Fenians

The Fenians are a political community invoked throughout Finnegans Wake less as a stable organization with a narrated history than as part of the language through which Dublin remembers, stages, and reshapes collective identity. They surface in a pledge to honor the dead, in an allusion to the Fenian rising, and in public performances and games where history becomes something repeated and shared.

Invocation and communal memory

In a speech addressed to the dead Mr Finnimore, the speaker promises that the “ombre players” will visit and rake his gravel, bringing offerings rather than trinkets from shops. The Fenians are called upon as witnesses to this continuing act of remembrance; Druids are invoked alongside them. The offerings include field produce, poppy preparations, honey, and goat’s milk, so the dead man’s grave is imagined not as an isolated resting place but as the destination of a communal, materially furnished ritual.

The same passage places the honored dead among an array of legendary and historical names and describes households beyond the Bothnians calling names after him. Its praise turns personal burial into public memory: the Fenians belong to a community that keeps the dead present through visit, gift, story, and repeated naming. The passage does not set out an organizational structure or program; it gives the name its force through the people assembled around the grave and the acts they promise to perform.

Political allusion and the public scene

Elsewhere, an account of HCE’s encounter with a man carrying a pipe places the “fenian rising” in a comic account of how near help might be. HCE is crossing a park in conspicuous military-style clothing when the stranger accosts him to ask the time. Recognizing the danger of the situation, HCE draws a watch from his pocket and answers that it is twelve, while the church bell sounds over the landscape. The rising is not narrated as a campaign; it enters as a phrase that gives the encounter a political horizon, mingled with the narrator’s unstable, punning account of danger, self-preservation, and public accusation.

The text also names the Fenians in a staged recitation of Hosty’s song. Before the ballad begins, Hosty’s authorship is announced, the audience is gathered around, and the performance moves through competing names for its target before settling on Persse O’Reilly. The ballad then presents him as a fallen public figure, linking his tumble to the Magazine Wall and threatening his removal to Mountjoy Prison. Political notoriety is thus made into a communal event: a named performer, a responsive audience, a chorus, and a song that carries its mockery from one voice to many.

Repetition, play, and transmission

The Fenians are also part of an immense catalogue of children’s and street games. Among the titles is “Battle of Waterloo,” alongside games about postal knocks, dreams, washing, and everyday encounters. The list does not explain the Fenian movement or equate it with any particular game. Its placement does, however, show how the book folds historical and political names into a common repertoire of play, where events and identities can be recited, varied, and passed on.

A separate passage evokes the long persistence of dances across Dublin districts, from Chapelldiseut and Ballybough to Grangegorman. Although fashions and currencies change, the dances return, carried forward as communal forms of performance. Read alongside the Fenians’ appearances in ritual remembrance, political allusion, song, and games, this recurrence clarifies the movement’s narrative function: the name belongs to a living store of public memory, but its meaning is repeatedly remade by the scene in which it is spoken or performed.