Moran Taing Many thanks to everyone who attended, hosted and made goodies for the 8 weeks of OUTLANDER. I have to say a good time was had by all! Mark your caklendars for April 4 when the next part is due to start…..8 more weeks of Jamie and Claire!

Dracula 1931Given the time of year it only seems appropriate to celebrate the season, Samhain, with one of Ireland’s gifts to the world which would be come to be known as Count Dracula. The birth of the modern day vampire, courtesy of Bram Stoker.Although there have been multiple versions of Count Dracula portrayals, sometimes it’s just hard to beat the original. Bela Lugosi was spotted in a 1927 Broadway adaptation of the novel and was cast to play the Count for Hollywood. His portrayal of the evil Count was chillingly convincing by his Hungarian accent, which would also work against him by being typecast. He also had back problems that led him to become addicted to morphine and methadone, this also made it difficult to find acting work as he grew older.In the original movie the Count secures a minion to be his slave/servant and secure his passage from the castle in the Carpathian Mountains to London where he seeks “new blood.” He feasts on two young ladies, the second of which is Mina Seward and her father, Dr. Seward, calls in the help of Professor Van Helsing to help with his daughter’s deteriorating condition. Van Helsing figures out that they are dealing with the supernatural and prepares Mina’s fiancé, John Harker, and her father, Dr. Seward, for what they must do to reverse the damage the evil vampire has wrought down upon poor Mina.The chilling details of silence and creepiness of Bela Lugosi’s eyes makes this an incredibly scary movie. The use of animation to show the conversion from vampire to bat is an amazing use of special effects for 1931. The movies that have been made since have utilized increasingly advanced technological effects to scare the bejeezus out of us, but it’s still hard to beat the original and how it was able to create the level of fear, and height of goose bumps crawling on your skin, that this movie can do.You can get the disc through Netflix, or just watch the coming weeks and it will probably be broadcast a time or two. Just don’t watch it alone. Boo Radley

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JOIN NACHS IN CELEBRATING KEN MCINTOSH’S NEW BOOK

The Ravenous Dead (WRITTEN UNDER THE NAME Roger Bruce)!!

preview copies will be available for signing

Meet at the City Hall parking lot at 6pm on October 25 for a kilted ZOMBIE walk to Uptown Pubhouse AND a talk on ZOMBIES by Ken himself.

Wear you BEST CELTIC ZOMBIE attire!

Brian O’Sullivan can be contacted for further information at irishimbas@gmail.com

A big thank you to those of you who submit items for the newsletter. A special thanks to RIchard for his monthly movie reviews. If you are interested in submitting items for the newsletter, there are some guidelines that will help me, and ensure that your entry is correct. If you have a flyer to submit, please send it in PDF format only. Also, please ensure that your PDF is no larger than 8.5" by 11, so that it is print-ready. If you are sending information on an event, please send only the important information such as who, what, when, where, etc... Often times I get way too much info, and I have to go through and pick out the important stuff. Please send submissions to johnmcgregor@me.com.

Thanks,John

The Jack-o’-lantern tradition is linked to an old folktale from Ireland about a man named Stingy Jack and his dealing with the Devil. There are numerous variations of the Irish tale, but they all end the same.

Stingy Jack was a wicked prankster and an old drunk who enjoyed playing tricks on everyone and anyone including his family, friends and even the Devil himself. One dark night, Jack was drinking in a local public house and there he met the Devil. Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him.

Not wanting to use his own money to pay for the drinks, Jack convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin to cover the cost— in exchange for Jack’s soul. The Devil agreed and transformed himself, but instead of paying for the drinks, Jack slipped the coin into his pocket next to a silver cross he always carried. The cross prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack would only free the Devil under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die in that year, the Devil would not claim his soul. The Devil agreed and Jack let him free.

The year passed and Jack, while out walking on a country road, found the Devil waiting for him. The Devil said he had come for Jack’s soul. But Jack convinced the Devil to climb into a nearby apple tree and pick Jack the choicest apple before taking his soul. The Devil agreed and while he was up in the tree, Jack carved the sign of the cross into the tree’s bark. The Devil could not climb out of the tree. Jack would not remove the sign until the Devil promised not to bother him for 10 years and that, should Jack die in that time, the Devil would not claim his soul. The Devil grudgingly agreed and Jack let him free.

