Singing the Soul Home: Keening, Wake, and the Old Irish Lament

In the hush between life and death, the Irish keening tradition once rang out with an untamed cry. A sound that split the air, carrying grief into the marrow of those who heard it, and carrying the soul of the departed into the unseen. Keening was not mere weeping. It was ritual, fierce in its necessity, a cry that acknowledged death’s arrival and accompanied the journey beyond.

Caoineadh, from caoin meaning to weep or lament, was both song and wail, both word and wordless cry. At its heart lay a rhythm of invocation, praise, remembrance and raw sorrow. Sometimes the keen would speak of the person’s lineage, deeds, and character. Sometimes it dissolved into a sound beyond language, a cry carried by breath and body alone.

Patricia Lysaght reminds us that “the caoineadh was a highly structured art form, though outwardly it may have seemed spontaneous. It drew upon memory, tradition, and the immediate grief of the moment.” This balance between form and release made it both art and necessity.

The Wake and Its Many Faces

Death in Ireland did not belong to silence. The wake was communal, full of ritual and contradiction. There were women keening by the bed or at the threshold, invoking grief and guiding the soul. There were men overseeing games, feats of strength, storytelling and laughter. The living did not gather only to mourn. They gathered to honour, to remember, to eat, to drink, to joke, to balance sorrow with vitality.

In some wakes, merrymaking was strong - riddles, songs, pranks, wagers. In others, especially when a life was cut short, gaiety gave way to raw lament. Always there was food, tobacco, candles, stories. The wake stretched through the night, binding community together in the face of absence.

As Seán Ó Súilleabháin observed, “Without the caoineadh, the wake was not complete, and its absence was noticed. It was considered a necessary part of the passage of the soul.”

Women and the Threshold

The work of keening fell to women. The bean chaointe, the keening woman, held her place at the edge between worlds. Her voice was not ornamental but essential, believed to help the soul cross over. Alongside her was the bean bhán, the white woman, who washed and laid out the body, tended the candles, and guarded the corpse. These roles, taboo for others, were seen as part of women’s covenant with death.

Men too held roles in the wake. The borekeen, or wake master, presided over the games, storytelling and merriment that counterbalanced the lament. Together these roles formed a whole cosmology of death ritual - grief and release, silence and noise, remembrance and resilience.

There was also risk. In folk belief, a keener who neglected her duty might become a bean sí - a banshee - condemned to wander as an eternal wailer. Here the mortal lamenter and the otherworldly figure blur.

Otherworld Echoes

The banshee, long feared and revered, is the shadow twin of the keener. She is heard before a death, crying on the night wind, hair dishevelled, voice piercing. In parts of the country she was also called The Bow - a spirit of air whose cries hovered over the fields. Patricia Lysaght traced Bow back to Badb, the death goddess of battlefields and ravens, noting that the banshee “manifests herself aurally or visually, attached to families, and her cry may be a mournful keening or a frightening animal sound.”

Folklore often locates these cries near liminal landscapes - rivers, fords, waterfalls, raths, and hollow places in the hills. The keen and the banshee’s wail are carried by the same winds, stitched into the topography of the island.

The human keen and the fairy keen intertwine. Both pierce the veil. Both cry for the threshold. Both remind us that grief is never private alone but woven into the wider fabric of land and kin.

Mythic Time and Continuity

Keening does not only belong to folk memory. Echoes of lament are found in the myth cycles themselves - the cries of the Morrígan on the battlefield, the wailing of Deirdre in the Ulster tales, the lament of Emer at the death of Cú Chulainn. These voices in myth form a deep continuity, showing that Ireland’s stories have long carried grief as sound.

Keening as Water Ritual

At its deepest root, keening is a water ritual. The body itself is the vessel. Tears rise like springs from the hidden aquifers of the heart, breaking the surface of the eyes and running down the face in salt streams. They are kin to the ocean, carrying the same salt that fills the tides. In keening, the body becomes river mouth, releasing what has gathered unseen.

The emotional body, like the land, suffers when its waters are dammed. Grief held in silence stagnates - it hardens into stone in the chest, or swamps the inner ground. The keen opens the sluice gates. It gives voice to waters that must move, allowing sadness, sorrow, even rage or melancholy, to pour out. In this release the body softens, the spirit is lightened, the community is cleansed.

Breandán Ó Madagáin described this dual movement clearly: “The lament honoured the dead and eased the grief of the living.” It was never only about the one who had died. It was also medicine for those left behind.

Keening also carried a communal psychology. When the voice of the keener rose, others wept with her. The grief of the bereaved was not borne alone but was shared, spread out across the whole company. Each person felt the vibration in their chest, the shiver along their arms, the resonance in the air. In this way, the keen became a collective act of carrying, ensuring no one was left isolated in their sorrow.

The soundscape itself was elemental. The cries rose and fell, names of the dead called again and again, words like ochón and mo chroí woven into the lament. It was as much rhythm and breath as language - a tide of sound that surged and ebbed, breaking open silence.

This is not unique to Ireland. Across the world, indigenous traditions understood that grief needs sound and water. Among Aboriginal peoples of Australia, ritual death wailing calls tears forth in chorus. In parts of Africa, mourners cry in rhythmic ululation, voices like rivers rising together. In the Americas, grief songs are sung into the night as offerings of release. The Irish keen belongs to this wider human knowing - that the body must cry out, must flow, if sorrow is to be borne.

Psychologically, keening prevents grief from being locked away where it corrodes unseen. Energetically, it restores the river’s current. It is not only the dead who are accompanied by the keen - the living too are returned to flow.

