1
Dicky Ned was eighty-six when he died at the Glen on May 24, 1910. His obituary in the Limerick Leader honored him as the “‘Grand Old Man’ of the Limerick Woulfes” and called attention to a letter he had dictated to Edmond Woulfe White a few days before his death. The note was addressed to Sister Teresa Woulfe, of the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans, on the occasion of her eighty-sixth birthday, and Dicky Ned praised her devotion to the church. He said it “makes me proud of our race and of our name,” before continuing:
Generations ago it was prophesied that there would be Woulfes in Limerick and in Kerry while the Shannon rolled into the Atlantic, and that more than an average number of them would devote their lives to the service of God. When I saw the inscription on your letter (for my vision, thank God, is still clear) I said that is the writing of a Woulfe, and when I read the letter it revived in my mind the memory of the prophecy mentioned, which was related to me in this house nearly eighty years ago by my poor father who survived my present age by three years and to the end retained his faculties undimmed and unclouded.
I’ve always pictured Dicky Ned as being a bit like Bull McCabe, a round, rough oak tree of a man, big enough to plunge his arm into the rush of a flooded stream and grab a drowning schoolgirl by the scruff of her neck. The one image I’ve seen, an etching of Dicky Ned and his wife, Kate, in front of the Glen, gives him a long beard and a fierce visage. They called him the “Book of Athea” for his voluminous knowledge of local lore — a learned Bull who spoke Irish fluently, recited long poems verbatim, and remembered the histories of all the West Limerick and North Kerry families.
Little is known of his life. There was the farm and the hedge school, a marriage and all the children, many of whom, of course, emigrated. But his obituary is typical of other sources in its general disinterest in mere vital statistics. What mattered most to the old Book, and what we must accept from him, are the stories. And in these the obituary overflows. His letter alone speaks of a prophecy that defines the Woulfe family by where it resides and what god it serves. You can identify members by nothing more than the scratch of their hand: “I said that is the writing of a Woulfe.”
According to a manuscript preserved by the Irish Folklore Commission, Dicky Ned was one of just three seanchaí in West Limerick at the turn of the century. The word is defined on the page in terms that are less than inspiring: “In 1903 these three old people could read and write Irish.” But it has always meant much more than that — a wise man, a keeper of histories and lore, a storyteller. When Father Pat Woulfe, who years later would have tea with the Book’s son the Commissioner, required information for a scholarly article about a prominent North Kerry family, he consulted Dicky Ned. In the resulting publication, which appeared in 1906, he even transcribed their interview word for word.
The Book always had plenty to say about the Woulfes. In his letter to Sister Teresa, he wrote that “I am the man, I think, now living that can from personal knowledge trace them back to the days of Cromwell.” Dicky Ned’s niece Dollie — who, it bears repeating, probably owes much if not all of her family history to the Book himself — goes back even further, dating the family to the Anglo-Norman invasion. The Woulfes weren’t even Irish then but French- and Saxon-speaking former Vikings who, a century earlier, had sailed across the channel from Normandy and conquered England. In the years since then, many families had congregated in Wales, where they had become powerful and restless enough to worry the king. When a deposed Irish chief whose wife had been kidnapped sought their help, the English king gave his blessing. Better these families raise havoc in Ireland than England.
The Woulfes, then, probably arrived with these Norman invaders in 1169 and may have taken their surname from Hugh d’Avranches, a gluttonous, warlike, and long-dead Anglo-Norman earl who was known, variously, as Hugh the Fat and Hugh the Wolf. By the time they landed in Ireland, however, the Woulfes seem to have associated themselves with the elderly lord Maurice FitzGerald, whose name literally meant “Maurice, son of Gerald,” and who had a number of sons, among them Gerald FitzMaurice and Maurice FitzMaurice.
These names, especially Maurice, show up again and again in the Woulfe family tree, while the FitzMaurice landholdings eventually became the earldom of Desmond in the province of Munster, an area that includes what is now Limerick and Kerry. The Woulfes, however, settled first a bit to the north, on a patch of land called Corbally, just east of Limerick city on the River Shannon. In Irish the place was called An Corrbhaile — the odd (or round or pointed or distinctive, depending on whom you ask) hill town. It was “a lovely place,” Dollie wrote the Commissioner in 1947. “How they got it is explained, I should think, by the simple explanation that they took it.”