Soon after, Jack did die. But when he went to heaven, God barred him from entering because of his wicked ways so Jack journeyed down to the gates of hell.

But the Devil remembered Jack’s trickery, kept his promise not to claim Jack’s soul and would not allow Jack into hell. Instead he sent Jack away into the darkness with only an ember of hellfire to light his way. Jack carved out a turnip to carry the ember and is doomed to wander the earth for all eternity.

The Irish referred to Jack’s ghost as “Jack of the Lantern,” which over time became “Jack-o’-lantern.” In Ireland and Scotland, people carved their version of Jack’s lantern out of turnips or potatoes. In England, large beets were used. The lanterns were carved with scary faces and placed into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack’s ghost and other wandering evil spirits. In the 1800s, large numbers of Irish immigrated to North America. They found pumpkins, a common native fruit, bigger and softer to carve than turnips or potatoes, so pumpkins became the new Jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween.

Brian O’Sullivan can be contacted for further information at irishimbas@gmail.com

Irish legend comes to life in contemporary thriller

The intriguing story of Fionn mac Cumhal is explored in a startling new Irish mystery thriller from Irish Imbas Books. The novel – Beara: Dark Legends – launched by author Brian O’Sullivan at Anam Cara Writers and Artists’ Retreat in Beara, County Cork, examines the facts behind the legendary Irish warrior, leader, wise man and poet in a manner that’s never been done before. “Fionn and his warrior band the Fianna have a very strong place in the Irish psyche,” says O’Sullivan. “As children, we learn about his adventures at school, our countryside is dotted with places named after him and Fianna adventures form a fundamental part of our native culture and identity. For this reason, most Irish people have great reverence for the character.”Despite Fionn’s legendary national status, however, there is a lot that we don’t actually know about him. A significant body of ‘Fenian Cycle’ material exists and yet much of this is often incomplete or even contradictory. Similarly, there is vast amount of information on Fionn mac Cumhal hidden away in the dusty tomes of academia that many Irish people aren’t even aware of.“Part of the problem,” explains O’Sullivan, “is that much of the written material on Fionn was destroyed. Centuries of conflict with England, the country’s subsequent colonisation and the dissolution of the Gaelic language means that great troves of cultural treasures and information were lost.”“At the same time, we’ve been exceptionally lucky in that we’ve had some phenomenal champions who protected much that could have been lost, and others have been able to piece together critical items of information from what remains today. Most of it remains in the realm of specialised academic studies. Part of my challenge is getting the information to the wider public in a way that’s enjoyable and fun for a contemporary audience.” Despite two years of research and historical analysis, O’Sullivan’s novel can hardly be considered a ‘dusty academic tome’. Reviewers have variously described it as ‘fascinating’ or ‘thrilling’ but at the same time ‘quintessentially Irish – a kind of Irish De Vinci Code for the 2010s’. “It’s true to an extent,” O’Sullivan laughs. “Yes, it was intentional to use the ‘thriller/adventure’ narrative as a basis to pass on the historical research on the Fianna. I think the hardest part for me was leaving out so much of that research but it’s essential for the book to work independently as an entertaining mystery/thriller. I’m all for treating the original material with the respect it deserves but I’m just as strong on making sure that anything I write is fun to read.”The first three chapters are freely available at Irishimbasbooks.com (the author’s own website) and also at Goodreads.com. Digital copies of the book are available on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and most other good ebookstores. Physical copies of the book are available through all good bookshops, Amazon, the Book Depository etc.

