During the Wake

An eighteenth-century travel account summarizes the activities during a wake. The old people stayed in the room where the body lay, smoking and telling stories. The young men went to the barn or another room and competed with one another; after the bagpipes sounded, they began to dance. The recorder did not follow a particular family through a wake from nightfall to dawn, but instead left these actions side by side. This manner of writing easily tempts later readers to complete the scene: as if the stories were coming from beside the body, the contests in the barn happened to meet the bagpipes, and the two rooms shared the same stretch of time. What the material can establish is that all these activities were counted as part of the wake; it cannot fill in for us every instance of rising, pausing, and changing rooms. Even so, the arrangement still preserves an unstable spatial relation: the old people did not leave the dead by telling stories, and the young men did not exit the wake by dancing. The old people’s stories were still continuing, while on the other side the dance steps had already begun.

Yet this night scene cannot be easily reproduced. When the existing materials speak of especially lively wakes, they repeatedly mention very old deceased persons. This is not enough to assert that wakes for young dead people had no games at all, nor does it explain why age would alter the night’s activities; it only forces the preceding picture to stop within limits. Contests, bagpipes, and dance steps were once recorded, but they cannot be spread around every body. If the age of the deceased is ignored, the so-called joy within the wake will appear more widespread than the materials allow.

Another set of materials on keening preserves not a scene of lament that can be quoted word for word, but a summary of a practice. The materials classify this practice as a reproach directed at the dead. The source does not preserve who sang that sentence or how it was repeated, and we cannot supply its tone on its behalf. The record leaves only one action: at times, the keeners would call on the dead to get up and go plow the fields.