Cold iron: aspects of the occupational lore of Irish fishermen

Abstract

tradition. Much more down-to-earth is Roy Fenton’s account of the Greensleeves Morris Men (in ‘The Early Revival’ section as the team was founded in 1926 although the account goes up to recent times). This is good as a memoir and useful as source material for future writers, but does not go much beyond a brief account of the team. The penultimate section of the book deals with the subject of ‘Women in Morris’. Sally Wearing gives an account of costume choices made by women’s dance teams as they navigated the perceived issues of presentation and the interacting concerns of tradition, revival and gender. Mostly concerned with the new women’s dance teams of the 1970s, there are some thoughtful considerations of the influence of earlier periods, precedents, suitability and fashion. Val Parker gives a very good first-hand account of the Women’s Morris Federation (1975–1983) and its development into The Morris Federation. Lucy Wright gives us a lively and fascinating essay which rightly draws attention to the underresearched but vibrant and significantly numerous tradition of women’s carnival morris. Sometimes dismissively referred to as ‘fluffy morris’, this vigorous dance tradition has flourished outside and with no regard to the folk revivals. Unburdened by those particular ways of relating to the past, this practice has forged its own way for more than a century. Lucy Wright has discerned no wish from participants in the carnival morris movement to associate themselves with or see themselves in any way connected to the folk revival. The last section of the book is titled ‘Material Culture’ and consists of two essays. Chloe Metcalf asks ‘Why do Morris Dancers Wear White? She tries to answer the question in a subtle way using what she calls ‘pragmatic analysis’ and rejecting ‘universal’ colour symbolism. She presents a good discussion that emphasizes the thought and care that many morris dancers took over their presentation and deals in an effectively critical way with older explanations of dancers’ costumes. In the final essay, David Petts concerns himself with questions of artefact preservation and memorialization. Here the UNESCO notions of tangible and intangible heritage are used to discuss the representation of morris paraphernalia in museums and ‘the creation of formal patterns of commemoration of morris within both urban and rural landscapes’ (347), particularly the placing of plaques and naming of roads. There is a sort of sadness to this highly focussed essay. As Petts remarks ‘. . .the ultimate expression of these traditions is in the transient and passing moment of performance itself’ (332). Does one need to memorialize that which is living and flourishing, or does the act mark a stage which has been passed through? The difference between a plaque on the wall and the excitement of a live performance by a morris team seems so different in essence, so large, that the gap between them can hardly be thought. All in all this is a satisfying volume that shows the maturity of a great deal of morris dance research. That maturity is attested in the quality of the work, the stimulation of the ideas, the rejection of Victorian type survival theories in favour of more grounded and interesting types of enquiry and the (almost) gender balance of the contributors. As someone who now finds physical books an encumbrance and prefers to read from electronic devices, the idea that one can get a £30 book free as a PDF is both novel, to be welcome and slightly worrying in terms of how such projects are funded.