Blithe-meat is a compound used by William Carleton in Fardorougha the Miser.
It was the meal prepared for visitors at the birth of a child. Carleton wrote: "After having kissed and admired the babe . . . they set themselves to the distribution of the blythe (sic) meat or groaning malt." It appears again in Simmon's Glossary of south Donegal English, sent in 1880 to Joseph Wright, who was to editor of the monumental English Dialect Dictionary for Oxford.
Blithemeat is not confined to Ireland. It has been recorded in Ayr and Galloway; and in Shetland and Orkney as blyd-meat.
I don't know what the meal consisted of in Ulster, but in Galloway there was always a special cheese served, called the cryin-oot cheese.
Margaret Gallagher, who was born near Donegal town, wrote from Perth to say that her grandmother used to speak of this meal.
Blithe is a Common Teutonic word which appeared in old English as blithe, and in Old Norse as blithr, mild. Oxford says that the earliest application was to the outward expression of kindly feeling, sympathy, affection to others. I hope the ancient custom is still alive in the North.
I see that the word is recorded in C.I. Macafee's invaluable Concise Ulster Dictionary, which is a good pointer to its survival; she also gives the word a second meaning: a gathering of friends to celebrate the birth of a child. Meat was pronounced mate, of course, which was the older form in both Scots and English.
From Waterford came a letter from P.J. Power, who asks why the local pronunciation of a conduit is cundick. He points out that there is also a Cundick Lane in my own home town of New Ross.
Cundick is from the Middle English form cundit, itself from the Old French condut, from Medieval Latin conductus.
If you take a boat upstream from Ross, remembering to follow the Barrow and not the Nore where they meet, you'll come to the lovely village of St Mullins. John Murphy, who once worked in the mill there, told me that an ark was a big oaken chest used to store flour in the old days.
The word is very old. In a 1325 tract we find: "Quen this corn to the kniht was sald/ He did it in an arc to hald." From a Common Teutonic source, probably adopted from latin arca, a box, a chest which gave Old English arc, and modern German arche.