SOURCE: Kennedy, Thomas E. “Seán O'Faoláin's ‘The Silence of the Valley’.” Critique 29 (spring 1988): 188-94.

In the following essay, Kennedy argues that “The Silence of the Valley” is primarily a story that celebrates the continuity of life in all its varieties.

The man (who nearly fifty years ago) had heard Seán O'Conaill (the Kerry shanachie) describes such sessions in this way: “The people (before the peat fire) were so quiet, you could hear the snipe in the bog, and he not far from quiet his-self.”

(Lawrence Millman, Our Like Will Not Be There Again: Notes from the West of Ireland. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977, p. 6.)

People bred on noisy times might find it hard to hear what Sean O'Faolain's silent valley has to tell us. Indeed, the tone is quiet, the voice remote, the sound muted as the opening paragraph's ghost-like echoes of the waters falling from...