Three centuries later, in 1476, a Thomas Woulfe was elevated to sheriff of Limerick, a rather prominent position. And a century after that, in 1582, another Woulfe appeared in the records, a Gerald Woulfe who died in fighting that came toward the end of the Desmond Rebellion, a series of armed uprisings against English rule in Munster that were led by Gerald FitzGerald. Almost two decades of violence finally ended with Gerald’s death in 1583, and it appears to have cost the family of that other Gerald, Gerald Woulfe, their land.
“She blasted us clean out of Corbally,” Dollie wrote, referring to Queen Elizabeth, “and scattered us here and there over the plain of Limerick — a few of us without heads.”
This marks just one of the many crossings, fords, translations, and exiles that have come to dominate the telling of Woulfe — and for that matter Irish and certainly Irish American — history. Hundreds of years later, when those dead ancestors waded the Galey at Áth an tSléibhe and paid night visits to the Glen, some of them likely had been born on the Continent, others in Britain, still others on the Odd Hill. They wore the clothes of soldiers, farmers, and merchants and spoke the tongues of Welshmen and Irishmen.
They were forever trailing west. From Corbally they trekked the fifteen or sixteen miles to Croagh and Rathkeale, which is where they seem to have been when Dicky Ned picks up the story, in 1641. That’s when a confederation of Irish Catholic gentry unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow English rule, leading to a bloodbath in which “numbers of the Woulfes were obliged to leave the rich plains of Limerick, and became scattered and separated never to meet again.” As the Book wrote to Sister Teresa, some fled to nearby County Clare, while others wandered farther south and west to Kerry.
Then, in 1649, Oliver Cromwell’s army showed up. The scourge that followed has been elegized by the Irish for more than three hundred and fifty years and included the leveling of Drogheda and the siege of Limerick, where — this is Dicky Ned again — “some were hanged, others shot in cold blood, for no greater crime than defending their country, and probably the ample possessions then held in Limerick and Tipperary.” We’ve already met Father James Woulfe, who exclaimed on the scaffold, “We are made a spectacle to God!”
That was in 1651, and the Woulfes were being pushed west yet again. Call it karma, but where the family had once taken Irish land, now the English took theirs. It’s indicative of almost five centuries of assimilation that they now even considered themselves Irish, or at least Old English (Sean-Ghaill), having fully adopted the language, manners, and sense of grievance characterized by the people they themselves had once terrorized. The so-called New English (Nua-Ghaill) had been imported by Elizabeth to plant the fields she had brutally conquered, and they brought with them the Reformation and a typically violent mistrust of priests. That the Woulfes kept the old faith was an important factor in their gradual Gaelicization.
One David Wolfe stands out in this respect. Born in Limerick, he studied under Ignatius Loyola and Francis Borgia before being dispatched, in 1560, as the official papal legate in Ireland. He traveled the country organizing Catholics and provoking an exasperated letter from Elizabeth to Pius IV that complained Father Wolfe existed only “to excite disaffection against her crown.” According to historians, the priest ended his days with his head still attached but his body and soul wrecked by a life on the run. According to Dicky Ned, whose very definition of a Woulfe included service to God, his only crime, and the only crime of those later Woulfes displaced by the hated Cromwell, “was their refusal to renounce the Faith as transmitted to mankind through the inspired Channels of Almighty God.”
Back to Cromwell. Like Elizabeth, he moved the Irish and Old English off their land in favor of the New, and subsequent, even newer, English, and he kept thorough records of the entire process. Many of these manuscripts were lost when the Record Office in the Four Courts, Dublin, burned during the Easter Rising of 1916. A few scraps survived, however, and one found its way into the Kerryman newspaper a dozen years later: an excerpt from Cromwell’s Book of Transplanters’ Certificates that documents the removal of a number of Woulfes, including another David:
Two servants came along, too, in addition to three cows and a pair of thin horses. Others followed: Thomas Woulfe, Richard Woulfe, and Anthony Woulfe on January 6 and another Thomas Woulfe a few weeks later. So the once-proud Norman family found itself exiled to the hills, woods, and streams of West Limerick and North Kerry — that deep end of the pool bounded by Listowel in the west, Athea in the east, and Abbeyfeale in the south.
