The point seems largely to have been missed here.
Keening for the dead, certainly in Ireland, is invariably improvised on the spot - there are, to my knowledge and as far as I know, there are no set set texts.
There maybe examples captured at the time of their making, captured like butterflies but real keens were seldom written down.
There are few recordings - the famous one being that recorded by Mrs Sidney Robertson Cowell on The Aran Islands in 1957, but it was not the done thing to treat them as entertainment to be passed on, and there are a few where singers attempted to imitate what they had heard at wakes, but even that was frowned upon.
Even Mrs Cowell's recording had to be made behind closed doors with the curtains drawn and without the knowledge of the locals - performing them was regarded bad taste and was thought to bring bad luck.
We recorded an Irish Traveller from Kerry whose mother was an "ullagoaner" - someone who would be expected to turn up at the death of a neighbour and lament over the corpse.
The best collection of European keens are to be found on A.L. Lloyd's radio programme, 'The Lament', made sometime in the 1960s, where, apparently, they were recorded when the tradition was accessible and the restrictions not as strict.
One of the most moving pieces of singing I have ever heard was recorded (I think) in Rumania.
The recording team were working in a mountain village when news came in that relative of one of the crew had been drowned not too far away.
He took Lloyd and a tape recorder to the wake; Lloyd describes how the village singer, the sister of the dead boy, had been summoned from the fields to keen over her brother - the hairs on the back of my neck still bristle just to remember it - an incredible mixture of skill and passionate grief.
I suspect that the 'keens' which are to be found in printed collections are no more than poems or songs written in keening style.
Jim Carroll