Citation

Sakai T. Relig. Soc. 2005; (11): 43-62.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Japanese Association for the Study of Religion and Society)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In the Northern Ireland unionist community, the First World War has been memorialized as a devotion of Ulster Protestant for the British nation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the formation process of the myth of the war dead, and analyse the conjunction and conflicts between elements such as the "sacred" and "disastrous", both of which the war dead have been invested with. Before the outbreak of the war, the Irish Home Rule controversy was at its peak and the anti-Home Rule unionism movement was intensifying. The commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne, one battle in the Glorious Revolution, was widely spread in the Ulster region as a unionism demonstration. In the Great War, many Ulster Protestants perished in the first and second days of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The coincidence of the date of the Boyne commemoration and the first day of the Somme battle contributed to the formation of the myth that the dead soldiers at the Somme had been second Boyne heroes. In the 1960s, the era of the liberal unionist state, stories by ex-soldiers of the Somme were introduced in the local newspaper. These stories stressed the miserable disaster in the field of the Somme and found nonsense in the story that regards the soldiers as mythical heroes. However, a hard line loyalist group in the 1970s glorified the Somme as the return of the hero of the Boyne, and at the same time, emphasized that the battle was a disastrous mass killing. They found in that connection the aesthetic of tragedy of heroes and made an analogy to their own position. Emphasis of the disastrousness of war itself is a representation of ultimate violence that cannot be justified. However, when it is connected with a mythic and mysterious element, the disastrousness can be beautified and can justify violence.

Language: ja