TOWER, BALLAD, AND CONVERSATIONAL FOLKLORE:

THE STABLE ARTIFACT AND THE FLUID COMMENTARY OF TRADITION

Wade Tarzia

INTRODUCTION

Both the archaeologist and the folklorist deal with the present. An ancient monument or an

ancient manuscript created in the past can be manipulated for present purposes, as can more

recent artifacts, printed texts, and spoken words. The monument I want to discuss is a folly,

or a construction built by a wealthy landowner for any number of aesthetic, practical, or

charitable reasons; in this case it is a ruined tower-house in Ireland called Fleming’s Folly.

(Click here for description and location of the tower.) The text is a local ballad about this

tower and the plantation-era landlord who built it. The spoken words are the conversational

folklore from a few people living within the gaze of the tower.

What interests me are the varying meanings the tower holds for the local people, whatever its

original purpose was (and little is known of its builder’s intentions). The tower is from a

historical period (the 19th century) of elite (large-estate owner) hegemony over the rural

population. The ballad is, like the tower, somewhat protected from change by its ‘mortar’ of

poetic form and the existence of that form as set in memory and published from time to time

in the local newspaper. Both tower and song form a central point of reference in the local

historical tradition. In addition, both tend toward political neutrality -- the tower is silent, and

the song’s comment on culture history is mild, such that most people in the community, of

whatever religious or social background, would find little to disagree about in the song.

In contrast, the conversational folklore boils with activity and comment. It represents an ever

formative web of communication. The lore is partly constrained by what has come before --

history, tower, and song – but is also free to affirm tradition, comment on history, or

challenge that comment. This process is a reminder of the part that ‘things’ in the

archaeological record play in the living verbal world of folklore. That which is ruined or

abandoned finds, paradoxically, continually changing ‘life’ as a community represents itself

in tradition – uses what is handed down in order to make sense of the present, which is one of

the processes of tradition (Glassie 1995).

This article is a progress report in a slowly proceeding study of the Folly and its lore. I

present the ballad and the conversational folklore relating to the tower in the form of a

narrative of my collecting experience. My aim here is to situate the folklore in a

chronological and personal context so that readers can have some insight as to how the data

were affected by the collection circumstances (cp. Aunger 1995:100). Then I choose two

features in the ballad for analysis to suggest a function of social commentary and pride of

place: the motif of blood-slaked mortar and the theme of place-lore. Finally, I discuss the

relation of what is stable (the song) and what is fluid and negotiable (the emergent

conversational folklore).

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE AREA

The ballad and local lore were collected in the neighbouring villages of Ballinagh and

Carrickaboy, Co. Cavan, Ireland, both of which are predominantly farming communities,

about seven kilometers south of Cavan town. Of interest in this study is that Co. Cavan has

been considered to be a dynamic ‘border’ county forming an area of contact between the

medieval provinces of Ulster, Leinster, and Connacht, whose border wars and heroes are

featured in medieval Irish saga literature. (Parker 1995 discusses Cavan in medieval times

and sees not one but several borders at issue.) As well, Cavan has been and still is involved in

more recent political changes relating to the partition of Ireland into British-ruled Northern

Ireland and what would become the Republic of Ireland. Click here for a short review of

some relevant Irish history.

Cavan arose as a relatively recent administrative division, incorporating the medieval

territorial division of Breifne and other land, during the English-Scottish plantation of Ulster

that started in the 17th century (Gillespie 1995:10). Cavan was considered intractable,

socially and geographically. One historian writing around 1830 described Co. Cavan as

“celebrated in the history of the wars in Ireland for the fastnesses formed by its woods, lakes,

and bogs, which long secured the independence of its native possessors” (Lewis

1837/1984:314). Topography and position at the far edge of the Ulster plantation seems to

have complicated efforts of the Cavan plantation (Duffy 1995:18-19). Still, by 1861, twenty

percent of the population comprised Protestants, generally inhabiting the best farmlands

(Duffy 1995:32-33). Although historically part of the province of Ulster, Cavan remained

after the 1921 partition with the Irish Free State and later the Republic.

