A thin, aged woman stands over a corpse and releases a terrible wail. Her knotted black hair obscures her face; her dark cloak conceals her coiled body; her hands pound at her sides. She convulses wildly and cries out in a tongue made foreign in its own home: “Och, och, ochón!” This image of consuming, unadulterated grief will be familiar to most who have heard of the Irish keen. Like any myth, it has a relation to the truth—but compressing a ritual with thousands of years of history into a single wail can only result in a somewhat flat portrayal of reality.

Though accounts vary over time and from one region to another, visitors chronicling their trips to Ireland have often included reasonably consistent descriptions of keening, usually perceived as peculiar, often as grotesque (a perception that, by the twentieth century, would be taken up by many within Ireland, including ashamed former keeners). The accounts tend to accord in some aspects with the mythologized version: the long-haired and cloaked keener was almost always a woman, often old, “or if she be comparatively young, the habits of her life make her look old,” as one such account puts it. This consistency could be that of a natural tradition. It may be a result of life imitating art, either in the form of direct literary depictions or related archetypes such as the banshee; the Virgin Mary, who tends to be depicted keening in Irish depictions of the Lamentation of Christ; and the sean bhean bhocht (poor old woman), as scholar Kathryn Conrad argues. It may also be a case of art imitating art, writers describing what they expected rather than what they saw. In any case, a cultural and literary tradition developed together, and with considerable congruity.

Today that tradition is all we can know about the keen. Essential to its modern mythology is that the keen has disappeared, that the song of mourning has itself been lost in the endless battle against invading powers. It can be heard in a few audio recordings by sociologists and seen in transcriptions of the words and melody of keens, but no more. Over the past few centuries, death in Europe (and the United States) has been hidden in hospitals and shipped overseas, and according to UN figures, death rates over the past seventy years have stayed relatively stable in Europe and until recently had been steadily decreasing in the U.S. Death rates for those under the age of sixty have significantly fallen, even in what the UN calls “less developed regions.” Mourning rituals like keening have become increasingly uncommon along with a rise in life expectancy that can feel like a scarcity of death. Funerals are often quiet affairs, and sorrow is to be felt in private. But no matter how much death may seem to retreat, as wars are fought by computers, one disease after another is cured, and Silicon Valley promises immortality, the illusion will always be broken. Death will inevitably reassert itself, whether it be in the form of “deaths of despair” and poverty, or a result of climate change and its many by-products, including natural disaster, famine, and plague. When death becomes public again, grief may, too.

The keen (from the Irish caoineadh, pronounced somewhere between keenu and kweenu) was a part of Irish funeral rites for over a millennium. The eighth-century Irish poet Blathmac presupposes knowledge of keening, as well as its necessity at a funeral, in the long poem “Tair chucom a Maire boídh” (Come to me, loving Mary). The best early evidence that keening was practiced across Ireland is in the twelfth-century historian Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica (Topography of Ireland). The mention is brief but suggests that the practice had been widespread and regular for a long time.

While the image of the keener existed for centuries, the myth of the keen as a symbol of Ireland’s pain solidified, along with much supposedly authentic Irish culture, during the Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement elevated the status of ancient Celtic culture, defended Irish autonomy, and called for the preservation of the Irish language. Its founding document was Standish James O’Grady’s 1878 History of Ireland: Heroic Period, characterized in its introduction as “filled with great heroic personages of a dignity and power more than human.” The greatest of these personages, and the heart of History of Ireland, is the mythological, godlike warrior Cú Chulainn. O’Grady’s “bravest of the brave” is lauded as much for his feats of physical heroism as for his profound depth of emotions, including rage, love, and grief. Thus, for Celtic Revivalists, several of whom also wrote on Cú Chulainn, it is extremity that is heroic. Great triumph entails great pain.

The literary movement within the Celtic Revival, which coexisted with calls for educational and cultural reform, was strengthened in 1890 with revelations of the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell’s adultery. The scandal ended the career of the campaigner for autonomy for Ireland within the United Kingdom, known as Home Rule, and was quickly followed by his death in 1891. The controversy reinforced both nationalist and Unionist political commitments but also left a vacuum in Irish nationalist circles. Until the 1916 Easter Rising twenty-five years later, political action was largely rerouted into cultural activity.

As a partly linguistic movement, and one that depended upon a new narrative of Irish identity, the Revival’s writers—including the poet W.B. Yeats, the playwright Lady Gregory, and the suffragist Maud Gonne—were some of its most important figures. Its political star, the Easter Rising leader Pádraic Pearse, was also a writer of poems, short stories, and essays. Keening appears in several plays and poems by Celtic Revivalists, including Yeats and Lady Gregory’s 1902 play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in which the titular heroine, whose “troubles have put her wits astray,” is said to “go cry with the woman / For yellow-haired Donough is dead”; Lady Gregory’s 1906 play The Gaol Gate, in which a man killed in prison is keened for by his mother and her friend; and Pearse’s short story “An Bhean Chaointe” (The Keening Woman). But alongside these works, the most significant and moving portrayals of keening can be found in the work of the wildly popular John Millington Synge.

