Charms and the evidence for rat charming in Ireland’s National Folklore Collection

Charms, charmers and the evidence for rat charming in Ireland’s National Folklore Collection

Ciarán Ó Gealbháin

The charming of rats by various means has been, from medieval times, predominantly, if not quite exclusively, attributed to poets in Irish and wider Gaelic tradition. Founded in the 1930s, to address the effects of centuries of colonisation and to stem the destruction of Irish indigenous culture, the archives of the Irish Folklore Commission (1935–1970), now held in the National Folklore Collection, bear strong testament to the tenacity of this idea into the modern period throughout the length and breadth of the island, in the large number of entries recounting the ability of certain prodigies or gifted individuals – poets principal among them – to charm, banish or ‘billet’ rats. Collected in the middle decades of the twentieth century, such long-held understandings and beliefs speak to the endurance of Gaelic cosmology through centuries of political and cultural subjugation.

Ciarán Ó Gealbháin is lecturer at University Collage Cork as well as a musician and singer, who has travelled extensively in the past with the Irish traditional music group, Danú. He currently lectures on the Béaloideas and Folklore programmes at UCC, and has co-edited Béascna: UCC Journal of Folklore and Ethnology since 2007, acting as senior editor to the Journal since 2012.