The Lass of Aughrim
Item
Title
The Lass of Aughrim
Description
The singing of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ in ‘The Dead’ is one of the key narrative elements on which the story’s multiple arcs and themes depend. Although the traditional Irish version of the song has its origins in an older Scottish air, ‘The Lass of Loch Royal’, the Irish adaptation ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ would become a well-known traditional song in Ireland, a folk song heaving with a sense of “the deep, oral, Irish-language, Jacobite, Gaelic past of the west of Ireland”, as Kevin Whelan describes it. In ‘The Dead’, it is the tenor Bartell D’arcy’s singing of the song that stirs up Gretta Conroy’s memories of the young lover she lost to death in her teenage years. Gretta’s exposure to these memories will lead, in turn, to a devastating epiphany for her husband Gabriel at the story’s close. James Joyce associated the traditional song with his wife Nora, famously describing it as “your song” in a letter in 1909. During the same trip to Ireland, he had Nora’s mother sing the song to him while visiting her in the Barnacles’ family home in Galway.
Subject
Traditional Air / Folk Ballad, Intertextual Reference in 'The Dead'
Date
Unknown