Keening also worked through the body’s wisdom - the chest heaving, the diaphragm contracting, the breath breaking into sob, the heartbeat pounding. The whole body was involved, making lament not only an emotional act but an embodied ritual.

Seasonal Context and Cosmological Thresholds

Keening also belonged to the wider rhythms of the year. At Samhain, when the dead were remembered and the veil thinned, cries of lament were said to echo more strongly. To keen at such times was to join the voices of the ancestors, to acknowledge death not as an interruption but as part of the seasonal cycle of return.

Thresholds mattered. Cries were heard at dusk, at crossroads, in hollow places. Keening was not only personal grief but also cosmological practice, part of Ireland’s elemental calendar of thresholds.

Lineage and Memory

Keening was not only an act of grief. It was also an act of remembrance, of keeping story alive. Names were spoken, deeds recounted, kinship lines traced. In an oral culture, the keen carried memory forward at the moment of death. It was both farewell and archive, ensuring that the life just ended did not dissolve into silence.

Regional Variation

Though widely practised, keening was not uniform. In Donegal, laments carried a particular musical shape, while in West Cork, Kerry, Clare, West Galway and Mayo, they held other contours and cadences. Each region had its own style and phrasing, yet all shared the same urgency - to cry the soul home and to unbind the grief of the living.

Suppression and Decline

By the late nineteenth century keening was already fading. The church condemned it as pagan, unruly, indecorous. Its wildness, its female voice, its refusal to be contained within prayer books or polite silence - all unsettled clerical authority. At the same time, centuries of English colonisation had steadily undermined indigenous culture across the island. Rituals such as keening, along with music, language, dance, foodways, sport, art and land based spiritual practice, were all pressed into silence or branded as uncivilised. To appear modern and respectable meant conforming to English standards, and much of what was native was pushed into the margins. Suppression did not always erase these practices, but it forced them into smaller and more private spaces, eroding their visibility while memory carried them quietly on.

Keeners themselves were sometimes mocked, shamed, excluded from burials. Stories tell of women who, silenced in life, withdrew to shadow. Yet in rural places the tradition endured into the twentieth century, carried by memory and persistence. To lament was not only grief but quiet resistance, a way of keeping culture alive when all around was pressure to fall silent.

Fragments and Revivals

What remains today are fragments - archival recordings, transcriptions, stories in the folklore collections, echoes in song and literature. Scholars such as Patricia Lysaght and Breandán Ó Madagáin have traced its patterns, noting both the poetic structure and the spontaneous cry.

From the National Folklore Collection, one account recalls: “At every wake long ago there used to be keeners. They used to cry over the corpse and say prayers. The whole company used to cry along with them.”

Another surviving lament, sung by Kitty Gallagher of Gaoth Dobhair, begins:

S’airiú … Agus a leanbh … Cad a dhéanfaidh mé? / Tá tú ar shiúl uaim … Agus mé liom féin …Oh, my child, what will I do? You are gone from me … and I am left alone …

In recent years, a quiet revival has begun - not a return to the full tradition but an honouring. In ritual spaces, laments are being sung again. Not polished performance but raw voice, wordless grief, communal wailing. In these cries the old current stirs once more. Keening has also re-emerged in contemporary art, sean-nós song, and poetry, as well as in community grief rituals, where the elemental wisdom of lament is finding relevance again.

Ritual and Re-enactment Today

To bring keening into contemporary ritual is to tread carefully. It asks reverence for lineage, acknowledgement of the cultural ground from which it came. It is not a song to be borrowed for ornament. But there are ways to honour it.

One might gather a circle in silence, then let the voice rise - no words at first, only sound. Others join, and grief becomes a shared river. One might walk at dusk, offering lament to land and ancestors, keening not only for human dead but for forests cut down, waters poisoned, species gone. Keening has always been about loss - but also about connection, a refusal to allow silence to close the wound.

Resources and Further Reading

For those who wish to walk deeper:

• Patricia Lysaght - Caoineadh os Cionn Coirp: The Lament for the Dead in Ireland

• Patricia Lysaght - The Banshee: The Irish Death Messenger

• Breandán Ó Madagáin - writings on Irish lament and song

• Seán Ó Súilleabháin - Irish Wake Amusements

• Kevin Danaher - In Ireland Long Ago

• National Folklore Collection - dúchas.ie

Closing

To keen is to speak death aloud, to let grief take voice and form, to guide the soul into the dark and to remind the living of their own impermanence. It is elemental - breath, bone, air, wind - but most of all water. The tears, the salt, the current through the throat, the body as river mouth. Earth is present too - the body returned to soil. Fire in the vigil candles. Air in the breath that carries sound. Keening belongs to the whole elemental field, yet water remains its deepest root.

Though diminished, the tradition has not vanished. Despite centuries of suppression and the long shadow of colonisation, its echoes remain in the land, in folklore, in the throat that cannot keep silent when grief arrives. To keen is to open the sluice gates of the heart - to let the waters move, to cleanse, to carry, to return us to flow. In this way the soul is accompanied home, and the living too are restored. And still, in art, ritual, and the courage of human voices, keening continues to find its way back into the world.

© 2025 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved. Original artwork by Niamh Criostail (2021).

Note on the above ritual inkwork:

A fox pelvis carried from the river to the Solstice fire, transformed into bone black ink – a carbon-rich fluid marking the dark face of the moon. Opposite, the light face bears iron ink – drawn from rusted scraps once gathered in my father’s yard.

Bone to dust – Metal to rust.

This piece holds the Equinox secret – fluidity, flow, release, transformation. It is both ritual and meditation – Autumn Equinox and watery full moon aligned in one gesture of balance.