“The first saint to appear in [Heaney’s book] The Spirit Level is St. Brigid, one of the three patron saints of Ireland, together with Patrick and Colmcille. In his interview with John Haffenden in 1979, Heaney remarked that ‘Irish Catholicism is continuous with something older than Christianity.’ His sense of a continuity between the pagan and Christian is most perfectly embodied in the figure of St. Brigid…
“As someone who seemed to epitomize the continuity between pagan and Christian cultures, [Brigid] was central to the folk-Catholicism in which Heaney grew up and which shaped his sensibility indelibly…. Stories…of miracles relating to butter churning, harvesting and cattle must have crossed with his own experience of farm life on Mossbawn. Religious practices and traditions around saints were woven into the fabric of the rural folk-Catholicism of Heaney’s upbringing.”
