The Ages of a Woman and the Middle Ages

This essay springs from the experience of translating the Old Irish 'Song of the Woman of Beare', and from researching its reception in the twentieth century. The poem was rediscovered in the 1890s and the scholarly reaction is tinged with Victorian preoccupations, including the bohemian cult of Francois Villon. In Ireland it is aligned with Pearse's 'Mise Eire', and with the work of later poets such as Austin Clarke. But as well as voicing the ancient text, the Woman of Beare appears in folklore in both Ireland and Scotland, and there are interesting parallels and divergences between the traditions of scholarship and the figure in the popular imagination. My account of the impact of both text and myth shows a development through the mid-twentieth century and into the twenty-first, in the work of poets writing in both Irish and English. In recent decades the work of women poets has engaged with the myths of the Cailleach as Goddess, and they have thus confronted questions of the legitimacy of treating the past, and especially mythology and folk beliefs, as a source for poetry. I believe it would be foolish for a poet who has the knowledge and critical intelligence to do it properly to ignore such a resource.