Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A skilled teller of tales or legends, especially Gaelic ones.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Ireland storyteller

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Scots Gaelic seanachaidh, from Old Irish senchaid, variant of senchae, historian, from sen, old; see sen- in Indo-European roots.]

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Examples

  • The story is a folk-story of many countries and Synge was told the version he worked from by the old shanachie of Inishmaan whom he calls Pat Dirane in "The Aran Islands."

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • If you doubt that he was shanachie, not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions."

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • It is because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages.

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • The range of the shanachie is wide, and wide, too, the range of Sharp in the rôle of shanachie of barbaric life on both sides of the Moyle.

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • Mr. Seumas MacManus is as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers that yet tell the old tales about peat fires in Donegal.

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • Quiller-Couch been born ten years later Cornwall had not wanted a shanachie.

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • In other words, it is in the very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth among the folk.

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • Trefuilngid: True indeed, O Fintan, you are an excellent shanachie in holding the memory of this land.

    Resonance FM: Midnight Sex Talk 2009

  • Both plays are written out of the old legends that are the common property of Irish and Scottish Gael, and in both Sharp has treated his material with his wonted freedom of adaptation, a freedom that is generally justified by his results, his instinctive surety of reconstruction of myths being such as to make one wonder, with Mr. Russell, if Sharp is not, in some fashion, a reincarnation of a shanachie that sang as contemporary in the wars of Gael and Gall.

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

Comments

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  • see seanchaí

    November 8, 2007

  • Also a fine record label. :)

    November 8, 2007