for their titillation and for their comfort, so that they can try to forget that for hundreds of years we have been executed, imprisoned, transported, beaten, and treated as second class citizens, for speaking our language. So, no, gorjers don't get to hear one single beautiful word of our language, they can hear "Gypsy" and their ears can burn with the shame of what they still do to us.

So is Gypsy a word that gorjers should use?

Context matters.

Are you talking about an organisation like the Gypsy Lore Society, or a modern Gypsy And Traveller Exchange, or things made by us like Gypsy Pegs, Gypsy Flowers, Gypsy Bangles, Gypsy Jazz? Go for it, use the capital G, in the same way as you capitalise French food, German engineering, Ukrainian poetry. If an organisation describes itself as being for Roma, don't assume that you can translate that to 'for Gypsies', but likewise you can't assume that 'for Gypsies' can be translated to 'for Roma' - All Roma are Romani, not all Romani are Roma (As in, they might be Sinti, Manouche, Roma, Romanisael, Kale, Romany... etc).

Do you want to describe something made by gorjers as Gypsy-like, or describe a gorjer as being like a Gypsy... Then don't.

There is probably a second post to write about this, on the theory of "Gypsy-ing", how the archetype of the Gypsy is created and applied to populations in different ways, but this is already very long and very tiring so, thank you for bearing with me this far!

[saintsenara]

Hi, I’m also Irish and I reckon around the same age but our Halloween experiences could not be more different. Halloween is a big thing where I live and has been for the last 30-40 years. When my parents were younger, it was a different story- peanuts, carves turnips instead of carved pumpkins, etc. I live in Connemara and there are a few pagan rituals the older families here practise, including on Halloween so there’s that as well… I just find it crazy that you haven’t had a trick or treater up till 5 years ago. Is it not so much of a thing in Northern Ireland?

well yes, i suppose there's a specific "why might you not go up to random houses, especially in the nineties" context here...

but - to be clear - i'm not saying that halloween celebrations have never existed here, [or in britain]. humans love any excuse for a party!

nor am i saying that there have never been similarities between halloween celebrations across different places - carving a turnip is essentially the same as carving a pumpkin.

what i'm saying is that the specific "look" of halloween which exists in the transatlantic cultural mind has totally homogenised in the past decade or so, while local traditions have receded. in 2000, we would have had two coexisting modes of thought - "how we do halloween" and "how the americans do halloween" - and we wouldn't have found the latter bizarre or impossible to comprehend, but we would have found it meaningfully different.

[and - in particular - much more extravagant, in a way that makes the extravagance seem like it's been exaggerated for fictional purposes. you know how americans are always amused when europeans discover that red solo cups are actually real, since they're something so associated with cool and hot and aspirational partying in the american media that we consume that we primarily think of them as existing in a fictional context... i always assumed that the lavish house decorations, or children getting so many sweets while trick-or-treating that they last for months, or the concept of halloween shops which only appear in october were similarly exaggerated for "movie magic"... reading the description of halloween in philosopher's stone has that similar movie magic feel - it doesn't just feel fantastical and exciting because it's talking about literal magic, but because it feels like it's describing an exaggerated, big-screen, hollywood version of halloween.]

but by the 2010s those distinctions had basically vanished, and now they totally have. we just have "how halloween is done" [and, beyond that, "how autumn is done"]. how many people do you know who'd still put a turnip out?

also we have to say it... 99% of the "pagan traditions" connected to samhain were made up in the later nineteenth century. and those that weren't tend not to have survived because of pagans...

they're gaelic revival stuff, which makes them interesting as part of historical myth-making and collective identity. the conflation of samhain and halloween is twentieth-century, and directly connected to republican political organisation. which is fascinating! but it's not ancient.

