Edmund Lenihan

Edmund Lenihan (born 1950), also known as Eddie Lenihan, is an Irish author, storyteller, lecturer and broadcaster. He is one of the few practising seanchaithe (traditional Irish lore-keepers and tale-spinners) remaining in Ireland. He has been called "one of the greatest of Irish story-tellers" and "a national treasure".

Biography

Lenihan is a native of Brosna, County Kerry, Ireland, but currently resides in Crusheen, County Clare. His college education was at Saint Ita's College in Abbeyfeale, County Limerick and University College in Galway. He is a collector and preservationist of folk tales, recording stories told by older people as passed to them in oral tradition, and then distributing them to a wider audience via print, audio and filmed recordings.

Lenihan is particularly well known for his tales of Irish folk heroes, fairies, fallen angels, and other supernatural beings as recorded in Irish mythology, folklore and oral history. He has also published poetry, stories about historical and legendary women of Ireland, and railroad history. In his role as a cultural preservationist he maintains the largest private collection of folklore in Ireland.

His first local reputation developed as an enthusiastic children's storyteller. But as his international storytelling reputation grew, he has appeared in the film, The Fairy Faith, in a series of programmes on BBC radio, and at numerous high-profile folk festivals.

Conservation activism

In the 2004 reprint of his 2003 book, Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland Mr. Lenihan explained his continuing dismay at the rapid loss of Irish cultural heritage and artefacts resulting from industrialisation of rural Ireland. He described his motivation to preserve hill forts, rural dwellings and native plants in the context of general preservation of folkways. He also briefly described how his conservation ethics had come to disagreement with the centralised progressive goals of modernist planners.

This had come to international attention in 1999 when Lenihan had stood up to road builders in County Clare who had wanted to cut down a special whitethorn tree. (The whitethorn is considered in local Irish lore, and Celtic folklore in general, to be sacred to the Aos Sí – the fairy folk of Ireland.) In local tradition, this specific tree was believed to serve as the meeting place for the fairies of Munster whenever they prepared to ride against the fairies of Connacht. His activism and protests had made international headlines, and succeeded in altering the road project to spare the tree.

Mr. Lenihan is not a violent activist. In the 1999 incident he used the tactic of mobilising public awareness by telling the old, traditional stories that mentioned the traditional significance of the tree, as well as the punishments that came to those who harmed the abodes of the fairies.

Lenihan's informants

In his cultural preservation efforts Mr. Lenihan relies heavily on local informants. These individuals are (often elderly) members of the rural community who are steeped in a tradition of oral history.

Jimmy Armstrong

Jimmy Armstrong was born in 1914 in Ballyrougham, the son of a land steward for a Protestant landlord. His stories of the people, places and heroes of County Clare were incorporated into the 1982 book, Long Ago by Shannonside. His importance in Lenihan's estimation was "...remarkable, then equally significant is the fact that one such man's death can deprive an area of a large part of its oral tradition at one blow".