'Take the Cliff Road West': Seán Ó Ríordáin and Contemporary Poets of Irish Searching for the Language
2021
Abstract
The motif of the journey is one of the major tropes in Irish-language literature, from the 11th-century Lebor gabála Érenn to the echtrae (adventure stories) and immram (voyage) tales of mythical heroes visiting Tír na nÓg. In most of these cases - and especially in the stories of the Fianna and the Ulster Cycle - the course of the narrative's moving geography is from the south to the north or from the north further up north (and back).
But besides this important south-north axis which determines many of the traditional journey narratives in earliest Irish writing, there is another important trajectory, prominent from the early Modern Times onwards, which runs from the east to the west, between the English Pale and the Celtic Fringe.