Thus Cavan forms a true case of a border region with the inhabitants situated on cultural

borders since the early medieval period and, thus, involved in the encounters of different

groups. The ballad and folklore discussed here can be understood as types of texts framed

against this historical background. (A comparison with Buchan’s [1972] analysis of Scottish

border ballads is tempting although these ballads and border history have different

characteristics and expression compared to the Folly ballad and Co. Cavan.) Still, the reader

is warned not to conceive of Cavan as seething in conflicts. It is too easy to find conflicts and

miss the routine constructive interaction between farming neighbours that is the norm, no

matter what the creed or ideology of the neighbours (see Glassie 1982a: 290-305, on

neighbourliness in a Northern Irish community).

THE BALLAD AND FOLKLORE: A RESEARCH DIARY

I collected the ballad and conversational folklore during both planned and chance meetings

with people in two villages, Carrickaboy and Ballinagh. Carrickaboy is about 5.5 kilometers

east of Ballinagh, on the upland of Ardkill Mountain (268 meters) from which the Folly is

barely visible on Belville Hill (171 meters) in Ballinagh. The people of Carrickaboy refer as

readily to the Folly as do those of Ballinagh, so the tradition easily crosses the town

boundaries. I protect the identity of my informants by using the initial letter of their first

names. When I do not supply identification, my contact was brief, having been made by

chance.

I first arrived in Co. Cavan in September 1980 via bicycle and carrying camping gear, new to

fieldwork in a foreign country. I was generally acquainting myself with the folklore of

archaeological sites (the type well-documented in Britain by Grinsell [1976]) prefatory to

graduate study. I met two senior farmers passing the time on the road on the western slope of

Ardkill Mountain in Carrickaboy. To my delight, they immediately offered information about

several local legends, among the first being that of Fleming’s Folly, visible as a small nub on

a hill several kilometers northwest from where we stood. Mr. J1 and Mr. B1 told me that a

rich man built the tower so that his sailor-son could see it when he came back to port in

Ireland. Howley (1993:111-112) also heard this explanation when researching his book on

Irish follies, as quoted above.

I spent that day and part of the next checking into various local legends, when I was flagged

down by Mr. T passing by in his car. He described himself as a plumber with an interest in

history, and he had heard of my interests and wanted to chat, which we did for an hour by the

roadside. The topic of the Folly arose, and he said his mother, born in Ballinagh, had passed

down to him that Fleming’s Folly was built by using bullocks’ blood to harden its mortar.

That evening I was invited to supper by a family who had watched over me during my stay.

Mrs. K suddenly produced her hand-written transcription of a ballad about the Folly. She had

copied it from a clipping from the Cavan newspaper, The Anglo-Celt. (After I revisited the

area in 1985, Mrs. K sent me an undated newspaper clipping with the ballad printed on it,

with the author noted as Patsy Gaffney of Ballinagh.)

We would like to know more about the author of the ballad and the date of its composition,

but this information eludes me at the time of this writing. Although Mr. T told my colleague

(introduced below) that the tower was made in the 1800s, I have not been able to date the

tower or ballad by other sources. Mrs. K’s 1980 ballad transcript (shown below) says the

tower was built in “twenty three,” whereas the newspaper clipping sent to me in 1985 records

“eighty three.” A date for the tower in the 19th century seems likely. Consider also the song’s

line, “Now that the landlord days are over,” which could well refer to the formation of the

Free State in 1921, or even earlier to the turn of the century, at which a culmination of a

series of governmental acts completed the movement of land from the great estates of the

landlords into the ownership of their former tenants.

I did not hear the ballad sung except for a verse in 1980 by Mrs. K’s husband, J2, and a

stanza in 1988 by Mr. B2 in the nearby town of Ballinagh. I do not know if these men did not

recall the remainder or were not inclined to perform it in that context. My goal is to collect a

sung version and to seek other variants and related folklore in future work, if circumstances

permit. Here is the ballad-text from 1980 (the numbers are keyed to an annotation in

hypertext, which includes notes on the ballad genre in Ireland.).

Fleming's Folly on Belville Mountain Hill by Patsy Gaffney

Four Irish miles from Cavan

Overlooking Ballinagh Town,

There stands an old gazebo

Both historic and renowned.

Now this old ancient structure

It remains intact there still

And they call it "Fleming's Folly"

On Belville Mountain Hill. – see Annotation, note 1

It was built by Captain Fleming

Way back in ‘Twenty Three’

When he thought to see them sailing

The big ships on the sea.

It was just a rich man’s folly

’Cos if he were building still

He'd never see the ocean – note 2

From Belville Mountain Hill.

