Back to Part 1I chose two particularly interesting features that have come out of this work: (1) the folklore motif of the blood-slaked mortar, which appears to index a function of social commentary against the landlord class; and (2) the theme of place-lore, which may function to enhance group identity.
The motif concerning the use of blood to slake the mortar of a building is part of an ancient and well-known tradition in Britain and Ireland. The commonly known example is the British legend recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1136), in which Vortigern, the king of Saxon-harassed Britons, builds a tower but finds that what is built in the day the earth swallows up in the night, with the solution being that “he should look for a lad without a father, and that, when he found one, he should kill him, so that the mortar and stones could be sprinkled with the lad's blood” (Geoffrey of Monmouth 1966:166-7). The theme of the blood-sacrifice was also collected near the turn of the century in Northumberland, in which the Picts (Scotland’s preCeltic inhabitants) were “believed to have bathed the foundation stone [of their castles] with human blood, in order to propitiate the spirit of the soil” (Balfour 1904:147). A vaguely related tradition existed in England and Scotland up to recent times: the legend of the building (often a church) that falls down each night until mysterious advice to build elsewhere is heeded, although the blood motif is absent (for examples, see Chambers 1870/1969:335-339). These examples are an expression of a panEuropean tradition, sometimes termed “foundation sacrifice.” This tradition associates a monument in the process of construction with the need to entomb a living thing, often a human, inside it before the building can be properly finished. Discussion of this wide tradition would be too involved to present here, so I constrain myself to the British-Irish motif of blood-slaked-mortar used to strengthen a tower.
In the area where I collected the ballad, the blood-in-mortar motif exists in the general lore about tyrants or landlords. A story from a collection of Breifne (Cavan) folktales, “The Cow of the Widow of Breifne,” tells of a man who wishes to build a tower strengthened with bullocks’ and cows’ blood:
In the ancient times a man the name of M'Gauran ruled in these parts. He was a cruel tyrant surely and prouder than the High King of Ireland or O'Rourke [who] was a Prince in Breffny. He conceited for to build a house [that] would stand to the end of time, a stronghold past the art of man to overthrow or the fury of the wind to batter down. He gave out that all the bullocks in his dominions were to be slaughtered and mortar wet with the blood of them. Evenly the cows were not spared at the latter end, the way a powerful lamentation went up from the poor of the world [who] were looking on the lonesome fields. (Hunt 1912, 15)
We might say this is an appropriate motif – the taking of blood to finance an elite construction. This view would have some historical and, indeed, anthropological veracity, when combined with theories of political power emphasizing the selfish as opposed to system-serving nature of political leaders. Such an approach could raise the fact that Irish pastoral lifeways have included the use of cattle blood as sustenance for those herding in the distant pastures (Evans 1957:35, 83). The use of bullock blood (and entire bullocks) for a landowner’s construction would be viewed as a waste of a foodstuff; such a folklore motif may then be understood as a social comment on the tributes taken by landlords, a comment best understood from the folk-group’s ethnographic frame of reference.
In light of the motif as it seems to be used in Co. Cavan, I hypothesize that blood-in-mortar is attached specifically to the elite landowner. Note the comparison between ballad and story: Fleming is punished or satirized in this world by earning himself a foolish reputation for building a 'folly' (in Irish medieval society, satire amounted to a social punishment to be feared, and the fear seems to have extended up to recent times in rural areas: for example, see O’Crohan 1951:86). The old motif is used in the ballad to indirectly evaluate the landlord class by indexing the specific landlord, Fleming, to the larger, unvoiced folklore tradition of which the ballad is one selective manifestation.
The Folly ballad is in the genre of songs and verses of places, a genre that exists generally in England, Scotland, and Ireland (the tradition from Scotland, with its legends of unsuccessful constructions, is closest to the Irish case). And here I mean actual places with local connotations. Place-names in some ballads – notably, many in the English-Scottish tradition – lose denotative value and move toward connotation of distant places, creating a fairy-tale-like setting removed from mundane life (Nicolaisen 1973:303). In contrast, the places named in the Folly ballad are local and denotative. The song names a real tower on a named (and real) hill situated between two (real) named towns, from which various named counties can be seen. Further, the formulaic language of the ballad emphasizes “seeing” these places (“you can see X, you can see Y”). (Click here for a discussion of place-lore and border themes in medieval Irish saga, with potential relation to the themes of the Folly.)
Place-lore is often expressed in Irish ballads, of both literary and traditional origin, thus we need not go far from Ballinagh to find ballads extolling the virtues of the land. Glassie recorded “The Fermanagh Song” in Co. Fermanagh (on the northern border of Cavan). It is seemingly addressed to the potential visitor with the same “you can see” promise (or formula) made in the Folly song, where a “tourist” is directly mentioned:
Of all Fermanagh’s beauty spots, I can only mention some,
And one of them must surely be that castle down at Crom.
There’s lovely Enniskillen and likewise dear Lisnaskea,
And when you visit Fermanagh all these places you can see.
(Glassie 1982b: 100).
