Fishing for a living is at best an uncertain enterprise, and can frequently, suddenly, and unpredictably become a dangerous one. Neither years of learned experience nor the advances of marine science can fully predict the behavior of fish, or ensure that the considerable financial and human risks involved in fishing will be rewarded or even overcome. Fishing, particularly in open water, is done at the boundary of two very different worlds—inhabitants of the land seek creatures of the water—and those who live in either of these worlds cannot survive in the other. This place of intersection between the lack of sufficient knowledge to assure success and safety, and the critical importance of such knowledge, is prime territory for the creation and use of folk practices to help remedy this lack.
Bairbre Ní Fhloinn’s Cold Iron: Aspects of the Occupational Lore of Irish Fishermen is a thoughtful and comprehensive survey of one body of belief-based folk practice shared among fishermen in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland) that helps to offset some of the risk of this work: the prohibitions against fishermen using certain powerful or inappropriate words that are believed on the basis of oral and experiential evidence to bring bad luck, and the euphemisms (such as “cold iron,” which is one of the most widespread of such terms) for those words that fishermen use as safer, or at least more neutral, substitutes.
Cold Iron is a work many years in the making, and benefits from the extended attention and reflection Ní Fhloinn has devoted to her subject over time, including diligent work to identify useful sources. These include a substantial body of written work produced over several centuries on the culture and work of fishing and documenting word-avoidance practices by fishermen in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the European and Nordic North Atlantic, and—to a lesser extent—North America; a number of archival sources, primarily focused on Irish tradition; and years of her own ethnographic work among Irish and UK fishermen.
The first two-thirds of the book comprises a thorough inventory of the varieties of language avoidance practiced by Irish fishermen, along with frequent geographic and historical reference to and comparison with expressions of this tradition in the other regions just mentioned. This section contains many transcriptions from field recordings; when the narratives were told in Irish Ní Fhloinn provides both Irish and English texts.
The major categories of words Irish fishermen avoid speaking are those related to land animals, particularly the fox, pig, and rabbit; those related to particular categories of humans, particularly members of the clergy and women, and especially red-haired women; and those related to land and the affairs of humans on land, including the names of landforms, words related to the colors or names red or brown, knives, and human disagreements and conflicts. The euphemisms that replace prohibited terms tend toward slightly more complex circumlocutions (“the bushy-tailed one” for a fox, “four-legger” for any prohibited land animal, or “cold iron,” used in a number of situations). Ní Fhloinn devotes considerable attention to the large body of prohibitions against directly naming things that are red (rua in Irish), or more precisely red-brown: animals such as the fox, and red-brown haired women and men.
The final one-third of the book delivers several analyses of this body of practice. Ní Fhloinn evidences, through text, maps, tables, and graphs, the frequency with which particular groups of words are avoided and euphemisms employed, several dimensions of the demographics (e.g., full time vs. part time fishermen, inland vs. open water fishing) of sources in the ethnographic corpus, and the geographic spread of particular alternative wordings. She also attends to the variety of degrees of belief and practice among those fishermen she interviewed.
Finally, she concludes, along the lines of much of the research into the social basis of tradition, that the purposes of such a body of traditional practice can more productively be identified by looking at its pragmatic function within the occupation and its power to create occupational identity. In other words, mastering this system of prohibition and euphemism builds skill and interpersonal utility at sea in young fishermen, and the mental alertness that system requires focuses the attention on the work at hand, leads to safe practice, and is both cause and effect of shared social identity among fishermen, from crew to crew, from place to place, and across the occupation.
Three appendices (outlining primary sources, reproducing the 1979 field questionnaire on fishing issued by the Department of Irish Folklore at University College Dublin, and listing euphemistic terms used in Shetland and in the European North Atlantic), an extensive bibliography, and an index conclude the volume.
Cold Iron is a fine focused study of a particular body of occupational tradition. Its extended attention to the historical record of the tradition—including works by local clergy and gentry as well as scholars—and to past archival and current ethnographic sources, provides us with a valuable mapping of the universe of this tradition in Ireland and across the European North Atlantic. I would also note that this thoroughness makes it old-fashioned in the best way. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of Irish folklore, occupational culture, folk belief and practice, and European North Atlantic maritime life.
--------
[Review length: 877 words • Review posted on March 28, 2019]