The Story of Paddy Finnegan

Once upon a time, there was a man...

One morning Paddy was rather full;
His head felt heavy which made him shake
He fell off the ladder and broke his skull;
So they carried him home a corpse to wake
They wrapped him up in a nice clean sheet
And laid him out upon the bed,
With plenty of candles around his feet
And a couple of dozen around his head.
His friends assembled at the wake
And Missus Finnegan called for lunch.
First they laid out tea and cakes
Then pipes and tobacco and whiskey punch.
Then Bridget O'Brien began to cry,
"Such a lovely corpse did you ever see?
"Arrah! Paddy avourneen why did you die?"
"Ah, shut your gob!" said Biddy Magee.
Then Peggy O'Connor took up the job;
"Oh, Biddy", says she, "You're wrong I'm sure."
But Biddy gave her a belt on the gob
And sent her sprawling on the floor!

Get tickets and hear the rest of the story about Finnegan's Wake.

The Novel

Finnegan's Wake was Irish novelist James Joyce's last and most complex work. Written in 1939 the novel is an attempt to embody in fiction a cyclical theory of history. The novel is written in the form of an interrupted series of dreams during one night in the life of the character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Symbolizing all humanity, Earwicker, his family, and his acquaintances blend, as characters do in dreams, with one another and with various historical and mythical figures.

Joyce carried his linguistic experimentation to its furthest point in Finnegan's Wake by writing English as a composite language based on combinations of parts of words from various languages.

The Song

Finnegan's Wake pre-dates the James Joyce novel. While the song was obviously of some inspiration to James Joyce when he entitled his novel there is no apparent connection between the content of the two. It is commonly believed that the song Finnegan's Wake was a street ballad created in Ireland sometime in the eighteen century. However, according to Hugh Kenner's A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers it is "a psuedo-Irish song, since [it] is not an Irish ballad at all but American-Irish - published in New York, 1864."