Family History and a Migratory Legend in County Cavan

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s elegant essay, ‘“The Old Woman as Hare”: Structure and Meaning in an Irish Legend’, published in Folklore, delivers the outcome of considerable reading and thinking in just six pages of text, while notes and references take up another two. Gendered readings of Irish oral tradition were rare in the early nineties, especially in such readable form. I happily urged this example of Éilís’s work on my students of Modern Irish and retained most of her findings in memory. Rereading it thirty years later, however, I’m led among the small drumlin farms of north-west Cavan, where my maternal grandparents, Patrick and Ellen Magee, grew up. Éilís’s own writings range widely, as seams of scholarship, family, memory and landscape enrich and illuminate each other. My essay reflects on my own family research, visits late in life to the border counties, and material written down in one Co. Cavan school in 1937/38 for the National Folklore Collection, and now available on www.duchas.ie .