[they also have a much more contemporary political context, in that they're being embraced as part of irish society becoming less dominated by the church and speaking more openly about the church's excesses and abuses. which is something we're absolutely correct to do - but i've noticed an interesting accompanying phenomenon of "the church" and its bad actors being made in some way "unirish", and the fact that enormous numbers of ordinary irish citizens were directly involved in the maintenance of the church's power brushed aside... the idea that there's a true, noble, pre-catholic irish way of behaving is part of this.]

we should also bear in mind that there's a transatlantic connection there too - a lot of "ancient celtic traditions", when they're actually investigated, turn out to have their first mention in the states in the mid-to-late twentieth century. the idea that traditions and modes of behaviour have ancient irish roots is a central part of irish-american identity formation [especially in the latter half of the twentieth century], but they're often traditions which developed in america, which are assigned origins on the island of ireland because the experience of emigration and being severed from the unchanging, mystical homeland is such a significant part of understanding oneself as irish-american. and no matter the giving out we do about them saying "st patty's", we love to go along with this and nod cheerfully when they talk about halloween being the night when the ancient irish believed the veil grew thin.

and so how old are the "old ways" which your neighbours are keeping? because there's a very, very good chance they've only crept in - slowly at first, and then with increasing speed since the millennium - as part of the recent aesthetic and cultural homogenisation surrounding halloween.

[historysideblog]

Online History Short-Courses offered by Universities Masterpost

Categories: Classical Studies, Egyptology, Medieval, Renaissance, The Americas, Asia, Other, Linguistics, Archaeology

How to get Coursera courses for free: There are several types of courses on Coursera, some will allow you to study the full course and only charge for the optional-certificate, for others you will need to audit it and you may have limited access (usually just to assignments), and thirdly some courses charge a monthly subscription in this case a 7 day free trial is available.

Classical Studies 🏛️🏺

At the Origins of the Mediterranean Civilization: Archeology of the City from the Levant to the West 3rd-1st millennium BC - Sapienza University of Rome

Greek and Roman Mythology - University of Pennsylvania

Health and Wellbeing in the Ancient World - Open University

Roman Architecture - Yale

Roman Art and Archeology - University of Arizona

Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City - University of Reading

The Ancient Greeks - Wesleyan University

The Changing Landscape of Ancient Rome. Archeology and History of Palatine Hill - Sapienza University of Rome

Uncovering Roman Britain in Old Museum Collections - University of Reading

Egyptology 𓂀⚱️

Egypt before and after pharaohs - Sapienza University of Rome

Introduction to Ancient Egypt and Its Civilization - University of Pennsylvania

Wonders of Ancient Egypt - University of Pennsylvania

Medieval 🗡️🏰

Age of Cathedrals - Yale

Coexistence in Medieval Spain: Jews, Christians, and Muslims - University of Colorado

Deciphering Secrets: The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe - University of Colorado

Enlightening the Dark Ages: Early Medieval Archaeology in Italy - University of Padova

Lancaster Castle and Northern English History: The View from the Stronghold - Lancaster University

Magic in the Middle Ages - University of Barcelona

Old Norse Mythology in the Sources - University of Colorado Bolder

Preserving Norwegian Stave Churches - Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The Book of Kells: Exploring an Irish Medieval Masterpiece - Trinity College Dublin

The Cosmopolitan Medival Arabic World - University of Leiden

Renaissance ⚜️🃏

Black Tudors: The Untold Story

European Empires: An Introduction, 1400–1522 - University of Newcastle

The Mediterranean, a Space of Exchange (from Renaissance to Enlightenment) - University of Barcelona

The Life and Afterlife of Mary Queen of Scots - University of Glasgow

The Tudors - University of Roehampton London

The Americas 🪶🦙🛖

History of Slavery in the British Caribbean - University of Glasgow

Indigeneity as a Global Concept - University of Newcastle

Indigenous Canada - University of Alberta

Indigenous Religions & Ecology - Yale

Asia 🏯🛕

Contemporary India - University of Melbourne

Introduction to Korean Philosophy - Sung Kyun Kwan University

Japanese Culture Through Rare Books - University of Keio

Sino-Japanese Interactions Through Rare Books - University of Keio

The History and Culture of Chinese Silk - University for the Creative Arts

Travelling Books: History in Europe and Japan - University of Keio

Other

A Global History of Sex and Gender: Bodies and Power in the Modern World - University of Glasgow

