Gaelic - Tumblr Posts
Different braids
Scottish, Celtic, Viking, and Gaelic braids
Shield Maiden braids
Celtic Fringe
Warrior braids
Scottish dreads
Celtic knot braids
PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here.
there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.
@ganseylike #but on the other hand #no-one in scotland is going to specify that the gaelic they speak is 'SCOTTISH gaelic' yeah this is probably v true - I haven’t had the chance to get into this with a Scottish person yet, I just threw it in absentmindedly as Scottish people may be more likely to call it gaelic, particularly as they also have scots which is a seperate language? - scottish people feel free to come here and yell at me as this is just off the cuff thinking here - basically it’s more that scots gaelic is how we refer to scottish gaelic in ireland, but we don’t tend to use gaelic when we’re referring to our own language and it’s not a component of its title
mainly I just want to avoid the narrative dissonance which comes from reading something about an irish character and then being told that they are speaking gaelic, it’s just so jarring.
PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here.
there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.
lol this literally just appeared on my dash (via @arielmagicesi) - if it wasn’t already obvious because of the universal love of scottish twitter, the use of gaelic makes it super clear that this is from the land of alba rather than éire
PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here.
there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.
big m00d - maybe it has something to do with the prevalence of "irish" culture globally? i mean the majority of that is some kind of contemporary Stage Irish-ness™ & harking back to an imagined ireland that doesn't really exist, largely for the benefit of the admittedly massive irish diaspora & their descendents to try to connect their roots to (9-10 million people born in ireland have emigrated since the 1700s and we have a minister of state appointed to our diaspora) (i could also talk about how appropriating faux irish culture is used as an excuse for a drunken good time and further adds to the general simulacrum and muddying of how people view ireland/irish people, but that sounds tiring to me so i’m not gonna). I mean even as far back as like 1910, Desmond FitzGerald recalled visiting the Blaskets to learn Irish and observed the linguistic landscape in writing: “There in that Irish-speaking district one could, as it were, watch the progressive death of the language. Not only was there a difference between the language of these old men from pre-Famine days to that of the middle-aged men, but also between that of the middle-aged men and the younger generation. The old men spoke Irish all of the time, even when they went into Dingle; the middle-aged spoke Irish at home in the village, but Englsih when they went to town. And often even in Ballyferriter one would hear the younger men [only] speaking English together.” In 1910. Like the area he visited is still one of the most active Irish-speaking regions in the country but the effects of british colonisation weren’t entirely ceased with irish independence and the celtic revival movements that were entwined with it. The Blaskets haven’t even had any permanent residents since 1953, there’s no one even there to speak that variation of the language anymore. The thing about living in a postcolonial country is that you’re still living in the detonation site of a cultural bomb, the effect of which “is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their untiy, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves... It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people’s languages rather than their own.” [Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), 3] We were colonised by the English for 800 years and live in a post-colonial world in which English is the third most spoken language. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) - and as Irish has been strangled and smothered progressively over centuries, as barely anyone in the country learns it as a first language, as it’s dying and misrepresented and misunderstood, there’s understandably a sense that there are more practical languages to learn to expand the limits of the world. Even Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator himself, viewed “the old language [as] a barrier to modern progress.” I mean, in an ideal world, reviving our language, which has shaped the hiberno-english we speak and is a part of our heritage, would be more of a priority for us as deconstruction of the limits imposed within our identities by colonialism. But like I’m saying this as an Irish person who has barely any Irish, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(woops i wrote a lot)
tl;dr Irish is Irish, not Gaelic, and also very few of us can even speak it, so having Irish characters start philosophising romantically as Gaelige to impress the people around them usually comes across as completely and utterly ridiculous and drenched in cringe
PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here.
there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.
@litelatin replied to your post “Anonymous asked: I'm French and Irish living in the US and my Irish grandfather...” what kind of headcannons?
As in what irish hcs bother me in this respect as an irish person? EDIT: this got kind of long, but if you’re interested in learning about what “Irish” elements in hcs/writing/etc. can come across badly to an Irish reader or interrupt suspension of disbelief, see below the cut for some points I came up with off the top of my head - this is written thinking about Ronan Lynch/TRC but also includes some of my general musings. I’m happy to consult with anyone who wants help with this!