Synge visited the Aran Islands off the west coast of mainland Ireland for the first time in 1898, on Yeats’ recommendation; he took the trip a total of five times and wrote a book, The Aran Islands, about his first four extended visits. The Islands were becoming a symbolic stronghold of native Irish culture; islanders still spoke primarily Irish and maintained an agrarian and fishing economy. Synge is responsible for making the region into the geographical center of keen mythology. He describes two funerals in The Aran Islands, focusing on keening in both instances, and shared similar scenes with wider audiences in several later plays, notably the 1904 drama Riders to the Sea.

At the play’s close an old woman named Maurya returns home after seeing the ghost of her son Michael, whose death was confirmed while she was out of the house. He is the fifth of her six sons to die, and, as she mourns, the sixth corpse, of her son Bartley, is brought into the house. Maurya can keen before she can speak, and when she does speak her monologue is accompanied by a group of keening women who have followed her on stage with Bartley’s body. “They’re all gone now,” she begins, following the stage direction “as if she did not see the people around her,” including the women lending a mournful song to her increasingly universal grief. She sprinkles holy water over Michael’s clothes and Bartley’s corpse and seems to be preparing for death herself: “It’s a great rest I’ll be having.” In reverse order, she prays for the souls of each of her sons, all with almost archetypically Irish names: Bartley, Michael, Sheamus, Patch, Stephen, and Shawn. Then she and the keeners extend further, from her sons’ souls to her own, to “the soul of every one…left living in the world.” Maurya mourns for the sake of all who have lost loved ones and mourns for all the dead. Synge writes in The Aran Islands, “This grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.” In Riders to the Sea, he extends that analysis to all the world.

There has always been an ambivalence in Ireland toward the Celtic Revival. Insofar as it was intended to vitalize nationalist politics via culture, it had undeniable concrete results. Following the Third Home Rule Bill in 1914, Celtic Revivalists were responsible for the resurgence of political nationalism with the Easter Rising of 1916, which began a revolutionary period that included the partisan War of Independence between the Irish Republican Army and England; the partitioning of Northern Ireland; and finally the Irish Civil War, which solidified Irish independence from the British Empire. Yet the generations following Synge’s included a series of cultural figures, such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, who were more skeptical toward the movement, in large part for its Romanticism and misleading depictions of Ireland—what a 2009 Irish Times article succinctly calls “the Celtic twaddle of myth and valor and keening women.” Joyce’s brief moments of keening are typically ironized: Ulysses has only an “Old Gummy Granny” “rocking to and fro…keen[ing] with banshee woe,” and Finnegans Wake has a mock wake in its first few pages including a “duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation…kankan keening.” Such dramatizations of the keen are far less reverential than Synge’s. Heaney was more polite but essentially in agreement, telling an interviewer, “When Synge goes to Aran in the late nineteenth century he hears the keening…and takes that as the spirit of Ireland…That was perhaps a mystification.”

They were right to doubt. The keen had already been increasingly confined to remote regions in the far west for at least a century. Synge may have been one of the few Dubliners of his time to actually witness it, leading to widespread misapprehensions. Earlier documents demonstrate a considerably more complex tradition than the myth that Synge offered and of which others took political advantage.

By far the most historically significant fact about keening that does not make its way into the myth is that keeners were often paid for their funerary services. At least as early as 1683 and for the following two centuries, many women were professional keeners, stationed in a particular area or traveling around the country to offer their skills to anyone in need—as long as they weren’t too much in need. Sometimes, when the family of the dead was poor, keeners were paid with alcohol; failing that, they often simply went on to the next funeral, seeking out a wealthier corpse. There was competition among keeners for lucrative jobs, and this rivalry could result in no keening at all. The Catholic Church’s opposition to keening was officially based in part on these professional keeners and the supposed inauthenticity of their grief—one of several possible reasons keening as a profession is absent from Celtic Revival literature.

There were other omissions. Keeners were sometimes hired for social prestige rather than spirituality, for example. They are also known to have sometimes drunk the blood of the dead: in her famous “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” (Keen for Art O’Leary)—one of the few keens that has been saved—late eighteenth-century keener Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill sings to her husband, “Your blood was flowing from you, and I did not wait to wipe it, but drank it from my palms.” This aspect of keening was too easily associated with primitiveness by those opposed to keening to make it into a play like Riders to the Sea. Moreover, keens were not completely spontaneous, formless wails but used a specific poetic meter, known as rosc, and a specific rhyme scheme, as well as standardized epithets, structures, and melodies as a base on which to build the otherwise improvised poem. The keen was a strictly observed part of the wake, a ritual within a ritual, a sober, more obviously mournful counterpart to the mostly festive wake. At a typical seventeenth-century wake, the first prayer was followed by a spontaneous family keen—which was in fact closer to the image of the formless, wordless wail, albeit still part of an established ritual—after which the head keener, or bean chaointe, began the more formalized keen. An 1832 dictionary explains that “the pedigree, land, property, generosity, and good actions of the deceased person and his ancestors are diligently and harmoniously recounted” by the bean chaointe, punctuated by a group of (usually three) professional keeners joining in melodic cries. The keen was sung repeatedly throughout the night or nights of the wake, especially upon the arrival of a new visitor, offering a reminder of grief amid the celebratory games and entertainment of the wake, and then again during the walk from the wake to the funeral. Details do vary depending on time and region, but this is the essence of the pre-twentieth-century Irish keen.

