Bridging Appalachia

“Máire Mac Néill has demonstrated that in much of oral tradition and local practice, Lugh has given way to Patrick, greatest hero of the Irish Christian pantheon. It seems likely then that the comparison between Brigid and Patrick that is made in so many sayings and anecdotes may derive from an earlier tradition of contrasting Brigid and Lugh. Comparison with Patrick in weatherlore is invariably unfavorable to Brigid, given Patrick’s position in the middle of the Irish spring, while Brigid remains ambiguously on its boundary with winter. Comparison with Lugh would have been more balanced…Such a symmetrical opposition would well express the division of labor in the farm families of rural Ireland…a theme of halves and wholes, capable of expressing…a complex of ideas about weather, time and gender balance, has been bent out of shape under the influence of patriarchal models perpetuated by the Catholic church…and the interests of a patrilocal, patrilineal tenant-farmer class…As Patrick has replaced Lugh in oral tradition, women’s contribution to a shared economy has been progressively devalued.”

Bourke, Angela. 1999. “Irish Stories of Weather, Time and Gender: Saint Brigid.” In Reclaiming Gender: Transgressive Identities in Modern Ireland, edited by Marilyn Cohen and Nancy J. Curtin, 13–31. Basingstoke: Macmillan.