Now this old moss grown landmark

Way down the years has stood:

'Twas built of stone and mortar

And mixed with bullocks blood

When you climb its spiral stairway

And at the top stand still

You can see the whole of Breffney – note 3

From Belville Mountain Hill.

You can see the County Longford

And Leitrim, Sligo too

Then Old West Meath and Royal Meath

They all come into view. – note 4

You can see the lakes and rivers

The wood and mountain hills

When you stand on Fleming's Folly

On Belville Mountain Hill.

There are many sons of Breffney

Way beyond the raging main

That would give the world to stand on

This rocky tower again

And a word to every tourist

Who's here in search of thrills

Come stand on Fleming's Folly

On Belville Mountain Hill.

Now that Fleming's estate's divided

And the landlord days are over

And the men who built the folly they

Are gone for ever more.

But here's to Captain Fleming.

Though his wish was never fulfilled

His name will live forever

'Round Belville Mountain Hill.

I did not visit the Folly in 1980, my folklore survey being nomadic with a self-imposed

schedule taking me elsewhere. Mrs. K and I have maintained contact from time to time

through letters up to the present. However, Richard J. Senghas, a friend with folklore

interests, in June 1984 performed a survey of archaeological-site folklore similar to mine,

visiting the Carrickaboy-Ballinagh area as a favour to follow up on some of the items I

collected (which he did, besides collecting new ones). He was hosted by the family of Mrs. K

during his five days of work in the area. Mr. T brought him to many local sites of legend; the

Folly was included, and Mr. T told him that the tower was built by Fleming in the 1800s to

see ocean-going ships. He also related that the structure does not have a lot of “binding”

stones, so it could not have been built very tall (Senghas 1984).

In 1985 my wife and I did a week’s driving tour of Ireland, and we visited the area for a

social call, when I finally saw the Folly in the company of Mrs. K and one of her teenage

sons. In June 1988 I returned again, this time fortuitously sent there on a business trip to

Dublin, which I preceded with four-days of folklore collection in Ballinagh and Carrickaboy.

I roomed in Ballinagh where I met Mrs. A, a senior resident and proprietress of a guest house

referred to me by Mrs. K and living near the foot of Belville Hill on which the Folly sits. Mrs.

A related folklore indirectly about Fleming’s Folly. I asked her generally about the tower, and

she affirmed the blood-in-mortar motif but said it was dragon’s blood. More interesting to me

were the narratives she immediately told in association with my Folly inquiry (these

narratives followed in quick succession, making me confident that she strongly associated the

Folly and these items): (1) A landlord in the area was known to have come to a bad end (she

did not elaborate). (2) Protestants in the area got the best land in the days of the landlords

(note that the Folly ballad concerns a landlord), but now their families had all died out or

were reduced. (That Protestants got the best land during the plantation is borne out

historically; beginning in the 17th century, Protestant colonizers took the most productive

land, displacing Catholics to the poorer [Duffy 1995:32]). (3) There was a priest who was

vexed continually by a Protestant. One day the priest said the man would rot alive, and the

man eventually “got maggots and died.”

For the remainder of the day I sought variants of other legends I had collected in 1980 before

walking to Ballinagh centre trying to engage chance passers-by in conversation that might

lead to the topic of the Folly. I was given only various sets of directions to the tower and soon

was hiking at dusk through fields thick with heather with the dual purpose of climbing the

tower and staving off jet-lag-induced sleep. On the way up I met a young man rooking hay in

a field. I confirmed my directions to the tower then asked him about its history. His response

was that Fleming had built the tower and stopped when someone fell off the top and died.

At the hill top I explored around, climbed the tower, and took photos. Soon I saw a man

walking up the western side of the hill accompanied by several cavorting greyhounds. In

response to my general questions, he told me that Fleming had paid the people a penny per

day to build the tower when work was idle. (It is safe to assume that he believed Fleming had

commissioned the tower as a famine-relief project, which was the origin of some Irish ‘folly’

structures [Howley 1993:2].) He affirmed the motifs of the bullocks’ blood being mixed in

the mortar and the fact that Fleming built his tower to see the ships at sea, after I mentioned

them when he seemed to have exhausted his comment, although he added a new detail to the

viewing motif: Fleming wanted to see the ships in Dundalk harbour. He pointed out a roomy

two-storey stone farmhouse at the foot of the hill where, he said, Fleming had lived. This

kind of house would have been rated superior to at least 80 percent of the housing in the

region (predominantly two or three room cottages of stone or clay), according to a mid-1800s

census (Crawford 1995:141-142).

