‘Master-pieces of their kind’

This chapter discusses the compositions of the blind seventeenth- and eighteenth-century harper-composer Turlough Carolan (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin) and the manner in which they were employed during the Celtic Revival by eighteenth-century Irish antiquarians and scholars in their recovery of the Gaelic past. Motivated by an interest in the native music and song of Ireland that was in turn sparked by the romantic movement, the vogue for primitivism, and the cult of the bard, scholars such as Joseph Cooper Walker, Charlotte Brooke, and James Hardiman re-invented Carolan’s image as that of a bard and a musical genius and elevated his compositions to a higher status than they had achieved during his lifetime. In doing so, they brought his work to a wider English-speaking audience.