Glassie (1982a:688) suggests that history is a feature of geography, to the extent that land features become oral-nodes for reminding of and performing of local history. To this thought, I would add mention of the theme of the tourist when songs extol local places. The Folly refers to the tourist “here for thrills,” and one function of place-lore is to raise up the status of one’s community. I am reminded again of Glassie’s collection: in the song, “A Tourist Visit to Arney and Macken” the tourist is shown sites of local historical significance (a Catholic-Protestant faction fight) and praises the local defenders (1982b:63-64). Jackson (1965:46) suggested that folklore can be used to define a group from within, or may be aimed at the outsider in the pursuit of self-definition. The presentation of events of local interest and the apparent (if not actual) target-audience of the outsider (whether from other parts of Ireland or from other countries) may indicate that both functions are operating in these ballads. As well, such a feature could be seen as a defining aspect of the genre of local-place songs.
As Catarella (1994:468) reminds us, “Categorizing the ballad as a genre is difficult because it is interdisciplinary and all-encompassing.” This is so because, in part, the ballad does not exist as an isolate (despite being made to ‘stand alone’ when divorced from tradition in print media) but rather among a web of related events in a community. The web arises from the social landscape (including archaeological sites), topographical landscape, and the people through whom the landscapes are ingested, digested, and resituated in the slowly but continually renewed world-views that are verbal traditions (click here for a discussion of the tradition’s performance context).
I have observed only the topmost currents of tradition in the district in which the Folly is known, and yet interesting themes have come to light, some of which are in tension. The ballad is ‘good natured’ rather than politically polarized, yet some of the lore of the area makes a definite social stand. As related above, one belief holds that Fleming fell off the tower and died; in another, a nameless man falls. In yet another instance, one man reverses another’s positive assessment – the tower ultimately raises the rents of the people paid to build it. And at one point the mere mention of the tower elicits brief narratives of the penal days in which Protestant antagonists either rot alive or live to see the end of their lineage. And if Fleming had in fact been a charitable landlord, commissioning the tower as a famine-relief project, then the selective aspects of folk tradition have avoided the specific case and attached Fleming and his tower instead to the tradition of negative landlords. The Folly is, then, not just a landmark overlooking a pleasant land and a work of an eccentric, but also a symbol of overlordship, and a reminder of the ultimate triumph of the oppressed.
The ‘good nature’ of the ballad may be a result of this social tension: the difficulty of coming to terms with strong emotions and the desire for peace and order that most people desire, particularly in a traditional agricultural community where mutual dependence is important (cf. Evans 1957:142, on labour pooling between Catholic and Protestant neighbours in the north of Ireland). I suggested above that the ballad’s origin could be within the 1900 to 1920s time frame. If so, the ballad arose from times of political change, when hardships were being redressed, after which social diplomacy in the border region of Cavan could proceed. The Folly ballad may be one of the ‘diplomats’ suited for these times, since it avoids strongly polarizing ideologies despite the focus of the song on a landlord of the ‘penal days.’ As Glassie (1982a:153) observed in the Co. Fermanagh farming community he studied, historical narratives in tradition are not a “weapon for conflict” but a way to consolidate groups.
The ballad seems to help consolidate the communities that its subject-tower overlooks. For the people have appropriated this place, once a symbol of oppressive hegemony, now made by the song into a landmark useful for viewing the ancient (preconquest) counties that partition Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland (which was, when the ballad seems to have been composed, the Irish Free State). And meanwhile the more fluid folklore argues for an array of social positions in relation to these issues. This makes the ballad a kind of ideal, or a yearning to an ideal framed in folk performance. In this sense we can see the ballad as part of a deeper drive in folk tradition to present an ideal of monoculturalism. (See Sherratt 1996 for a discussion of how the Homeric tradition may have functioned in this way.)
However, for the archaeologist and the folklorist, the heterogeneity of culture is what we thrive on. In particular, the multifunctionality of the landscape leaves us much cooperative work to do in showing how our studies not only explain the past but relate to reuse of the past in the present.
Thanks go to Professor David Engle and Jeff Sypeck for responding quickly to an early draft of this article on very short notice. Of course, I am responsible for the interpretation and selection of my colleagues’ good advice. Susan Lawler and Don Nichols sent me useful photocopies when I was then merely a stranger from the Internet asking for advice. Others provided useful general advice from the electronic-network discussion groups, Ballad-L (Indiana), Folklore (Texas A&M), and Medieval Folklore (Ohio State University), even if many worthy ideas could not be incorporated because of space limitations. Thanks also to the two peer-reviewers for their perceptive comments on the draft article. And as always, many thanks to the people of Ballinagh and Carrickaboy for opening their minds and kitchens to a nosy stranger.
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Wade Tarzia took his PhD in English with a focus on anthropological approaches to Early Irish and Old English heroic lore. He works as a technical writer in an engineering research centre, and squeezes his hobbies – including research on modern Irish folklore, the folklore processes inherent in fringe-archaeology, and the writing of fantasy and science fiction – into whatever nooks and crannies of his life that he can find.
Contact address: Wade Tarzia, Ph.D., 7 Glenn Lane, Vernon, CT 06066 USA
Email: tarzia@uconnvm.uconn.edu
© Wade Tarzia 1997
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