With the end of the summer, and this project, in sight, the past month has been about finishing up the research portion of my project. The month started off as a continuation of what I had been doing last month: going through the digitized portions of the Irish National Folklore Archive at UCD, provided online by the Duchas project, trying to further build out my notes before I had to start turning my attention to the final paper itself. I was able to make some decent progress here – I got through many more entries, and they paved the way for what I think will be a cohesive final paper.
In addition to the research was a much more difficult task: figuring out which portions of the project had wound up being too much to fit in, and how I could go about making those cuts as seamless as possible. By far the biggest cut I had to make was my original plan to trace the motif of mist back through Irish history. In the end, the one archive provided enough work that digging up a critical mass of other primary sources to do that form of analysis just proved too much for one summer.
Now that I have a general sense of what I’m planning to put into my final paper, the rest of the summer will focus on getting that onto the page itself. I’m currently outlining what I’m going to put down, and plan to start writing in earnest later this week.