On the way back down the hill in the dusk, I met again with the young man, now joined by an

older man at the rooking. When the conversation did not lead to further details about the

Folly, I resorted to prompts. Both of them agreed with that Fleming built his tower to see the

ships in Dundalk harbour. One of the men said Fleming was a sailor; the other said Fleming

had a son who was a sailor. When I mentioned the belief of the man with the hounds (i.e., the

jobless being paid to build the tower), the older farmer replied that Fleming did pay the

tenants a penny per day to build the tower, but then raised the rent to pay for the building

(spoken humourously). Both men affirmed, when asked at last, the bullock’s blood motif.

The next day I visited Mr. B2, purportedly the area’s oldest resident, but beyond a recited

verse about the Folly (unfortunately lost in my memory before I could write some notes two

hours later) he would tell me little else about it. Later I sought information at a few of modern

cottages lying closest to the tower on the west side, with no one providing information. I did

meet two farmers passing the time, one of whom said the tower had been used for looking out

for horse thieves. Here note that the place-name for Ballinagh means “ford-mouth of the

horses” (Baile-an Each) (Room 1986:27), from which I can draw no strong conclusions. The

men also pointed to a nearby, two-storey, stone farm house and attached outbuildings (the

same one identified by the man with the hounds) that they said had been part of Fleming’s

estate.

On the evening of the second day Mrs. A suggested I visit her immediate neighbour. He was

not extremely communicative but affirmed, after I prompted, the general information I had

collected about the Folly. Then he added a new element: the tower was used to watch the

hunting hounds. (Note that a rich man's sport is collocated with the rich man's tower. Note as

well, a similar belief reported about Lloyd’s Tower in Kells, Co. Meath: “The tower has been

described as an inland lighthouse and it is thought it was used as a coordination point for

returning huntsmen.” [Howley 1993:51].) The informant’s wife, suddenly speaking out from

behind his shoulder, then added that Fleming had fallen off the tower and died. Although I

had two more days of collecting before me, the remainder of the folklore did not relate

directly to the Folly.

On to Part 2

© Wade Tarzia 1997

TOWER, BALLAD, AND CONVERSATIONAL FOLKLORE

Wade Tarzia

(Part 2)

THEMES OF SOCIAL COMMENT AND PRIDE OF PLACE

I chose two particularly interesting features that have come out of this work: (1) the folklore

motif of the blood-slaked mortar, which appears to index a function of social commentary

against the landlord class; and (2) the theme of place-lore, which may function to enhance

group identity.

The Blood-in-Mortar Motif

The motif concerning the use of blood to slake the mortar of a building is part of an ancient

and well-known tradition in Britain and Ireland. The commonly known example is the British

legend recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1136), in which Vortigern, the king of Saxon-

harassed Britons, builds a tower but finds that what is built in the day the earth swallows up

in the night, with the solution being that “he should look for a lad without a father, and that,

when he found one, he should kill him, so that the mortar and stones could be sprinkled with

the lad's blood” (Geoffrey of Monmouth 1966:166-7). The theme of the blood-sacrifice was

also collected near the turn of the century in Northumberland, in which the Picts (Scotland’s

preCeltic inhabitants) were “believed to have bathed the foundation stone [of their castles]

with human blood, in order to propitiate the spirit of the soil” (Balfour 1904:147). A vaguely

related tradition existed in England and Scotland up to recent times: the legend of the

building (often a church) that falls down each night until mysterious advice to build

elsewhere is heeded, although the blood motif is absent (for examples, see Chambers

1870/1969:335-339). These examples are an expression of a panEuropean tradition,

sometimes termed “foundation sacrifice.” This tradition associates a monument in the process

of construction with the need to entomb a living thing, often a human, inside it before the

building can be properly finished. Discussion of this wide tradition would be too involved to

present here, so I constrain myself to the British-Irish motif of blood-slaked-mortar used to

strengthen a tower.

