T U R B U L E N T WAT E R THE IRISH SEA IN CULTURE During the academic year 2018–19, Claire Connolly, Professor of Modern English at University College Cork, held the Parnell Fellowship at Magdalene College. She delivered the 2019 Parnell Lecture in Irish Studies in the Sir Humphrey Cripps Theatre on 25 February. The following is an abridged version of her lecture. There is hardly any need for me to tell Cambridge graduates about the death and burial of Oliver Cromwell. Readers may not, though, be familiar with the accounts given in Irish folklore of his burial at sea. In the late 1930s, as part of a national project run by the Irish Folklore Commission, a school-girl named Annie Morgan of Coaghill, Williamstown, County Galway, heard from John Gaffey, a forty-oneyear-old farmer, that ‘when Cromwell died the earth refused to take him. Three times and each time the corpse was found near the grave. At last the people decided to throw him into the Irish Sea between England and Ireland. They did so and the part of the sea that Cromwell was thrown into, is rough the hottest day in Summer’.1 And in another story, recorded by Seán Ó Súilleabháin in his Folktales of Ireland: ‘Cromwell died in Ireland and was buried there, but the Irish soil rejected his body and the coffin was found on top of the grave each morning. Finally, it was thrown into the sea and sank down between Dublin and Holyhead, thereby causing that part of the Irish sea to be very turbulent ever since’.2
‘In the Penal Times’. The Schools’Collection, vol 0013, 098, Duchas. Ie https://www.duchas.ie/en/ cbes/4591091/4589775/4615416.
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2
Sean Ó Súilleabháin (ed), Folktales of Ireland (London, 1966), 283-4.
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