STRANGE LIT
Sean O. Suilleabhain's
Irish Wake Amusements is one of the strangest books I've
found in a couple of years.
The book originated in 1921 when the author:
... had his first experience of a wake at which horse-play,
fun and games were the order of the night, with the apparent
sanction of the mourning relatives of the deceased. This
surprised him, as in his native Kerry wakes were generally
solemn occasions, where storytelling formed the only means
of entertainment.
This led to him studying and recording the goings-on at wakes
for the next forty years until he first published this book in 1961
(in Gaelic with an English translation six years later).
He breaks down the amusements into various categories in
successive chapters, e.g.
- Storytelling; singing; music and dancing; card-playing;
riddles; tongue-twisters; versifying and repetition of jingles
- Contests in strength; agility; dexterity; accuracy of aim;
endurance and toughness; hardihood and athletics
- Taunting and mocking; booby traps; mischief-making;
horse-play; rough games; fights at wakes and funerals
- Imitative games
- Catch games
- Games of hide, seek and guessing
Among the character-building "athletic tests" described is:
The Knee Game: A player sat on a chair, knees apart,
fists on knees. A second player knelt on the floor in front of
him, and it was his task to bend his head between the knees of
the first and withdraw it so quickly that he escaped being
crushed and hit by the other's fists. If he succeeded in doing this,
the other player had to take his place.
The booby traps, equally fun and wholesome, included such
japes as:
Hiding the Spoons or Stones required three small stones
to be placed on a table. A simple fellow who had not seen the
game before was then told by a rogue to take the stones out of
the kitchen, one by one, and hide them; he, the rogue, boasted
that he would be able to tell him where he had hidden the third
stone. The booby then went out twice and took great trouble
in hiding the first two stones. While he was outside, a fourth
stone was being secretly heated in the fire and it, instead of
the third stone, was lying on the table when the booby returned.
The boob would pick up the stone, drop it immediately while
getting a nasty burn, and the clever rogue would point to it
on the floor and say, "That's where you hid the third one!"
Oh those crazy, crazy rascals!
A later chapter details how the church was opposed to such
cruelties, and apparently not just because they weren't invited
to conduct the bastinado. Various decrees over the years had
apparently wiped out or at least severely reduced the most
serious abuses by the 1950s, after which (being Irish) they
limited themselves to alcohol abuse.
posted by Steven Baum
2/16/2000 02:43:38 PM |
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