Keening the Dead Across: The Bean Chaointe and the Lost Art of Lament

On a May day in 1773, near Carriganimmy in Co. Cork, Art Ó Laoghaire was shot dead by soldiers after a quarrel with a magistrate over a horse. His mare came home riderless. His wife, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, leapt onto it and rode until she found him lying by a furze bush, and there, she later sang, she did not wait to wipe away his blood but drank it from her palms. The lament she made for him, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, is one of the great poems of the Irish language. It is also something rarer: a keen, the improvised lament of a woman over the dead, written down while the tradition that produced it was still alive.

The First Keen

The tradition says it began with Brigid. In The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, Bríg’s son Ruadán is sent to spy on the smith of the gods, wounds him and is killed in return. “Then Bríg came and keened for her son,” the text says. “At first she shrieked, in the end she wept. So that then for the first time weeping and shrieking were heard in Ireland.” The goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft is also the first mourner. The same passage credits her with inventing the whistle used for signalling at night. She gave the Irish a way to call across the dark, and a way to call across death.

How a Keen Was Made

The caoineadh belonged to the wake and the funeral. The body was laid out in the house, and the women gathered around it. One of them, the bean chaointe, the keening woman, led. She might be a relative with a gift for it, or a woman known in the district for her keening and paid in drink or money to come. She addressed the dead directly, in verse made up on the spot, in a chanting voice: who they were and who their people were, how they looked and what they did, how they had been loved, how they had been wronged, and how cruel it was of them to leave. Between her verses the whole company took up the gol, the cry, a long falling wail on ochón or ullagón, rocking over the body and clapping their hands. Then she began again. At the graveside the keen rose once more, and the cry went up as the coffin went down.

Scotland had its corranach, Wales its formal elegies, and Brittany its Ankou, the driver of death’s cart. But the keen as a public, improvised, communal art was most fully developed in Ireland, and it lasted there, in the remoter parishes, into the twentieth century.

The Work It Did

The keen did several things at once, and in shamanic terms all of them matter. It gave the dead a send-off: by naming their lineage and their deeds it placed them among the ancestors, and by reproaching them for leaving it acknowledged that they had gone. It gave grief a shape. The bereaved were not left to weep privately and politely; the whole community wept with them, loudly, in a form that had a beginning and an end. And it marked the boundary between the worlds. The wake was the threshold where the living and the dead were together for the last time, and the keen was the sound of that threshold being crossed.

The American teacher Jane Burns, who has written on the lost art of keening, names the keening woman as the one entrusted with the proper commissioning of souls to the spirit world: what core shamanism calls the psychopomp. Burns argues that the loss of such rites can disrupt the smooth passage of souls and keep the survivors from moving through their grief. Whether or not one accepts the first part, anyone who has stood at a modern funeral, where tears are apologised for and the coffin slides discreetly away, will recognise the second.

The Otherworld had its own keener. The bean sí, the banshee, cries before the deaths of members of certain old families. The folklorist Patricia Lysaght has shown how closely she mirrors the human keening woman: her cry and her long, loosened hair. The tradition imagined that the dead were keened from both sides.

Why It Was Lost

Church synods condemned keening from the seventeenth century onward as pagan, unseemly and unchristian, and priests drove keeners from graveyards. The Famine emptied the parishes where the art was strongest. The nineteenth century’s ideal of respectable grief, quiet and private, did the rest, and by the middle of the twentieth century keening survived only in a few places and in the memory of the old. Folklorists recorded a handful of keens before the last keeners died. Most of what we know comes from them, from descriptions by outsiders, and from the great written laments like Eibhlín Dubh’s.

We have no wish to revive it as a performance. A keen sung by a stranger for a stranger is a costume. But the needs it met have not gone away, and a circle that sits with its own dead can learn from its shape.

A Practice: A Keen for One Who Has Gone

This is for a circle, or a family, or two friends. It can be done at a wake, on the anniversary of a death, at Samhain, or whenever a grief needs a form. Choose one person to lead.

1. Gather. Sit close together around something that stands for the dead: a photograph, a garment, a candle. Make the room dim.
2. Name. The leader speaks to the dead directly, by name, in the second person. “Mary, daughter of Kate, granddaughter of Bridget, of the house by the river.”
3. Praise. Tell them who they were. How they laughed, what they made, what they were good at, what they did for you. Speak in short lines, as if chanting.
4. Reproach. The old keens scold the dead for leaving and the world for taking them. Say what you are angry about. It is allowed.
5. Cry. Between each part, everyone joins the gol: a long, falling sound on a single vowel, ochón, rocking forward and back. Let it be as loud as it needs to be. Let it stop when it stops.
6. Send. Tell them they are free to go. Tell them where: west over the sea, to the house of Donn, to their own people. Tell them they will be remembered. If you journey, this is the moment to accompany them to the threshold, and no further.
7. Silence. Sit without speaking until the room settles.
8. Feed the living. The wake was also a feast, with stories, games and laughter. Eat together. Tell the funny stories. Grief and merriment were never separate in the old house.

Eibhlín Dubh ended her lament by telling the women to stop their weeping until Art had his drink, before he went into the school, not the school of learning or of song but the school of the dead, where he would carry stones and clay. It is a strange, practical, tender ending: the keener, at the last, sends the dead on to their work. The cry is not only for us. It is also how they hear that it is time to go.