It is here, wrote Dollie Woulfe, that “the curtain rises again on two brothers bearing the now recognised family names of Maurice and James who were living at a place called Inchreagh on the bank of the river Galey west of the village of Athea.” Their father, you almost could guess, was James Maurice, and as a young man he and his own brother had been busy ploughing under a hot day’s sun when they spied a man bounding across the field toward them. The runner disappeared over a fence, however, and only later did the brothers find him passed out in a dyke. Once revived, he identified himself as a messenger from Limerick to the lords of Kerry, the FitzMaurices. Limerick, he was shocked to report, had fallen to William of Orange.
This remarkable bit of Woulfe family oral history, handed down from generation to generation, puts the elder set of brothers near Athea in the year 1690, the same year that James Maurice’s son Maurice — Dicky Ned’s great grandfather — was born. Old Maurice is how he came to be known, and he eventually moved to the townland of Cratloe, just south of Athea, where he built a house for himself at the Glen. When he died, you’ll recall, he retained all but one of his thirty-two teeth.
2
The Book of Athea was every bit the seanchaí people claimed him to be. In fact, his obituary bragged that Father Pat Woulfe was “indebted” to him “for much of the information” in the scholar-priest’s famous work, Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall (Irish Names and Surnames). I admit to having wondered, perhaps a bit cynically, whether this was actually true, but in his scholarly article — the one in which he transcribed his conversation with Dicky Ned — the priest vouches for his octogenarian cousin as “a good authority on local history and traditions, and knows all about every family in Limerick and Kerry.” Father Pat, meanwhile, was an impressive authority in his own right. His slim but celebrated volume, published in 1923, lectures on naming practices throughout Irish history, noting, for instance, that Norman names tended toward the Frankish, and listing, in order of frequency, the most common. Maurice comes in at twenty-first, or about halfway down the list and just behind Baldwin, Herbert, and Martin. The book also collects surnames from across Ireland and provides their English and Irish Gaelic equivalents. For example, from page 54:
Father Pat often signed himself in Irish, Pádraig de Bhulbh, as too did Dicky Ned: Risteárd Éamonn de Bhulbh. (This last part is pronounced, roughly, “Wuluv.”) It’s a practice that took off with the new nationalism of the mid- to late nineteenth century, the idea being that only in their family’s native language could these men find their truest (and most patriotic) selves.
“The speech being Irish,” you’ll recall the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser having grumbled, “the heart must needs be Irish.” Thomas Davis, one of the legendary founders of the Young Ireland movement that my great-great grandfather John R. Wolfe may, or may not, have “helped to organize,” put it somewhat differently. “A people without a language of its own,” Davis wrote, “is only half a nation.” And elsewhere: “To lose your native tongue and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest — it is the chain on the soul.”
Of course, it’s worth asking an obvious question here: what constitutes one’s native tongue? As the son of a Welshman, Davis did not grow up speaking Irish himself and in his short life picked up only a little bit of it. The Woulfes likely spoke something akin to French when they first arrived, and seven centuries later John R. or Dicky Ned may or may not have been raised speaking Irish, although current scholarship suggests that Limerick and Kerry, at least until the Hunger, were bilingual. Father Pat learned his Irish in Rome. “I suppose you have heard I am very learned now in that grand old tongue,” he wrote his sister Johanna (Sister Bonaventure) from the Irish College in 1893. “I was going to write a letter in it to Aunt Ellie some time ago but I thought she was not book-learned enough in it to read it.”
Language and religion are fundamental to Woulfe history and identity. A fellow priest once wrote of Father Pat: “He believes in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church and the Irish language. He uses Irish for thinking, talking, praying, dreaming. He speaks English to you as a concession — because you are a foreigner; but if you can distinguish the difference between slán leat and táim go maith, he carries you along in Irish.”
