In his most recent book, Séamas Ó Catháin—former Chair of Irish Folklore and retired Head of the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics at University College Dublin—offers us a well documented and engagingly illustrated account of the professional development of his predecessor, James Hamilton Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga, 1899-1980). Delargy’s professional and personal journey deserves book-length treatment given that over time he transformed from local folklore collector and Irish language enthusiast into a leading architect of twentieth-century Irish folklore studies and of the incomparable Irish Folklore Commission (1935-1970), or what Delargy memorably called “the state papers of the Irish people.” The records of the former IFC remain at the core of today’s National Folklore Collection in the Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore at University College Dublin; the Folklore of Ireland Society, which Delargy helped found, continues to publish the flagship journal Béaloideas, which Delargy edited from 1928-1970.

When one considers the historical interdependence of folklore studies and nationalism, one looks first to case studies such as Finland and Ireland where folklore provided the resources for bearing witness to cultural distinctiveness and for supporting the right of small nations to self-determination. Indeed, Delargy was a student of Douglas Hyde, folklorist and first president of Ireland, who authored the foundational polemic in Irish cultural nationalism, “The Need for De-Anglicising Ireland” (1892). Given his contextual surround and judging from Delargy’s later recollections, there is no doubt that Delargy’s early vocational aspirations were part of a larger wave of pro-Gaelic, anti-colonial patriotism in a newly independent state. That being said, Ó Catháin’s book productively highlights the crucial and extensive Scandinavian and northern European influences on Delargy’s work and, by extension, the importance of international perspectives in the early stages of the professionalization of Irish folklore studies.

Ó Catháin begins his narrative in 1921 in the Irish language section of a Dublin bookshop where by chance the twenty-two-year-old Delargy met Reidar Christiansen, archivist of the Norwegian Folklore Collection in Oslo. This moment of serendipity combined with a 1927 meeting set up by Hyde between Delargy and the Swedish scholar Carl Wilhelm von Sydow led to life-long correspondence and collaboration. In these early years Delargy was particularly eager for guidance in “the scientific methods of folklore collecting and analysis,” and for this, at the time, he needed to look beyond Ireland and Britain. Christiansen and, in particular, von Sydow were instrumental in securing funding and leave from UCD for Delargy to visit the major folklore programs, museums, archives, and scholars of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, and Germany.

Delargy’s 1928 grand tour, detailed in chapters 2-4, stretched over six months and opened Delargy’s eyes to a new world of ethnographic, archival, and analytical objectives and methods. For example, Delargy returned with a portfolio of questionnaires from the folklore archives at the University of Uppsala. These greatly informed the subsequent research methods of the Irish Folklore Commission and led to greater consolidation and codification in the Handbook of Irish Folklore (1942) written by Séan Ó Súilleabháin who succeeded Delargy in studying folklore methods in Sweden. Likewise, Delargy was exhilarated by the open-air museum at Skansen and, under Åke Campbell’s influence, returned with a determination to add material culture and folklife studies to the growing ambit of Irish folklore studies.

Complementing Ó Catháin’s account of Delargy’s apprenticeship and his later application of international models in Ireland, chapters 5-9 offer thoughtfully compiled and edited primary materials: chronologically organized correspondence from 1921 to 1928, diary entries, notes on archives and museums, and helpful brief biographies of the many folklorists Delargy met. Twelve following appendices reprint articles, reports, and lectures by Delargy, Christiansen, and von Sydow.

In addition to the internationalization of Irish folklore studies, another theme that stands out in Formation of a Folklorist is the life-long consequence of generous mentoring. Very clear in Ó Catháin’s account, leavened by excepts from Delargy’s diaries, is the twenty-nine-year-old’s sense of wonder and gratitude at the largesse of senior colleagues as he networked and couch-surfed across Northern Europe from one luminary to the next. This tradition of collegial hospitality and mentorship is surely one of the more praiseworthy aspects of academic culture, worth remembering and cultivating in the present. Arguably, it has got us, as a discipline, where we are today.