A History of Royal Fashion - University of Glasgow

Anarchy in the UK: A History of Punk from 1976-78 - University of Reading

Biodiversity, Guardianship, and the Natural History of New Zealand: A Museum Perspective - Te Papa

Empire: the Controversies of British Imperialism - University of Exeter

Great South Land: Introducing Australian History - University of Newcastle

Indigeneity as a Global Concept - University of Newcastle

New Zealand History, Culture and Conflict: A Museum Perspective - Te Papa

Organising an Empire: The Assyrian Way - LMU Munich

Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction - University of Virginia

Russian History: from Lenin to Putin - University of California Santa Cruz

Linguistics 🗣️

Introduction to Comparative Indo-European Linguistics - University of Leiden - Coursera version

Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics - University of Leiden

Archeology 💀

Archeoastronomy - University of Milan

Archaeology and the Battle of Dunbar 1650 - Durham University

Archaeology: from Dig to Lab and Beyond - University of Reading

Archeology: Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage - Sapienza University of Rome

Change of Era: The Origins of Christian Culture through the Lens of Archaeology - University of Padova

Endangered Archaeology: Using Remote Sensing to Protect Cultural Heritage - Universities of Durham, Leicester & Oxford

Enlightening the Dark Ages: Early Medieval Archaeology in Italy - University of Padova

Exploring Stone Age Archaeology: The Mysteries of Star Carr - University of York

Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology - Durham University

Roman Art and Archeology - University of Arizona

The Changing Landscape of Ancient Rome. Archeology and History of Palatine Hill - Sapienza University of Rome

[maximumwobblerbanditdonut]

Conor MacNeill as young Edward (Ned) Gowan

Bill Paterson as old Edward (Ned) Gowan. Ned was a lawyer from Edinburgh who knew the law, inside and out and acted as a legal advisor to Clan MacKenzie.

Conor MacNeill is an Irish actor from County Antrim, Northern Ireland, who has experience on both the big and small screen, as well as the stage. He is an actor, producer, and writer, and is known for his roles in An Crisís (2010) Whole Lotta Sole (2012) a Comedy/Crime with Brendan Fraser and Privates (2013) and in the BBC and HBO drama, Industry, as Kenny Kilblane.

He made his London stage debut starring alongside Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe in The Cripple of Inishmaan. He was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2017 for Best Short Film.

He played the Garda, and Detective Ruairi Slater in The Tourist season 2 alongside Jamie Dornan (2024) Conor MacNeill wrote a script with Jamie Dornan it's set in NI'.

The Tourist is the four-time MacNeill and Dornan have worked together – they were both in The Fall, Belfast and Siege of Jadotville together, and became good friends outside of work, even writing a script together during lockdown (more of which later)

Belfast. The film is set in the 1960s. Belfast captures the spirit and atmosphere of the city during a period of significant social and political change.

Conor MacNeill (McLaury) fictional character and Colin Morgan in Kenneth Branagh's “Belfast” film (2021) 🎬

Industry (2020)‧ Drama Young finance graduates venture out into the cut-throat competitive world to get a job during the recession times that followed as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.

Conor MacNeill - Industry’s Kenny belongs in the pantheon of bad fictional bosses.

The Siege of Jadotville (2016) It is a true story. Irish soldiers on a UN peacekeeping mission in Africa, are besieged by overwhelming enemy forces, as UN peacekeepers defend their outpost.

The Siege of Jadotville depicts the incredible true story of the siege of 150 UN Irish troops led by Commandant Pat Quinlan (Jamie Dornan) in the Congo in 1961. Quinlan and his men held out against a force of 3,000 local troops led by French and Belgian mercenaries working for mining companies.

