Note 563 — Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY (continued 2)

Quoted by J. C. Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards, London, 1786, pp. 20 f. The keening of women who follow the hearse, dressed sometimes in white and sometimes in black, “singing as they slowly proceed ... extempore odes,” is sufficiently like the march of the praeficae at a Roman funeral; and in neither case has one the primitive form of the rite.