Kilmacow Folklore 2 is a treasury of Irish legends, beliefs, cures, and history from the rural locality of Cill Mochua—Anglicized as Kilmacow—at the southern edge of County Kilkenny. Located six miles northwest of Waterford City, one of only a few urban hubs in the southeast of Ireland, Kilmacow comprises two villages and a hinterland totaling about 2,000 in population.

Editor Jimmie Cooke frames Kilmacow as a hub in its own right by cataloguing the considerable amount of folklore gathered there as part of the Irish Folklore Commission’s Schools’ Collection, undertaken between 1937 and 1939. This project of the newly independent Irish state enlisted local teachers to send pupils home in search of examples of folklore and folklife from their elders. The resulting collection, housed today in the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, contains more than half a million manuscript pages. Academic folklorists have long consulted this resource for their work. Others, like Cooke, a retired vocational teacher, have also made great use of it. For every scholarly essay that relies on the Schools’ Collection to prove a thesis, a book like Cooke’s employs it to give back to one of the communities that originally contributed to it.

Himself a native of Kilmacow, Cooke painstakingly orders his home area’s work by listing the schools and students that took part in the Schools’ Collection eighty years ago[1]. He then assigns each piece of collected folklore a number that is cross-referenced with the name of the informant who supplied it, as well as the month and year of the interview. Cooke embroiders this material with “Down Memory Lane,” a series of photographs depicting the faculty and students of the participating schools, as well as those who have run and attended them since the 1930s. These additions pull the volume further into the local field, as the images portray family, friends, and colleagues who would be known to Kilmacow readers.

The intensely local organizational structure is complemented by content that occasionally reaches an international audience of folklorists. Regardless of a reader’s location, it is possible to recognize the supernaturally bestowed black cat that appears in a few of these collected legends as a harbinger of otherworldly forces. Sometimes revealed to be in league with the devil, this creature is a common ingredient in narrative folklore around the world, a pattern that earned it a distinct subheading—“Magic quadrupeds–Felidae”—in Thompson’s motif index.

Despite such familiarities, a majority of the entries here are strongly oriented toward the names, places, and histories of Kilmacow, as would be expected from a folklore collection solicited from the area’s schoolchildren. Bits of folklore are connected to certain features in the local landscape, which in turn is described by the original informants in general terms. Bearings are given only vaguely, with phrases like “a few hundred yards from the upper village,” “Doctor’s Lane,” and “near Kyle creamery.” Here, all readers but those from Kilmacow must intuit their understanding of the entries, as Cooke offers little spatial contextualization.

The book’s focus on the local is both its great good and its notable challenge. On one hand, the existence of Kilmacow Folklore 2 provides evidence of an effective governmental collaboration. If an aim of the Irish Folklore Commission was to create a public resource that inspired future interest in the folklore of every hamlet in Ireland, then it has succeeded quite well. On the other hand, the intensely local bent partially obscures the book’s full meaning from audiences outside the county—perhaps even outside Kilmacow. The message here seems to be: Our people collected this material, and it is being offered now for their good.

In fairness to Cooke, this book is one of a genre of local history volumes that are common in Ireland. In small villages and towns across the island, a visitor is likely to find one or another written work on local history, often completed by a member of the same community. Therefore, the book’s international readers, as many reading this review are likely to be, are obliged to do some contextualizing work before rendering an opinion.

The first step in the contextualizing process is to recognize that Kilmacow Folklore 2 is a successful example of a book of its kind. Not an interpretive work and yet not a mere collection of folklore, this is instead a carefully annotated portrait of expressive culture in a small community almost a century ago. The second step is to note the deft strokes with which Cooke has served his constituency. Rather than directing his energy toward interpreting the material collected in Kilmacow during the Schools project, he chooses to spend it on numerically organizing the material in a way that recognizes schools and individuals as key contributors to the Irish Folklore Commission’s project. What the locality is left with from this arrangement is a reference work that cites the role of beloved grandparents, aunts, and uncles in the cultural restoration of a postcolonial nation.

In this regard, Cooke’s work is a substantial accomplishment. It treasures the people who gave to its pages and serves as an illustration of fruitful cooperation between bureaucracy and community. Those wishing to use folklore to give voice to underserved populations are encouraged to take books like Kilmacow Folklore 2 as fine examples.

[1]Kilmacow Folklore 2 focuses on collections completed by the students of St. Joseph’s Presentation Convent Girls National School and St. Patrick’s Strangsmills Mixed National School. The 2008 book Kilmacow Folklore, edited by Patrick Lynch, compiled the collections of St. Senan’s Boys National School.

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[Review length: 921 words • Review posted on April 12, 2017]