The virtue of ongoing international collaboration in folklore studies—pursued in Ireland by Delargy, profitably expanded by his successors, notably Séamas Ó Catháin—is exemplified further by the second book under review, Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Language. Here the editors Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, Liam Mac Mathúna, Séamus Mac Mathúna, Seosamh Watson, and the late Bo Almqvist gather essays in honor of Séamas Ó Catháin on his seventieth birthday. Thirty scholars from Ireland, Scotland, England, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and the United States cover a wide range of topics that reflect the impressive breadth of Ó Catháin’s expertise in folk narrative, custom, and belief; dialectology, linguistics, and literary studies.

An appreciative introduction recalls Ó Catháin’s career trajectory from fieldwork in Counties Donegal and Mayo started while a student at Queen’s University Belfast, to fieldwork among the Sami while lecturing at the University of Uppsala, to serving as lecturer and archivist in the Department of Irish Folklore at UCD, to succeeding Bo Almqvist as Head of Irish Folklore at UCD, to writing Formation of a Folklorist and the present. This introduction is bookended with a summation of Ó Catháin’s prolific published works from 1964 to the present. The thirty essays in between divide into five sections. The majority of essays are written in English; English summaries follow those written in Swedish and Irish or Scottish Gaelic. With so many contributions in the book and limited space here, it is impossible to do justice to all that is on offer. Let me concentrate on sections I imagine to be of interest to the greatest number of JFRR readers.

In Part I—Folklorists and Folklore Collecting--five essays complement Ó Catháin’s Formation of a Folklorist by addressing Delargy’s collecting and collaboration in the Faroe Islands (Bo Almqvist); correspondence from Delargy’s mentor von Sydow that recounts the Swedish scholar’s experiences in Ireland (Nils-Arvid Bringéus); the work of Irish Folklore Commission collector and Delargy protégé Mícháel Mac Énri (Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh); the work of amateur collector Mícháel Ó Tiománaí, whose Irish language folktales Delargy acquired for the Irish Folklore Commission (Ríonach uí Ógáin); and the sketches and paintings of Simon Coleman who was commissioned by Delargy and the IFC to document vernacular material culture in County Donegal (Patricia Lysaght). Arne Bugge Amundsen tracks tensions between Enlightenment and Romantic motivations for studying folklore in nineteenth-century Norway—a valuable case study for comparative intellectual history. Back in Ireland, Maureen Murphy offers an intriguing case study in the relationship between folklore, history, and memory by comparing an American traveller’s published eye-witness account of the Irish Potato Famine with folklore collected later in the twentieth century.

Part II—Tales, Legends, Proverbs and Song—features three complementary chapters addressing different aspects of belief. Bairbre Ní Fhloinn investigates the supernatural legends of one Irish storyteller, paying close attention to the storyteller’s critical exegesis and how she strikes a balance between rationalization and belief. Ülo Valk discusses the memorates of an Estonian true believer in supernatural forces and beings; resisting the legacy of Soviet suppression of folk and official belief, this storyteller looks to nearly forgotten collective lore to authenticate and elucidate her personal experiences. Turning to contemporary legend, Eilís Ní Dhuibhne-Almqvist offers an engaging detective story getting to the bottom of rumors about tunnels under the University College Dublin campus. She does a particularly good job in considering why people would want to entertain or indeed wholeheartedly believe the rumors and attendant conspiracy theories.

Also in Part II, Henry Glassie returns to Ballymenone to mount an argument about folk history as temporally vague, spatially specific, and concerned with eternal truths and conditions. Here Glassie shifts to a more textual approach, opening up previously published materials in new ways. In particular he pays close attention to intertextual references that meaningfully collapse different historical periods in local legends and songs. Bengt af Klintberg offers a comparative perspective on and gendered reading of a widely spread legend about a witch who transforms a man into a horse and who is later humiliated when the roles are reversed. Continuing Ó Catháin’s Celtic-Nordic collaborations and entertaining Delargy’s interest in connections between Ireland and the Faroe Islands, Eydun Andreassen reviews Faroese ballads, popular sayings, and place names for evidence of historical links between Ireland and the Faroes. Iain Seathach examines Scottish Gaelic religious tales from Cape Breton, while Kenneth Nilsen and Harald Gaski offer compelling collectanea: anecdotes and historical lore from County Tipperary, and proverbs from the Sami, respectively.