The Story Behind the Story of Fionn mac CumhalMy first in-depth connection with Fionn mac Cumhal took place five years ago, when I was completing a non-fiction piece of work on ‘The Fenian Cycle’. The Fenian Cycle is generally described as a body of prose and verse centred on the adventures of Irish mythical hero Fionn mac Cumhal and his warrior band, the Fianna. What struck me from the very first days of my research, however, was the sheer scale and scope of the body of literature on this character. Stored in libraries around the world, these records consist of several thousand narratives collected from sources all over Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. Some of the original sources still exist as ancient manuscripts (in Old and Middle Irish) stored in national archives and libraries. Some have yet to be fully translated.The second thing that struck me was that despite the huge amount of raw material available (and decades of subsequent analysis), nearly all of it remains very much restricted to the academic sphere. Most Irish people, in fact, are completely unaware that this great body of cultural knowledge even exists.As I pored through the various narratives and analysis I repeatedly found myself thinking ‘Why don’t I know this? Why did no-one ever tell me this? In a sense, it seemed almost unfair that the material had never been made available in a form that could be accessed by the Irish public (or people of Irish heritage), those individuals who had a direct interest in the knowledge and whose cultural birth right it actually was.I continued to mull over this for a year or two while I carried on with the day job. At the same time, intrigued by what I’d learned, I did some further investigation to assess how Fionn mac Cumhal and the Fianna were perceived in modern Ireland. What awareness, for example, did contemporary Irish people have of Fionn mac Cumhal compared to our ancestors of fifty, a hundred, or even five hundred years ago? From my research, it quickly became clear that most contemporary Irish people first encounter Fionn mac Cumhal at a school level, through the Fenian stories that make up part of the school curriculum. Unfortunately, (but, understandably, given the audience) most of these tales are generic and sanitized versions of the originals, where all reference to anything “inappropriate” is removed. This unintentional sanitisation is also reproduced in the commercial literature market where the main Fianna literature resources consist of limited academic press runs and very dated “Tales of the Fianna” type stories reprinted from the early 1900s. Looking back at it now, it’s hard to believe that there have been almost no culturally authentic fiction narratives on the Fianna published in Ireland in recent times. In a bizarre way, it’s as though Ireland underwent some strange kind of ‘national amnesia’ with respect to Fenian culture since the early 1900s. It was at that point that I was first prompted to write my own book (Beara: Dark Legends). For years, keen to impart what I’d discovered about Fionn mac Cumhal through my own research, I was also keen to dispel the huge amount of superfluous fabrication associated with the character. The truth is, there’s an amazing amount of crap available out there on the topic of Fionn mac Cumhal, most of it ‘Oirish’ books produced by non-Irish people with very little basis in fact and little cultural authenticity of any kind. At the time, I was convinced the only way of getting this information out to people was to present it in a form that was informative without being boring or officious. For years, I’d been playing with the idea of developing a culturally authentic series about an Irish historical detective who examines how key elements of Irish history relate to more contemporary national issues. It struck me that by wrapping the cultural information up as a mystery/thriller, this was as good a mechanism as any for getting the results of my research out. As a result, Beara: Dark Legends, the first in a trilogy of Irish mysteries, was released in February 2014. Since its publication, some people have described Beara: Dark Legends as a kind of ‘Irish De Vinci Code’ (the O’Vinci Code!). In my mind, it’s actually much deeper, scarier and – in some ways – more real than the Dan Brown novel. For people of Irish heritage at least. Most Irish people have a strong emotional connection to their cultural heritage and a healthy respect for its source material. If this book has inspired even one person to access the available information and extend the knowledge of his/her own culture, then I’m happy to consider it a success. Brian O’Sullivanirishimbasbooks.com

8th Annual

Scandinavian Fair Norway – Sweden – Denmark –Finland – Iceland

Saturday – October 11, 2014 9:00 am – 3:00 pm

San Francisco de Asis School (formerly St.  Mary’s School)

320 N. Humphreys Street Flagstaff, Arizona

Free Admission Swedish Meatball lunches

Meatballs, gravy, mashed potatoes, lingonberry, green beans, drink and dessert

Scandinavian Booths – Lefse – Demonstrations

Food and Crafts for Sale – Live Music

The fair will take place at San Francisco De Asis School  (formerly  St.  Mary’s) The school is located in Downtown Flagstaff two blocks north of City Hall.

From Rt. 66, turn north onto Humphreys Street (which is also Highway 180) Travel 3 blocks.

The school is located at the corner of Humphreys and Cherry.

Contact Information: 928.779.5959 tahoej@usa.net

Sponsored by Nordic Pines Lodge of the Sons of Norway