The misrepresentations were understandable, and successful, attempts to sanitize a complex cultural phenomenon for the sake of a political program celebrating the strength of a supposed native Irish character in light of colonial repression. But in mythologizing the tradition, Celtic Revivalists also stripped away the specificity of the keen, making it essentially indistinguishable from any number of similar “death wails” from around the world sung by ancient Romans, indigenous Americans, and Spanish plañideras—all usually women. They also reduce a group of women into a symbol, silencing them by glorifying them. The keen was the rare poetic tradition dominated by women, and moreover uneducated, peasant women, who could earn the respect typically reserved for wealthy, educated, male poets. They were free to express themselves—intellectually as well as emotionally—in a formalized poetic genre and receive compensation for their work. Celtic Revivalists may have intended to raise keeners to a higher status, but in fact they transformed them into inarticulate madwomen, utterly overpowered by their emotions.

The new mythology lends credence to the keeners’ denigration by ignoring the labor story central to their history. Professional keeners were no more emotional frauds or mere funerary ornament than priests. Keening is believed to have initially offered a spiritual service, “singing the soul into heaven.” It later had a more practical function: facilitating grief, rather than expressing it. One 1833 account in the Dublin Penny Journal describes a funeral procession in County Meath, in which some of the mourners “pointed themselves out as the professional keeners who assisted on the occasion.” At times these women were alone in their wail, but at others they were joined by mourners closer to the body and more obviously in real despair. It can be difficult to know how to feel and demonstrate grief, especially immediately after a death, when Irish wakes take place. It can be equally difficult to feel the freedom to do so. By having professional keeners at a wake and a funeral, these difficulties were eased. The conventions of keening, a solo recitative punctuated by group choruses, created the opportunity to honestly bare one’s pain without fear of shame. Those wailing may not have been grieving, but they didn’t need to be.

The simplest justification for professional keeners is that they were talented. Not everyone had the voice or improvisational aptitude for it. The job demanded tremendous linguistic and musical instincts. “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” was apparently composed extemporaneously (though subsequently edited) by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, grieving a husband executed for refusing to undersell his horse to a Protestant as was required by law. It is a masterpiece of the Irish oral tradition and demonstrates the possibilities of the form. The poet describes first her meeting and eloping with her husband, then her life with him, extols his virtues while acknowledging his faults, laments his loss (of course), and offers a political commentary on gender and gender relations under colonialism—all within forty stanzas of beautiful poetry. The skill necessary to improvise such a thing is remarkable. The best professional keeners did it regularly.

Church efforts to repress the keen arguably began as early as the ninth century, but by 1614 British colonizers and the increasingly Anglicized Catholic Church had begun to do so more actively and openly. In the seventeenth century keening was officially punishable by as much as excommunication, and priests were “strictly charged…to use all possible means to banish from Christian burials such anti-Christian practices,” which resulted in whippings and beatings of keeners. The reasons offered were varied and sometimes contradictory: in 1748 keening is contrary to the forbidding of “immoderate grief for the dead, as if they were not to rise again” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18), whereas in 1800 it shows not enough respect for the gravity of “so awful an occasion, where the real image of death lies,” as the Archbishop of Cashel, Dr. Thomas Bray, wrote in a pastoral letter. Sometimes keeners, especially professional ones, were criticized for inauthenticity and exaggeration, and at other times they were criticized as overly authentic, void of all self-control.

The true reason for the church’s opposition may not have had anything to do with abstract notions of the soul or authenticity at all. One of the greatest successes of the colonizing powers in Ireland was the banning of the Irish language. The keen, always in Irish, offered an opportunity for public dissent that the colonists could not understand. It also allowed women an unusual freedom of expression, which could be directed against men, and sometimes even against the men they were lamenting. The British and the Catholic Church knew it was politically unwise to allow any freedom to express resistance to a hegemonic power, whether it be colonial or patriarchal, so they banned it.

Ultimately, the ban’s aim was achieved: after centuries of proscription, punishment, and cultural derision, the keen died. It held out in strongholds through the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but by the middle of the twentieth century it was a memory, creeping further and further into the past. When the Irish Folklore Commission collected 740,000 pages of folk knowledge from 1937 to 1939, they enlisted schoolchildren to ask their family and neighbors about keening. Almost every response to the question was some variation of the words of a fifty-five-year-old farmer in County Mayo: “No keening carried on nowadays.” The keeners had been laughed and shamed away, they said. The myth, it seems, had destroyed what the church could not. Tourists had heard of a strange tradition they had to see: mad old women with wild black hair, bowing and spasming in a black cloak over a dead body, beating themselves, wailing an inarticulate song of the purest imaginable pain. Being seen thus, they stopped—stood up, stood still, and stood silent.