It’s interesting, then, that only the church, and not the tongue, survived the transatlantic journey. Perhaps this had the effect of heightening the American family’s attachment to Catholicism over the generations. We are not simply Irish or Irish-American; we are Irish-Catholics. My grandfather’s first cousin, Father Thomas Wolfe, was the sort who would have made Dicky Ned proud. One of a great many priests and nuns in the family, he entered the seminary as a young man and during the Second World War served as chaplain of the XX Corps, in George C. Patton’s Third Army. In August 1944, he and his sergeant were among the first Americans to liberate Chartres cathedral. According to a newspaper report, Wolfe and his driver came under sniper fire on their approach to the church. “I could see no damage [to the cathedral] except [for] a few bullet marks,” Wolfe said. The story continued: “During the successful battle to drive out snipers, [Wolfe] related, two middle-aged French women remained alone at devotions before the altar of the Virgin Mary.”
“Love God and your fellow man, and serve both,” my dad scribbled in my baby book, back in 1972. “Remember the Sermon on the Mount.”
And yet somewhere along the line, during my childhood, Dad fell out with Holy Mother Church and, more immediately, with Father Martin, for whom I (Brendan Maaaaartin, as he liked to call me, rolling his r’s in a fake Irish accent) was named. We stopped attending Mass and I was never confirmed. When Dad died, he wanted his funeral to be stripped of all things religious. “I don’t care what you do in this regard,” he wrote in a letter to my sisters and me, “but try to make those attending show some degree of remorse over my passing, even if you need to pistol whip them. Also, try to make it a festive occasion, although those gathered will probably think that anyway! If I have any money lying around to finance it, make it a party.”
So we did. But it was no small thing that he had abandoned the Church just as he had the land: twice an exile. And he recoiled just as much from the Irish language.
“Do they speak much Irish over there?” he asked me when we were preparing for our visit to Ireland. “Is that all they speak? Will I be able to understand anything?” I reassured him that there were more native speakers of Navajo than Irish. I told him with some enthusiasm, though, about how the water-pipe caps on Dublin sidewalks are marked Uisce, for water, as in uisce beatha, or water of life, which is Irish for whiskey. After I pointed out the phonetic origins of “whiskey,” he snorted impatiently. So I explained that Irish was gasping and almost dead.
Only then did he relax.
Although the Iowa Wolfes rehearse a kind of determined monolingualism — our English is like a lot of Midwesterners’: flat, suggestive, a little indignant — I think we are haunted by the ghost of this long gone language. The Irish poet Eavan Boland writes:
When John R. Wolfe immigrated to Iowa, his fellow Irishmen were abandoning the Irish language wholesale. While a few radicals like Thomas Davis clung to those old consonants (or, more accurately, learned them anew), mothers were only speaking English to their sons and daughters. They were ashamed but convinced it was necessary. And maybe it was.
Now, only a few generations removed, Dad actually seemed afraid of the language. He was hostile toward it. Could it be a scab was being picked at that he didn’t even know was there?
The title of Boland’s poem is “Mise Éire,” and it means “My name is Ireland,” or, more literally, “I am Ireland.” It’s a simple enough concept. To say Mise Brendan is to say, in a manner of speaking, that I am my name, that it was no accident my parents named me for both a Dublin playwright who drank himself to death and a Catholic priest. Perhaps the hope, or at least the hedge, was that I’d split the difference. But to say Mise Éire is to go a step further and argue that Ireland is her language. “We exist in the element of language,” the Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday has written. And in “Mise Éire” Ireland exists by virtue of a language that is vanishing.
So what is hiding under all that scar tissue? What does my family no longer know about itself because at some point we stopped speaking Irish?
While in graduate school I drove several hours to a town in Wisconsin with a wonderfully dense Indian name — Oconomowoc — in order to study Irish for a weekend. Ghosts of missing languages were everywhere, as were elderly priests and fussy nuns who were gracious enough to host the event. They taught us call and response, a little elementary grammar, and even some sean nós, or old style, singing. The rest of the time we loitered around kegs donated by the Miller Brewing Company.