In honour of their courageous actions in Congo at the Siege of Jadotville a specially commissioned medal “An Bonn Jadotville” was awarded to all men of “A” Company, 35th Infantry Battalion and the families of deceased members, to give them full and due recognition. If you haven't seen this film yet, I recommend watching it.

The Fall (TV Series 2013–2016) - Conor MacNeill as Mark Bailey - MacNeill joined the cast of The Fall in 2016 for its third season, in which he featured in the final few episodes.

The Fall is a crime drama television series filmed and set in Northern Ireland. The series, starring Gillian Anderson as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, is created and written by Allan Cubitt and features Jamie Dornan as serial killer Paul Spector. 

#ConorMacNeill #BillPaterson #NedGowan #RuairiSlater #TheTourist #JamieDornan #season2 #TheFall #Belfast #SiegeofJadotville

[transthadymacdermot]

Using all the research I did for the paper I had to write about northern irish catholics not supporting the united irishmen when I was in mickey's dick smasher in july for EVIL (developing my fictional agrarian paramilitary)

[dndhistory]

409. Various Authors - Imagine #29 (August 1985)

Imagine magazine keeps going, and we now come to the next to last issue of the magazine, and what is most fascinating is the fact that no one seems to be aware that the end is nigh. They march on blissfully towards oblivion with a new feature (Fancast) as well as a whole reader module competition with entries requested "no later than December" which seeing as the last issue is going to be the September one is a bit sad.

As in the last few issues, Imagine continues moving a bit away from (A)D&D, the cover and much of the content is, in fact, not even fantasy oriented with Northern Irish Science Fiction writer Bob Shaw taking centre stage in this issue. We get a long interview with Shaw and a Star Frontiers module based on his short story that also comes included in this issue.

Imagine continues in its sad state of not knowing exactly what it wants to be, either a showcase for British new talent or a gaming magazine and sometimes feeling a bit scattered in trying to include both. It's a laudable attempt but ultimately one which didn't connect to audiences too much. Still there was always some good stuff in the magazine. 

[justforbooks]

Irish author Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker prize for his fifth novel Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland that is descending into tyranny. It was described as a “soul-shattering and true” novel that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment” by the judging chair, Esi Edugyan.

Canadian novelist Edugyan, who has twice been shortlisted for the Booker prize herself, said the decision to award Lynch the £50,000 prize “wasn’t unanimous” and was settled on by discussion and multiple rounds of voting that lasted “about six hours” on Saturday.

Prophet Song takes place in an alternate Dublin. Members of the newly formed secret police, established by a government turning towards totalitarianism, turn up on the doorstep of microbiologist Eilish asking for her husband, a senior official in the Teachers’ Union of Ireland. Soon, he disappears – along with hundreds of other civilians – and Eilish is left to look after their four children and her elderly father, fighting to hold the family together amid civil war.

“It is with immense pleasure that I bring the Booker home to Ireland,” said Lynch, a former film critic, upon receiving the prize. “I had a moment on holiday in Sicily many years ago where I had this flash of recognition, I knew that I needed to write, and that was the direction my life had to take. I made that decision that day to just swerve, and I swerved. And I’m bloody glad I did.”

His win comes days after violent protests broke out across central Dublin after a stabbing attack outside a primary school that left three children injured. Police said the disorder was caused by a “complete lunatic faction driven by far-right ideology”.

Asked about his reaction to the events, Lynch said that he was “astonished” and at the same time “recognised the truth that this kind of energy is always there under the surface”.

“I didn’t write this book to specifically say ‘here’s a warning’, I wrote the book to articulate the message that the things that are happening in this book are occurring timelessly throughout the ages, and maybe we need to deepen our own responses to that kind of idea,” Lynch said, later adding that he is “distinctly not a political novelist”.

Edugyan said, when asked whether recent events had influenced the judges’ decision, that “at some point in the discussions, maybe for a few minutes, this was introduced, this was discussed”. However, she said that timeliness “was not the reason that Prophet Song won the prize” – the judges simply felt it was a “truly a masterful work of fiction”.

