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153 Collocations of orality with the politically disadvantaged are commonplace in the popular imagination; so if, as Winston Churchill is often credited with asserting, “history is written by the victors,” oral tradition might well be looked to as a repository for the histories of the vanquished and oppressed. A fighting example of such felicitous preservation of inconvenient truths, one might argue, would be the sixteenth-century Irish Gaelic chieftain, sea captain, trader, and pirate Gráinne Ní Mháille. For though a dominating, unpredictable campaigner against the Tudor reconquest of Ireland, with her exploits well documented in the State Papers of both Ireland and England, Ní Mháille is strikingly all but absent from later written histories. As Anne Chambers stresses, “The Annals of The Four Masters, that seminal source of Irish history, compiled shortly after her death … does not even mention her name,” while she features in nineteenth-century accounts only in passing, or in relation to her two husbands (xiii; Cook xi). In contrast, as the semimythical Granuaile, the pirate queen is a veritable star of the Irish oral tradition : her infamous independence, battle courage, and private audience with Elizabeth I feature in folk tales based on living memory, and in various ballad aislingi [ash-LING-gee] composed from the eighteenth century. The aisling [ASH-ling], or “vision poem,” is a genre of nationalist verse that, I will argue, is like the ballad in having its roots in an Irish orality dating from early Celtic culture. As I will demonstrate in my analysis of eight such ballads, however, the preservation of Ní Mháille’s memory in the aisling involved a dramatic transformation, and from a feminist point of view, an alarming one. For the unruly buccaneer of the State Papers mutates in the early aislingi into a sorrowing icon of nationalist aspirations, one who falls victim, I will suggest, to the homeostasis of oral cultures, which, Walter Ong has noted, subordinate “the integrity of the past”to“the integrity of the present”(48). Oral tradition, then, I will contend, does not necessarily reflect the historical experience of THE BALLAD AS SITE OF REBELLION Orality, Gender, and the Granuaile Aislingi Naomi Foyle 154 Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality women, at least, in any uncomplicated way. Ultimately discussing the rehabilitation and evolution of Granuaile’s image in contemporary aislingi, including my own ballad “Grace of the Gamblers,”1 I will ground my arguments throughout in their historical context, in particular the complex dynamics that exist among gender, orality, and political conflict in Ireland. I first encountered the name of Gráinne Ní Mháille [GRAWN-ya NEE WYL-ya] (1530–1603?) several years ago while browsing on the Internet, a medium for verbal documents that shares with orality a reputation for transience , idle chat, and factual unreliability. Or perhaps I clicked on her English name, Grace O’Malley. In either event, this casual, half-remembered introduction was fitting, for even the most established facts of Ní Mháille’s life are interwoven with rumours and tallish tales that change in the telling. A near exact contemporary of Elizabeth Tudor, she was the only daughter of a chief of the seafaring Uí Mhaille dynasty, who ruled the west coast of Ireland, now County Mayo. Her Irish nickname, Granuaile [Gron-u-ALE], means “crophaired ,” which, according to Judith Cook, relates to a childhood incident in which Gráinne cut off her hair to demonstrate her determination to sail with her father to Spain (21).As an adult, Granuaile overcame entrenched cultural prohibitions against both female leadership and women at sea, eventually succeeding her father as chieftain. For more than forty years she commanded a fleet of up to twenty galleys, leading two hundred men in continual interdynastic warfare as well as battles with the English. Widowed twice and the mother of four, Granuaile played a dominant role in the fortunes of her three sons and maintained political independence from her spouses. Though the State Papers indicate she remained married to her second husband until his death, she is famously said to have divorced him after a year’s trial union, garrisoning his fort and shouting down to him,“I dismiss you” (Chambers 66). So why was such a formidable leader, whose actions often placed her at the heart of the convoluted politics of her day, omitted from contemporary Irish accounts? Both Chambers and Cook conjecture that an independent female leader would have threatened the world view of male Irish commentators...

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