Driving home, new words popped and buzzed between my ears. I made all sorts of resolutions about how I was going to keep up with it on my own, only to promptly abandon them. My guilt was vague and sinking. Then I read this line in a magazine: “But there is a sharp difference between ethnic identity as something you claim and something that makes claims on you.”
You cannot wear your language like your drunk cousin wears a “Screw me, I’m Irish” pin on St. Patrick’s Day. You must wear it like your name — you must be it. Around that same time a friend sent me an essay titled, “Just Speak Your Language.” I’ve heard its story expressed several times before, the importance of knowing your ancestors’ language. How else will you be able to communicate with them in the afterlife?
“I know that Cheyenne is the only language they know, the only language they ever needed to know,” writes Richard Littlebear, a community college instructor in Montana. “And I hope when I meet them on the other side that they will understand me and accept me.”
It’s a beautiful story, one that suggests language is more than uisce beatha. It is the water of life and afterlife.
In aninm an Athar, in the name of the Father, agus a Mhic, agus an spioraid Naoimh …
3
In his play Translations (1980), Brian Friel also wonders what goes missing when a language changes. In 1833, a young Irish-speaking man named Owen returns to his village in the company of two British engineers who are part of the Ordnance Survey project charged with mapping the country. They must collect all of the place names and, if possible, translate them into English. These foreigners have no knowledge of the native tongue, however; they even misunderstand Owen’s name as Roland.
“Owen — Roland — what the hell?” Owen shrugs, not wanting to make a big deal of the situation. “It’s only a name. It’s the same me, isn’t it?”
That’s the question, of course. Some names contain within them whole narratives. Owen tells one of the engineers about a crossroads called Tobair Vree, a corruption of the Irish meaning “Brian’s Well.” You see, there once was an old man named Brian who, afflicted with a disfigured face, came to the well everyday to wash himself. Hoping the water might cure him, he found that instead it killed him. One morning Brian was found drowned in the well.
“And ever since that crossroads is known as Tobair Vree,” Owen explains, “even though that well has long since dried up. I know the story because my grandfather told it to me.”
The engineers decide to keep this particular name, but in other instances their changes and translations result in such stories disappearing. Bun na hAbhann, or mouth of the river, becomes Burnfoot, while Áth an tSléibhe, or ford of the mountain, became Athea.
What’s contained in a name?
Lost Nation … Brendan Martin … Dicky Ned … or Dicky Ned’s great grandson John Maurice Woulfe, who adopted the Irish version of his name, Seán Muiris de Bhulbh. An engineer himself, as it happens, de Bhulbh was a fluent Irish speaker and spent much of his life promoting the language. In the 1970s he served as cathaoirleach, or presiding officer, of the Limerick branch of Conradh na Gaelige (formerly the Gaelic League) — the same position Father Pat had held earlier in the century. The league’s work had been successful enough that by the 1960s and 1970s the Irish language was taught in national schools and passing the course was required to graduate. Nevertheless, skepticism of the language remained widespread. On March 17, 1962 — St. Patrick’s Day — the playwright John B. Keane (The Field) published a column in the Kerryman newspaper suggesting that other school subjects were more important than Irish. He even wondered whether the language wasn’t being coöpted for social and political advancement. “People whose names are written in English on Baptismal and Birth Certificates have found it politic and profitable to sign themselves in Irish,” he wrote, an accusation that prompted a swift response from de Bhulbh:
Seán de Bhulbh was particularly interested in names. In 1997, after ten years of work, he updated Father Pat’s book with his own, Sloinnte na hÉireann: Irish Surnames. Both books, and a new edition that de Bhulbh published in 2002, examined the origins of Irish names and provided a reference for names as they appeared in Irish and English.
Both projects, in a sense, sought to undo the Ordnance Survey. To remove the scab. Where the English had mapped onto Ireland a new language and cultural sensibility — a new history even — the Woulfes have clamored for a return. It’s complicated, of course. “Seán” is nothing more than Irish for the much older “John.” “De Bhulbh,” in its very construction, suggests its Franco-Norman origins. In this case, though, the Irish language, in all its guttural mystery, plunges us deep into that pool of invented memories. It is a means of asserting our Woulfe-ness and, just as crucially, our Irish-ness.
