Keening a traditional form of expressing grief for the dead was once prevalent at the funerals of ordinary people and nobles alike.
At one time a central part of Irish death customs and traditions, keening (caoineadh) was a sung poem which lamented the passing of the deceased, remembering their attributes, good deeds and life story.
Breandán Ó Madagáin, professor of Irish in the National University of Ireland Galway explains, this form of lament followed a strict style.
The keener, usually a woman, often had the ability to compose verses on the spur of the moment, relying on their knowledge of a centuries old tradition.
They drew upon the corpus of keens that they were familiar with.
A combination of factors lead to the decline of keening, among them the collapse of the Gaelic social and political order from the 1600s onwards, as well as pressure from the Catholic Church to suppress the practice in the centuries that followed.
Keening has come to be thought of as purely a form of wailing to express grief, but in fact the gol (a form of melodic lament with no discernable words) was a defined section of the keen which all the mourners sang together. Victorian travelogues described the experience as hair raising.
Prior to the conquest of Ireland by the English crown keening was also part of the funeral rituals of Irish nobles and chieftains, albeit in a more sophisticated way.
The chieftain’s poet composed a marbhna (elegy) in the bardic tradition, which was set to music. Poets such as Dáibhí Ó Bruadair continued this custom.
In time these marbhnas were sung using ordinary song tunes, but according to Professor Ó Madagáin, records of two marbhnas with their original music exist. These reveal elegies which were chanted instead of sung, and have something in common with keens for ordinary people, as they contain,
A chorus line at the end obviously the assembled company would have come in on that.
This episode of 'Looking West’ was broadcast on 18 July 1980. The presenter is Jim Fahy.
'Looking West' was an RTÉ Radio series presented by Jim Fahy which featured stories from life in rural Ireland during the 19th and 20th centuries.
