1 “Paper shoes and thick milk socks:” Some distinctively Irish types of oral colophon used to end folktales Lloyd D. Graham This paper presents three distinctively Irish formulae that a seanchaí (story-teller) can use to signal the end of a folktale. Colophons 1 and 2 are in Irish, Colophon 3 in English; there is little evidence of any of these paradigms jumping the language barrier. Colophon 1, which is a sober and defensive, is strongly associated with Munster. Colophon 2, which leans toward the absurd and impossible, is distinctive of Ulster and – to a lesser extent – of Connacht, except when encountered in combination with Colophon 1; it has Scottish and continental European counter- parts. Colophon 3, which is an amusingly trite rhyme, is strongly associated with Munster. The recurring allusions to food and/or drink in Colophons 2 and 3 seem calculated to elicit refreshment for the seanchaí at the end of their performance. All three ending types facilitate a rapid transition from the remoteness of the story-world setting back to the “here and now” of the storyteller and his/her audience. Introduction Colophons have been used to signal the end of written accounts since at least the time of ancient Egypt, where the standard scribal formula of the Middle Kingdom reads iw=f pw HAt=f r pH.wy=fy mi gmi.yt m sS, “Its beginning has come to its end, as it has been found in writing,” 1 or “It has been transcribed from beginning to end as it was found in writing.” 2 Equivalent formulae may signal the end of oral compositions. In their discussion of the structure of R̥ gvedic hymns, Joel Brereton and Stephanie Jamison note the existence of distinctive phrases, each of which may be thought of as an “oral colophon” – a wish that marks the conclusion of a hymn and associates its composition with a particular family: 3 A special type of refrain is the family or clan signature: in some of the Family Books, many of the hymns end with a pāda that marks the hymn as a product of that bardic family, a sort of oral colophon – e.g., the Gr̥ tsamada refrain of Maṇḍala II “May we speak loftily at the ritual distribution, in possession of good heroes,” found at the end of most, though not all, of the trimeter hymns of that book, and the Vasiṣṭha refrain “Do you protect us always with your blessings,” ending most of the triṣṭubh hymns of VII. Similarly, Irish folktales may conclude with a distinctive oral colophon which signals the end of the story and facilitates a rapid transition from the fantasy-world of the story to the real- world “here and now” of the storyteller and his/her audience. These stock terminators are drawn from a small repertoire and, while the choice of ending does not identify the narrator or composer of the story, the use of any of them does impose a distinctively Irish stamp upon the narration. Moreover, as we shall see, each colophon type has a regional association. The folktales to which these colophons are appended are “Irish” in the sense that they were first written down in Early Modern Irish, but “they belong, in fact, to the common Gaelic culture of Ireland and Scotland which broke up in the seventeenth century, and many of them were copied in Scotland, and some have only survived there, and some were quite probably composed there.” 4 Although this paper focuses on the Irish oral tradition, relevant Scottish parallels will be included for comparison.