The Language That Carries Us: Part One – Before the Word

The heART of Ritual
5 hours ago
7 min read

Oral tradition is fragile. Not because it lacks substance, but because it depends on closeness. It survives only where people remain in relationship – to one another, to place, and to those who came before them. Once that proximity is broken, once knowledge is lifted out of the hearth and placed at a distance, something essential thins. The words may remain, but the transmission weakens.

In Ireland, much of what is most vital has never been written down. It has lived instead in the mouth, the hands, the body, and the shared rhythms of daily life. These are not traditions that can be learned fully from books or courses, particularly when those accounts are produced outside the culture that carried them. They require presence and lineage. They require time spent within a community, listening and watching, absorbing not only what is said but how it is said, and when.

This is why oral tradition is so easily misunderstood. From the outside, it can appear informal, unstructured, even accidental. From within, it is exacting. It is held through repetition, familiarity, and trust. It is passed on quietly, often without announcement, through the doing of ordinary things. History here does not always announce itself as history. It is whispered around the hearth, carried in habits of movement, embedded in hand skills that were never separated from daily survival.

At its heart, oral tradition is not simply about preserving stories. It is about orientation. It answers, again and again, the most fundamental human questions – where am I, who am I among, what ground am I standing on, and how do I move through the world without losing myself.

In Ireland, this orientation was never confined to the spoken word. It lives in voice, certainly, but also in hands, feet, breath, rhythm, repetition, fibre, and form. Meaning travelled through the body as much as through the mouth. Long before literacy became synonymous with books, people here were already fluent in a language that exceeded speech.

In West Cork, where I am from, each valley once carried its own way of moving and sounding. Set dances were not interchangeable from place to place, nor were the tunes that accompanied them. A dance belonged to a valley in the same way a field or a boreen did. To know its steps was to know something of the life that had shaped them. To move correctly within its formations was to demonstrate a bodily understanding of place, labour, relationship, and timing.

These dances were not arbitrary. The figures, turns, crossings, and circles spoke of everyday life – of working together, of separation and return, of communal labour and shared rhythm. Group formations mattered. Who faced whom, who crossed the set, who waited and who advanced all carried meaning that was immediately legible to those within the culture. The dance was a social language, spoken through movement rather than explanation.

The music written for these dances was inseparable from them. Tunes were composed for particular figures and step patterns, not as general accompaniment. When the dance and its music were held together, they formed a complete sentence. When separated, something essential was lost. The dancer might remain, and the tune might still be played, but without their shared ground they became fragments – like half a story told without its beginning.

When a set dance stops being danced in its place of origin, it is not simply a tradition that fades. A way of remembering disappears. The movements no longer carry the lives of those who shaped them. The valley loses a thread of continuity, and with it a means of recognising itself across generations.

In many valleys now, what threatens this knowledge is not indifference, but absence. Young people leave in search of work, education, and survival elsewhere, and those who remain are often the last carriers of dances and tunes that were once common knowledge. When the bodies that know the steps are gone, and the hands that know the music fall still, a valley can lose its memory in a single generation. This is not a theoretical concern for me. I was raised inside these traditions.

My family has always been deeply involved in Irish music, dance and culture, not as revival or performance, but as ordinary every day life. My father, who has taught set dancing for decades, recognised early that some of the dances of our own home valley, and the music written for them, were in danger of being lost simply because there were so few young people left to carry them.

In response, he undertook the careful work of recording these dances and their accompanying music in full detail, documenting formations, figures, steps, and tunes audiovisually for the Irish Folklore Archive. This was done not to fix them in time, but to ensure that they would remain accessible to future generations should the living chain of transmission be broken. Over the years, he has been involved in recording set dances and music from other West Cork valleys as well, acting as a bridge between what is still alive and what might otherwise disappear without trace.

This is how oral tradition survives when circumstances change. It adapts without surrendering its integrity. Documentation, when undertaken from within the culture and in service to it, becomes a form of guardianship rather than extraction. It does not replace living transmission, but it can hold a place for it until people are able to return.

The same intelligence lives in craft. Knitting, weaving, basketry, needlework – these were not decorative skills, nor were they hobbies undertaken in spare time. They were communicative acts. The hands spoke when speech was insufficient, unsafe, or unnecessary. Wool, reed, flax, and thread became carriers of information that endured far longer than flesh.

Along the Irish coast, knitted garments such as socks, jumpers, hats, and scarves were worked by hand within families and communities whose lives were shaped by the sea. Each knitter developed recognisable ways of handling pattern, tension, and form, working within shared regional styles while leaving a personal signature in the making. These were not formal codes or fixed systems, but lived languages of the hands, legible to those who knew how to read them.

Wool, especially the dense, lanolin-rich wool traditionally used in such garments, endures differently from the human body. In cold, wet, and waterlogged conditions it decomposes slowly, often remaining intact long after soft tissue has returned to the sea. In those circumstances, it was the garment that spoke – not through abstraction, but through recognition. A familiar arrangement of pattern, the shaping of a sock, the particular handling of a motif could tell a family what the sea itself would not. The wool held long enough to be read and identify the person who died at sea as belonging to a certain family.

The Aran Islands have become the most widely known expression of this tradition, but they were never its sole source. Similar practices existed along seafaring communities throughout the Irish coast, shaped by necessity, climate, and inheritance rather than by uniform design. What endured was not a single pattern, but a literacy – an ability to recognise meaning carried through fibre and repetition, passed from mouth to mouth, hand to hand, and generation to generation.

This question of nuance matters deeply where archetypes, elements, and seasonal understanding are concerned. In Irish tradition, these are not abstract ideas to be learned about, nor symbolic frameworks to be applied. They are lived relationships, known through timing, restraint, repetition, and daily practice. To understand them requires proximity – not only to texts, but to land, weather, labour, and community over time.

When these traditions are encountered only through theory, or through interpretations formed outside the culture that carried them, something essential is missed. The broad outlines may remain, but the subtleties that give them life are lost. It is those subtleties – the pauses, the silences, the gestures, the things that are not said or done – that make up the greater part of the tradition. Without them, archetypes flatten, elements become concepts, and what was once relational turns abstract.

In Irish seasonal understanding, spring corresponds with the element of Air. Not air as abstraction, but air as breath, transmission, movement, and connection. Air governs speech and song, but it also governs the subtler forms of communication that move between bodies without words – rhythm, gesture, pattern, and communal motion.

Non-verbal communication is rarely discussed with seriousness, yet it has always been central to human survival. Before people could write, they danced. Before they could record history, they stitched it. Before they could explain themselves, they learned how to move together in time. Language did not begin in the mouth. It began in the body, in breath and rhythm, in shared labour and repeated gesture, with the hands.

What we are witnessing now is not simply a shift in aesthetics or economics, but a profound change in how meaning is valued. Mass-produced objects replace work that once carried local knowledge, seasonal awareness, and personal presence. When making is separated from place, and knowledge, culture becomes sterile. Forms repeat without memory. Objects arrive without story. The ground beneath them goes silent.

To support local makers, dancers, musicians, and craftspeople is not an act of nostalgia. It is an act of cultural continuity. It allows knowledge to pass forward rather than being archived as artefact. It keeps languages that do not rely on words alive in the hands and bodies of the next generation.

All of this belongs to language before it is spoken. To the phase where meaning moves through bodies, hands, rhythm, and repetition, orienting a people long before a word is formed. It teaches how to listen, how to recognise, how to belong.

Speech and song arise from this ground. But before they do, there is this quieter season of learning how to read what has never needed to be said.

Read Part 2 here.

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