In the area where I collected the ballad, the blood-in-mortar motif exists in the general lore

about tyrants or landlords. A story from a collection of Breifne (Cavan) folktales, “The Cow

of the Widow of Breifne,” tells of a man who wishes to build a tower strengthened with

bullocks’ and cows’ blood:

In the ancient times a man the name of M'Gauran ruled in these parts. He was a cruel tyrant

surely and prouder than the High King of Ireland or O'Rourke [who] was a Prince in

Breffny. He conceited for to build a house [that] would stand to the end of time, a stronghold

past the art of man to overthrow or the fury of the wind to batter down. He gave out that all

the bullocks in his dominions were to be slaughtered and mortar wet with the blood of them.

Evenly the cows were not spared at the latter end, the way a powerful lamentation went up

from the poor of the world [who] were looking on the lonesome fields. (Hunt 1912, 15)

We might say this is an appropriate motif – the taking of blood to finance an elite

construction. This view would have some historical and, indeed, anthropological veracity,

when combined with theories of political power emphasizing the selfish as opposed to

system-serving nature of political leaders. Such an approach could raise the fact that Irish

pastoral lifeways have included the use of cattle blood as sustenance for those herding in the

distant pastures (Evans 1957:35, 83). The use of bullock blood (and entire bullocks) for a

landowner’s construction would be viewed as a waste of a foodstuff; such a folklore motif

may then be understood as a social comment on the tributes taken by landlords, a comment

best understood from the folk-group’s ethnographic frame of reference.

In light of the motif as it seems to be used in Co. Cavan, I hypothesize that blood-in-mortar is

attached specifically to the elite landowner. Note the comparison between ballad and story:

Fleming is punished or satirized in this world by earning himself a foolish reputation for

building a 'folly' (in Irish medieval society, satire amounted to a social punishment to be

feared, and the fear seems to have extended up to recent times in rural areas: for example, see

O’Crohan 1951:86). The old motif is used in the ballad to indirectly evaluate the landlord

class by indexing the specific landlord, Fleming, to the larger, unvoiced folklore tradition of

which the ballad is one selective manifestation.

Place-Lore Theme: Oppressive History Turned to Pride of Place

The Folly ballad is in the genre of songs and verses of places, a genre that exists generally in

England, Scotland, and Ireland (the tradition from Scotland, with its legends of unsuccessful

constructions, is closest to the Irish case). And here I mean actual places with local

connotations. Place-names in some ballads – notably, many in the English-Scottish tradition –

lose denotative value and move toward connotation of distant places, creating a fairy-tale-like

setting removed from mundane life (Nicolaisen 1973:303). In contrast, the places named in

the Folly ballad are local and denotative. The song names a real tower on a named (and real)

hill situated between two (real) named towns, from which various named counties can be

seen. Further, the formulaic language of the ballad emphasizes “seeing” these places (“you

can see X, you can see Y”). (Click here for a discussion of place-lore and border themes in

medieval Irish saga, with potential relation to the themes of the Folly.)

Place-lore is often expressed in Irish ballads, of both literary and traditional origin, thus we

need not go far from Ballinagh to find ballads extolling the virtues of the land. Glassie

recorded “The Fermanagh Song” in Co. Fermanagh (on the northern border of Cavan). It is

seemingly addressed to the potential visitor with the same “you can see” promise (or formula)

made in the Folly song, where a “tourist” is directly mentioned:

Of all Fermanagh’s beauty spots, I can only mention some,

And one of them must surely be that castle down at Crom.

There’s lovely Enniskillen and likewise dear Lisnaskea,

And when you visit Fermanagh all these places you can see.

(Glassie 1982b: 100).

Glassie (1982a:688) suggests that history is a feature of geography, to the extent that land

features become oral-nodes for reminding of and performing of local history. To this thought,

I would add mention of the theme of the tourist when songs extol local places. The Folly

refers to the tourist “here for thrills,” and one function of place-lore is to raise up the status of

one’s community. I am reminded again of Glassie’s collection: in the song, “A Tourist Visit

to Arney and Macken” the tourist is shown sites of local historical significance (a Catholic-

Protestant faction fight) and praises the local defenders (1982b:63-64). Jackson (1965:46)

suggested that folklore can be used to define a group from within, or may be aimed at the

outsider in the pursuit of self-definition. The presentation of events of local interest and the

apparent (if not actual) target-audience of the outsider (whether from other parts of Ireland or

from other countries) may indicate that both functions are operating in these ballads. As well,

such a feature could be seen as a defining aspect of the genre of local-place songs.