I mean some general ones that I’ve already posted about are people referring to Irish as Gaelic (check the replies for further discourse) and having Irish people all be fluent and profound with the Irish language without any explanation how or the importance of this to their identity, which shows a complete ignorance of the whole post-colonial situation the language is in, or people using the term bagpipes to refer to Irish instruments which doesn’t sound right to us at all. You do have this in trc itself but I believe this is because the pov of that chapter isn’t lynch and it’s in-character ignorance of this. a helpful anon has let me know that maggie does seem aware of the terminology on her blog so at least there’s that. But also stuff like @arbores--loqui--latine’s post on st patrick’s day about how kilts are also Scottish and not Irish generally. This post gave me life tbh. Generally, I find the idea of Ronan acting anything other than livid about American interpretations of st patrick’s day don’t really work for me? Firstly, because of who he is as a person. Secondly, he’s second generation and the son of someone who was born in the North and I don’t think he would have been raised to think that pinching someone for not wearing green is a thing (it’s not in Ireland anyway) or as someone tied to a magical dream forrest he’d support dying rivers green or that Niall wouldn’t have been one to take part in our national past time of judging people for referring to it as st patty’s (it’s st patrick’s day or paddy’s day or nothing at all). Like I’m fine with Ronan ironically opting for a “kiss me I’m irish” line he fully knows is terrible, but idk, I think an interesting complexity can be found in his character as being so close to his irish heritage as an irish american? like i find that balance more compelling personally Other things are like pretty much anytime anyone writes irish!ronan - as in a ronan who is meant to be 100% born and raised in ireland - they do this terrible unnatural hokey dialect or speech pattern for him and his character becomes some mystical caricature and i cannot go any further without combusting with embarrassment.
(generally there’s an obvious lack of awareness of irish history touched upon with this almost every time, with weird things coming out of comments people make offhand that just completely ruin all suspension of disbelief for me)
really odd stuff can come out of this too like weird wedding traditions that are in no way common or accounts of life in ireland as though the emerald isle is some magical/ahistorical realm out of Man of Aron that are again drenched in a long history of stage irishness and paddywhackery most foul.
i do often enjoy hcs and fics that draw on irish fairy lore, but if literally any single person ignorantly includes a leprechaun i will break out in hives - the contemporary version of a leprechaun which everyone is familiar with is a derogatory xenophobic stereotype based entirely on 19th century british colonial cartoons making fun of the primitive irish. they aren’t funny. stop. if you’re gonna use them, please confront their history when you do. if you mention them generally, be aware of their historical context. it’s bad and cringey enough they’re used in ireland as a fun gimmick for tourists. we don’t even have lucky charms in ireland and they make our blood boil fyi. there’s obvz a lot of stuff out there about alcohol and ireland which is Not Great and ill-informed and perpetuated without question? which unfortunately trc is kind of set up to allow for. i mean i do find harry potter much worse for this, but seamus finnegan is at least a side character, so there’s less major fandom posting perpetuating these problems without question. (also see the context of the st patrick’s day discourse above - like it’s a bit ew that our national holiday is celebrated by perpetuating a massive irish stereotype/social issue? idk)
also there’s some stuff out there about ireland and religion which is sort of quite dated or over-simplified? i don’t have the energy to go into this right now but that’s just a general topic that can raise my eyebrow
wow this is really long lol sorry - there’s just a lot that i generally ignore because it just makes no sense and this is some of it. tbh a lot of it is this intangible mysticism of “irish” characters as mentioned above, like i can’t give firm examples, it’s just inherent stuff in how characters are positioned/viewed/etc. I know that it generally is coming from a “good” place but a lot of it is rooted in really bad history and people just don’t know about it so that’s a shame.
Like this is all 100% off the top of my head also. Again: If anyone wants me to read over their use of irish culture or characters, I would be happy to give feedback! I don’t want to discourage people from honestly engaging with these things, I just want to encourage more people to do a quick google before including something or actually checking with an irish person first, because a lot of this stuff actually reads like people have tried to look up irish traditions and completely missed the reality of what they’ve found or were led astray by the quantity of nonsense out there. Does that answer your question? Any other Irish fans with anything to add?
Ed Sheeran - The Parting Glass (Studio Version) + lyrics
This is a beautiful & eerie song. 🎶☘️🍀
Rose Betts - Take This Body Home (Lyric Video)
Rose Betts voice is Sunday morning angelic.
What it feels like to only know one phrase in 1 of your native languages:
(irish is so confusing istg😬😬😬😭😭😭)
When you get this respond with five things you love! Then send this same message to the last 10 people in your notifications anonymously, never know who could need some positivity atm! 🖤🖤🖤
I love…..
Ocean/Water sciences
fantasy (especially if it relates to the ocean in some way)
My family and friends
Learning about Gaelic culture and language
And lastly…… I love the color Blue
https://download-music.wixmp.com/smusic/76e23d_b0d26f4ddcd9469690fc7c090dddce0b.mp3?token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9