In the time of the Troubles, when bombs blew through the night and
soldiers prowled down the roads, Henry Glassie came to the Irish
borderland to learn how country people endure through history. He
settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in
the County Fermanagh, and listened to the old people. For a decade he
heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their
culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world. In their
view, their world was one of love, defeat, and uncertainty, demanding
the virtues of endurance: faith, bravery, and wit.
Glassie's task in this book is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop
and clear the stage, so that Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle, Peter
Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and their neighbors can tell their own tale,
which explains their conditions and converts them into a tragedy of
conflict and a comedy of the absurd. It gathers the saints and warriors,
and celebrates the stars whose wit enabled endurance in days of violence
and deprivation.
With patience and respect, Glassie describes life in a time and a place
exactly like no other, and yet Ballymenone is like a thousand other
places where people work on the land during the day and tell their own
tales at night, forgotten, while the men of power fill the newspapers
and history books by sending poor boys out to be killed.
The Stars of Ballymenone is an integrated analysis of the complete
repertory of verbal art from a rural community where storytelling and
singing of quality remained a part of daily life.
