Fadó, fadó the ghost of Fergus Mac Róich rose from the grave to tell scholars the lost story of Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley), Caílte recounted the adventures of the Fianna to St Patrick, and young girls gathered around the fire in West Cork to hear their friend tell the story of Séadna and his deal with the devil. Storytelling is an intrinsic part of Gaelic cultural history. From the great medieval saga Táin Bó Cúailnge and the fusing of Christian and pagan in Acallam na Sénorach (The Colloquy of the Ancients) to cautionary folk tales and storytelling in contemporary Gaeltacht areas, such as those collected in the twentieth century by the Irish Folklore Commission, tales affected – and continue to affect – all levels of society. But stories are not static; they are transmitted, and they evolve. Within Gaelic-speaking areas, continuous strands of storytelling can be traced from the medieval period up to the modern day. In his Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland, Proinsias Mac Cana suggested that one of the consequences of the collapse of the Gaelic aristocracy ‘was that the inherited cultural forms – or such of them as remained viable in these grievously changed conditions – became the recreation and the responsibility of the people at large’. Although the social status of storytellers declined after the collapse of literary patronage, the dynamism and cultural relevance of storytelling persisted and became the artform familiar today.

However, despite over a thousand years of documented storytelling, the study of side-by-side medieval and modern storytelling in Gaelic as a continuous tradition has not been sufficiently addressed in scholarship.