ABSTRACT
Located on the fraying edges of the British Empire, Ireland has always been a place associated with liminality. A country of twilit zones, misty horizons, chimerical visions, and illusion (O’Connor 2006). A place where the supernatural traditionally played an important part in cultural life, a landscape where every stream, well and cavern, every valley and mountain peak, had its own stories and memories of otherworldly creatures (McCarthy 1903). The Sidhe, or fairy folk, were said to live inside the earth and to sometimes steal humans away into their land, a realm where a few hours or minutes might be equivalent to years or even centuries of quotidian reality. To enter this otherworld was ‘to pass through the looking glass, to leave the world of rational constraint for the more vivid and threatening world of imagination and desire’ (Mahaffey 1998: x). For those who managed to cross back and forth between the two worlds, travel involved crossing boundaries of time rather than those of geography. Likewise, Irish society did not have to await the twentieth century to undergo the shock of modernity. Disintegration and fragmentation were already an integral part of a history shaped by invasions and internecine feud. Ireland was ‘a crucible of modernity’ (Karl Marx cited in Kiberd 1995: 645) to the extent that it has been argued that ‘in a crucial but not always welcome sense, Irish culture experienced modernity before its time’ (Gibbons 1996: 6). Yet shared understandings about the supernatural could cross all social, cultural and denominational boundaries.
