Abstrakt: |
Séamus Ó Duilearga, Gerard Murphy and certain other Celtic scholars of their generation presumed that the storytelling tradition they encountered in the Gaeltacht was an age-old tradition, going back centuries, even to medieval times, leading them to view extant sagas of Old- and Middle-Irish literature as essentially poorly recorded folklore, not literary creations in their own right. This article attempts to examine the evidence for the narration of lengthy, multi-episodic tales of both native and foreign origin in Ireland, from late-medieval times down to the modern period, with a particular emphasis on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |