Henry Glassie, Folklorist

First Published: The Irish Times, January 8, 2007
There’s some kind of a god who looks over foolish fieldworkers,” laughs Henry Glassie. He’s remembering his first trip to Ballymenone, the farming community a few miles south of Enniskillen, where he arrived in 1972 to begin an anthropological study which would, as it turned out, absorb a [...]

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On Brian Friel’s Translations

First Published: The Irish Times, January 4, 2007
Mayday, 1979. Brian Friel was battling with the beginnings of a new idea. He had thought of something, he wrote in his diary – a “hedge school/ordnance survey play” – and he was circling around it, reluctant to begin. The diary entries which followed revealed the extent of [...]

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