This path was created by Emily Bengtson.  The last update was by Maren Connell.

Star of the Sea : A Postcolonial/Postmodern Voyage into the Irish Famine

Ballads

Ireland has songs about beautiful girls and drunken nights and drinking songs and nonsense songs, just like any other culture.  But some of their most beautiful and heartbreaking songs are ones that mourn the loss of their island, or deal with emigrating, or the famine.  Most Irish folk songs with words can be considered ballads. Ballads are a "form of folk verse narrative. The majority of folk ballads deal with themes of romantic passion, love affairs that end unhappily, or with political and military subjects. The story usually is in dialogue form, in direct and unsparing language, arranged in quatrains with the second and fourth lines rhyming" (Quinn). They are essentially storytelling songs, and one can learn a lot about a culture based on what stories are frequently told in their music, stories that everyone knows.

Works Cited
Quinn, Edward. "ballad." A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second Edition. New York: Facts On  File, Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 5 Mar. 2016.<http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&WID=10020&SID=5&iPin=Gfflithem0077&SingleRecord=True>.

songsinirish.com - provided lyrics and translations for Gleanntáin Ghlas' Ghaoth Dobhair and Carrickfergus/Do Bhí Bean Uasal


Researcher/Writer: Michaila Gerlach
Technical Designers: Emily Bengtson and Maren Connell
 

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