Part III—Folk Beliefs, Folk Customs and Social Organization—also could have been titled “folk ways of life.” In this collection’s most materialist contribution, geographer Patrick O’Flanagan--co-author with Ó Catháin of The Living Landscape (1975), an outstanding study of place lore—contrasts Irish and Galician subsistence farming systems that had long lasting and not entirely positive effects on family and social structures. In a less materialist but no less insightful mode, Joan Pauli Joensen, another Faroese contributor, uses tensions over pilot whale hunting in the Faroes as a case study in the difficult transition from collective-minded traditional society to the more individualistic, capitalistic society associated with modernity. Two additional case studies focus on customs associated with rites of passage. Terry Gunnell complements Ó Catháin’s “Room to Rhyme” mumming research project by comparing Irish, Shetland, and Norwegian traditions of guisers at weddings blessing the bride and groom’s union. Pádraig Ó Héalaí reviews folktales relating to the deaths of children to reveal aspects of traditional worldview that help explain why in the past funerary rites for children were less elaborated than for adults.

I do not wish to give short shrift to Part IV—Gaelic Mythology and Early Literature—and Part V—Celtic Languages—but many of the chapters involved will appeal more to the literary and linguistic constituents of a Celtic studies audience. Of course, specialist knowledge on the interrelations of language and culture is by no means irrelevant to folklorists. It is good that the present volume makes available, for example, Seosamh Watson’s painstaking research on the Gaelic dialects of the Isle of Skye, Liam Mac Mathúna’s account of the evolution of contemporary Irish orthography, and Nicholas Williams’s recovery of Cornish names for native fruits. Of special interest to folklorists in these last two sections are Séamus Mac Mathúna’s chapter (in Irish) on the depths of terror in early Irish literature, focusing on supernatural creatures associated with the wilderness; Gearóid Mac Eoin’s argument that narrative verse existed in Early Irish long before the ballad became popular across Europe; Iain MacAonghuis’s investigation (in Scottish Gaelic) of Scottish cailleachan or hags/supernatural wise women; and Michael Chesnutt’s investigation of Gaelic influences in Icelandic sagas that points to more cultural hybridization in the late Viking era that was previously understood.

It is perhaps conventional in reviews of festschrifts and collections to say that the quality of the contributions is variable and that the wide range of topics detracts from overall coherence. This is not true of Atlantic Currents. The volume does include chapters of many types: intellectual and disciplinary history, ethnographic analysis of folklore in situ, cultural and historical interpretation drawing from archival research, literary history, linguistics, philology, collectanea. Each judged on their own generic terms, however, the contributions to this volume are, across the board, of a very high caliber, and apples and oranges though some may be, they are as a whole harmonious and compatible. Moreover, all connect with some aspect of Séamas Ó Catháin’s vast field of knowledge, comprising a fitting tribute to an admirable, industrious, and generous scholar. It is a pity that American academic publishers seem to be withdrawing from the business of publishing book-length festschrifts. This festschrift in particular is well worth the time it takes to digest. In defense of festschrifts more generally, I contend that they serve important purposes. As a genre, festschrifts gather shorter essays that typically introduce exciting new work, make available new data, take new approaches to older research, and/or distill longer research into its core significance. Moreover, no other genre offers such an insightful snapshot of the current thinking among a given social network of scholars, while at the same time revealing the contours and interrelations of these networks through which knowledge is produced and circulated. Séamas Ó Catháin deserves his accolades, and the editors of this volume deserve praise for an exemplary festschrift.

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[Review length: 2085 words • Review posted on March 26, 2014]