Eleanor Plunkett: A Song History
"Eleanor Plunkett" is one of the airs of the blind harper Turlough O'Carolan (1670–1738), who was born near Nobber in County Meath; it began as a song in Irish in praise of a woman associated with Robertstown in the same county.[1] Harp historian Simon Chadwick, drawing on Nóra Ní Shúilliobháin's 1987 study of the local Plunkett family, identifies her as the elder daughter of Thomas Plunkett, who was murdered on the road in 1691; by his reckoning she was born around 1686. Her grandfather Francis, who died in 1682, is commemorated by a carved effigy slab in Robertstown churchyard. She married John Cahill, and from 1720 she and her sister pursued a claim to the family lands, which the House of Lords finally dismissed in 1728.[2] An older story, printed by Tomás Ó Máille and repeated by Donal O'Sullivan, holds that some thirty of her kin perished by boiling water in their castle, leaving Eleanor the sole survivor; O'Sullivan suspected an exaggeration of a 1641 deposition, and Chadwick dismisses the tale as fantasy, suggesting the castle may already have been in ruins before she was born.[1][2]
John Egan, Portable Harp, Irish, 1819. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Made some eighty years after Carolan’s death; shown for the instrument only.
Edward Bunting never printed the tune, but it survives among his papers at Queen's University Belfast.[1] According to Chadwick, Bunting took it down from the old harper Denis Hempson (O'Hampsey) at Magilligan in the 1790s under the title "Madam Keil," and James Cody, collecting for Bunting c. 1805–10, wrote down versions as "Nelly an Chúil Chraobhaigh."[2] In Carolan: The Life, Times and Music of an Irish Harper (1958), O'Sullivan gave "Eleanor Plunkett" as No. 150 and listed "Mrs Keel" separately as No. 69, its subject unidentified; following an observation by the harper Ann Heymann, Chadwick argues that Madam Keil, Mrs Cahill and Eleanor Plunkett are the same woman.[1][2]
Chadwick credits Moya Brennan with what seems to be the earliest recording of the instrumental air, on Clannad's album Clannad 2; the singer Iarla Ó Lionáird has since performed a reconstruction of the song itself.[2] The tune appears in later books such as The Kitchen Musician No. 3: Carolan (1983) and Ó Canainn's Traditional Slow Airs of Ireland (1995).[1]
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