Fishing, Fishing Boats and Traditional Lore Based on Maritime Memorates Collected in the 19th and 20th Centuries in Ireland and Scotland

Abstract

This paper will analyse and assess material contained in a corpus of maritime memorates, or stories of the sea, collected in Ireland and Scotland, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is based on the Ulster University research project ‘Stories of the Sea: A Typological Study of Maritime Memorates in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic Folklore Traditions’, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and aims to add to previous published studies on this subject, including Fomin and Mac Mathúna 2010, 2015, 2016. The focus of this paper is on matters relating to fishing, fishermen and their boats, in Ireland, especially on the Gaelic-speaking western seaboard, and to a lesser extent in Scotland, during the period under consideration. Most of the narrators and some of the collectors themselves were fishermen, and the close bond and shared beliefs and taboos between informant and collector serves to emphasise the personal nature of the accounts. The information gained from these stories is supplemented here by works of other writers and scholars on Irish vernacular boats and on the practice of fishing and the legends, taboos and other matters associated with it.