This is the second year in a row that a novel about political conflict has won the prize. In 2022, Shehan Karunatilaka won with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, set during the Sri Lankan civil war.

“Lynch’s dystopian Ireland reflects the reality of war-torn countries, where refugees take to the sea to escape persecution on land,” wrote Aimée Walsh in an Observer review. “Prophet Song echoes the violence in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria, and the experience of all those who flee from war-torn countries.”

Melissa Harrison called the novel “as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real” in her Guardian review.

Lynch was born in 1977 in Limerick, grew up in County Donegal and now lives in Dublin. His other novels are Beyond the Sea, Grace, The Black Snow and Red Sky in Morning. He is the fifth Irish author to win the prize, following in the footsteps of Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright. The Northern Irish writer Anna Burns won in 2018.

Asked what he would spend the prize money on, Lynch said that “half of it has already gone” on his tracker mortgage.

The keynote speech at the prize ceremony in London was given by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was released from prison in Tehran, Iran, last year. She discussed the ways in which books helped her when she was in solitary confinement. “When the guard opened the door and handed over the books to me, I felt liberated; I could read books, they could take me to another world, and that could transform my life,” she said.

“One day a cellmate received a book through the post; it was The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, translated into Farsi,” she said. “Who thought a book banned in Iran could find its way to prison through the post?”

The other titles shortlisted for the prize were The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery and Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein.

Alongside Edugyan on this year’s judging panel was actor Adjoa Andoh, poet Mary Jean Chan, writer and academic James Shapiro and actor Robert Webb. At the ceremony, Andoh read an extract from the 1990 Booker prize-winning novel Possession by AS Byatt, who died earlier this month.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[irishtourney]

welcome to the irish tourney!

this is a tumblr poll bracket for all your favorite irish fictional characters! a couple of rules to get us started out:

Protestants and Catholics both welcome, as are both Northern or Republic of Ireland; we are not here to promote Irish Separatism They also do not have to be Christian at all lmao

Ireland-natives, immigrants to Ireland, and Irish diaspora all welcome!

Canonly Irish preferred, but we'll listen to your weird Irish headcanons so go for it

NO REAL PEOPLE. FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ONLYNO HP characters!

submission form can be found here!

 submissions will end on Thursday, March 16th, at 11:59 PM EST!

a couple of blogs who inspired us:

@italian-tournament @gingershowdown @mixedkid-matchup @sleepsmackdown @autismswagsummit

[drownmeinbeauty]

HOMELANDS

A long-running semi-permanent exhibit at the national Museum of the American Indian, Native New York, gives a straightforward, text-heavy account of native communities in New York State. Backlit maps and diagrams show who lived where and how. Communities in present-day Manhattan clammed at its northern tip, carved canoes along the Hudson, settled among the ponds at its center, and hunted beavers in its streams. Then in 1626 Peter Menuit gave the Lenape 60 guilders and claimed the entire island for the Dutch West India Company. The fiction of harmonious coexistence ended, and the struggle for sovereignty began.

Of all the artifacts on display (clay bowls, beaded mocassins, hand-hewn arrowheads, feathered spears, gourd-rattles, canoes dug from tree trunks, cartoons on newsprint, wool blankets), the most poignant is a Haudenosaunee passport, issued by a league of six Iriqouis nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora) and carried by enrolled members when they travel abroad. But it offers little security outside their homeland. It is recognized by the Irish government, only irregularly by the United States government, and not at all by the governments of Canada, Bolivia, Peru, and the European Union. One Canadian official, in denying the Haudenosaunee national lacrosse team entrance, called it a "fantasy document."

This little book mimics the pocket size, midnight blue color, and gold stamping of a US passport. In the low and low-lit museum vitrine it gives off a plasticky shine and won't lie flat. Why does it seem inert? Why doesn't it posses the same unquestioned, mythological, authority of a United States passport? The United States was created by proclamation, conjured with words and documents, not so long ago. Why don't we grant others the power to do the same?