CONCLUSION

As Catarella (1994:468) reminds us, “Categorizing the ballad as a genre is difficult because it

is interdisciplinary and all-encompassing.” This is so because, in part, the ballad does not

exist as an isolate (despite being made to ‘stand alone’ when divorced from tradition in print

media) but rather among a web of related events in a community. The web arises from the

social landscape (including archaeological sites), topographical landscape, and the people

through whom the landscapes are ingested, digested, and resituated in the slowly but

continually renewed world-views that are verbal traditions (click here for a discussion of the

tradition’s performance context).

I have observed only the topmost currents of tradition in the district in which the Folly is

known, and yet interesting themes have come to light, some of which are in tension. The

ballad is ‘good natured’ rather than politically polarized, yet some of the lore of the area

makes a definite social stand. As related above, one belief holds that Fleming fell off the

tower and died; in another, a nameless man falls. In yet another instance, one man reverses

another’s positive assessment – the tower ultimately raises the rents of the people paid to

build it. And at one point the mere mention of the tower elicits brief narratives of the penal

days in which Protestant antagonists either rot alive or live to see the end of their lineage.

And if Fleming had in fact been a charitable landlord, commissioning the tower as a famine-

relief project, then the selective aspects of folk tradition have avoided the specific case and

attached Fleming and his tower instead to the tradition of negative landlords. The Folly is,

then, not just a landmark overlooking a pleasant land and a work of an eccentric, but also a

symbol of overlordship, and a reminder of the ultimate triumph of the oppressed.

The ‘good nature’ of the ballad may be a result of this social tension: the difficulty of coming

to terms with strong emotions and the desire for peace and order that most people desire,

particularly in a traditional agricultural community where mutual dependence is important

(cf. Evans 1957:142, on labour pooling between Catholic and Protestant neighbours in the

north of Ireland). I suggested above that the ballad’s origin could be within the 1900 to 1920s

time frame. If so, the ballad arose from times of political change, when hardships were being

redressed, after which social diplomacy in the border region of Cavan could proceed. The

Folly ballad may be one of the ‘diplomats’ suited for these times, since it avoids strongly

polarizing ideologies despite the focus of the song on a landlord of the ‘penal days.’ As

Glassie (1982a:153) observed in the Co. Fermanagh farming community he studied,

historical narratives in tradition are not a “weapon for conflict” but a way to consolidate

groups.

The ballad seems to help consolidate the communities that its subject-tower overlooks. For

the people have appropriated this place, once a symbol of oppressive hegemony, now made

by the song into a landmark useful for viewing the ancient (preconquest) counties that

partition Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland (which was, when the ballad seems to

have been composed, the Irish Free State). And meanwhile the more fluid folklore argues for

an array of social positions in relation to these issues. This makes the ballad a kind of ideal,

or a yearning to an ideal framed in folk performance. In this sense we can see the ballad as

part of a deeper drive in folk tradition to present an ideal of monoculturalism. (See Sherratt

1996 for a discussion of how the Homeric tradition may have functioned in this way.)

However, for the archaeologist and the folklorist, the heterogeneity of culture is what we

thrive on. In particular, the multifunctionality of the landscape leaves us much cooperative

work to do in showing how our studies not only explain the past but relate to reuse of the past

in the present.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks go to Professor David Engle and Jeff Sypeck for responding quickly to an early draft

of this article on very short notice. Of course, I am responsible for the interpretation and

selection of my colleagues’ good advice. Susan Lawler and Don Nichols sent me useful

photocopies when I was then merely a stranger from the Internet asking for advice. Others

provided useful general advice from the electronic-network discussion groups, Ballad-L

(Indiana), Folklore (Texas A&M), and Medieval Folklore (Ohio State University), even if

many worthy ideas could not be incorporated because of space limitations. Thanks also to the

two peer-reviewers for their perceptive comments on the draft article. And as always, many

thanks to the people of Ballinagh and Carrickaboy for opening their minds and kitchens to a

nosy stranger.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Wade Tarzia took his PhD in English with a focus on anthropological approaches to Early

Irish and Old English heroic lore. He works as a technical writer in an engineering research

centre, and squeezes his hobbies – including research on modern Irish folklore, the folklore

processes inherent in fringe-archaeology, and the writing of fantasy and science fiction – into

whatever nooks and crannies of his life that he can find.

Contact address: Wade Tarzia, Ph.D., 7 Glenn Lane, Vernon, CT 06066 USA

Email: tarzia@uconnvm.uconn.edu

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