This weblog begins on the 17th of March of 2012. From the Irish capital of Dublin to the US city of Chicago, where the river is dyed green, thousands of people around the world are celebrating Saint Patrick´s Day.
It commemorates the most recognizable of Ireland´s patron saints and the arrival of Christianity in that country centuries ago. It is a day of parades, fireworks shows and marching bands. Participants dress up as leprechauns and green clothes and shamrocks are worn. Saint Patrick was said to have used this three-leaved plant to explain the Holy Trinity to the pagan Irish.
Having started with this entry about Ireland may not be just a coincidence if the aims of the blog are to promote good reading and share a passion for literature. It is remarkable that such a small country has been recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature on four occasions so far: Yeats, Bernard Shaw, S. Beckett and Seamus Heaney.
Having started with this entry about Ireland may not be just a coincidence if the aims of the blog are to promote good reading and share a passion for literature. It is remarkable that such a small country has been recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature on four occasions so far: Yeats, Bernard Shaw, S. Beckett and Seamus Heaney.
Did you know that the national flag, with three vertical equal stripes (green, white and orange) has a lot of meaning? Orange stands for Irish Protestants, green for Irish Catholics and the republican cause and white represents the hope for peace between them.
ReplyDeleteSwift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Joyce were also great, although they had not received a Nobel Prize for Literature. And they were Irish too! Who hasn´t read or heard about Gulliver´s Travels, Dracula, The Happy Prince or Ulysses?
ReplyDeleteI have heard that in Ireland there are no snakes and that the legend says that it was Saint Patrick who drove them out of the country. Snakes had a lot of symbolism in pagan religions
ReplyDeleteI didn't know all these things, but I tried to celebrate Saint Patrick´s Night, anyway.
ReplyDeleteIt´s amazing how a little country as Ireland is has exported its National Day Celebration to almost everywhere in the world nowadays, not only in the US or other English-speaking countries, which could be quite normal because of the Irish emigration in there, but also to countries such as Argentina or Spain, for example, which don´t have a direct relationship with Ireland. So everybody can feel a bit Irish on St Patrick´s Day whenever you are now, I think thanks to Guiness beer and the marketing around this celebration. Anyway in this time of crisis and bad news it´s good for our mood to cheer up with a celebration like this!
ReplyDelete1995 Nobel Prize winner Heaney, who has some relatives living in Asturias and has often visited it, has expressed his sympathies towards the Asturian language and the recognition of the linguistic rights of its speakers.
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