Liz Warren | Storyteller

                                                                                                                
                         “Stories are everywhere – they fall from the trees.” So we learned from Niall De Búrca, the second of our Three Rivers Storytelling Festival tellers. His exuberant, boisterous passionate, kinetic style of telling dazzled the students in my class. He started off with one of his signature stories; he called it his “flagship” story, “How the English Language Came to Be.”

Niall was raised in Galway, but his “bones” – his ancestors – come from County Mayo. I was delighted with the way that he consistently reinforced something that I want the students to understand: the connection between story, place, and family. All of his stories were connected to a particular place or to places in the Irish landscape. More than once he leapt to the map at the back of the room to show us just exactly where the story took place, or which family names were associated with which region of the country.

             He told us that it was the responsibility of the storyteller to “know the landscape, know the peoples of the landscape, and to know the stories of the people.” He talked about the huge social changes that were taking place in Ireland as the “new Irish” came with their talents, traditions and stories. He is committed to insuring that children are connected to traditional knowledge.

             His second story was “The Origin of the River Shannon.” He based his version on that of Douglas Hyde. He told us that folklore was so important to the Irish that their first president, Mr. Hyde, was a folklorist. The previous week Nuala Hayes had told one of the library audiences a very different version of the story. I wished my students had been able to hear both versions. It would have been a great teaching moment on the variety of stories in the tradition and what happens to them in the hands of different storytellers.

              One of my favorites of the day was a story about a woman he met in a nursing home in New Zealand. She asked him if he liked to sing, and when he said he did, they sang “Johnson’s Motor Car,” (click here for the lyrics) which is a song from the rebellion. In brief, Doctor Johnson’s car is appropriated by the rebels to transport guns and soldiers. After the war, he and his family emigrate to New Zealand. We end up learning that the old woman was his daughter. It was a great example of how to integrate history, music, and tradition into a story that can link them all together.

He ended his session with us by telling a long ghost story about Bearchan, one of the four wise men of Ireland. As he had throughout the session, he made the students jump with sudden changes in volume and intensity. They loved it every time.

Niall said that the storyteller’s primary tasks were to tell from the tradition, to add to the tradition, and most importantly to enjoy the process. He embodied all three. He told us traditional stories in modern accessible language and there was absolutely no doubt that he was enjoying himself. He incorporated some Irish when he was telling to my students, but later in the afternoon he was telling to the students from the Gael school he often told bilingually.

             Niall’s style is to embody his stories. He tells them with great physicality, and with every muscle of his body – especially those in his face. He incorporates accents from all over Ireland into his stories as well. We, with our inexperienced ears, could perceive the differences but not really understand their referents. The children in the afternoon, however, knew them well and it was clear that it deepened their enjoyment of the stories. To my class he had explained that the accents and facial expressions were all part of “setting hooks” to pull people into the story.

After his session with my students we grabbed lunch at the Londis and rushed down to the Aidan Heavey Library in Athlone. We had tea with Gearoid O’Brien and then Niall did his first session. We squeezed another cup of tea in before his second session. By 2:30 he was back on the road to a recording studio in Dublin where he was working on a recording of stories told by children.

One of the last things he told my students was that stories are “press-ups” for the imagination. He credited the Kerry writer Brian McMahon with saying that as food is to the body, and church is to the spirit, stories are to the imagination. I hope they remember that.