This translation of a folklore compilation by Seán Mac Giollarnáth has been many years in the making. Because of the forethought of Seán Mac Giollarnáth, a single person in the southern peninsula of Connemara, the 1941 collection Annála Beaga ó Iorras Aithneach (“Small Annals of Iorras Aithneach”) reveals so much about local ways of knowing, living, and connecting with others. It is simultaneously deeply personal—naming names and identifying locations—and general in its inclusion of materials from multiple narrators. Seán Mac Giollarnáth was already an established author and translator by the time he set himself up to collect folklore at a pub in Connemara, and men came to him and talked to him. Of all the people from whom Mac Giollarnáth collected stories, memories, and anecdotes, just one was a woman. Given that women were first allowed to drink in pubs in Ireland only in 1968—and it wasn’t until years later that the practice was normalized—Mac Giollarnáth’s choice of venue was simultaneously welcoming and self-limiting.

The compilation begins with a twenty-six-page prologue, “Space, Time, and Connemara,” by Tim Robinson. He highlights both the geography of the region—the rock formations from millennia ago, the impact of the Ice Age, and the stone monuments of Neolithic peoples—and the difficulty of claiming its precise location today. He continues with a detailed history of the local prominent families and their efforts to defy Cromwell’s armies, leading well into the present with simply gorgeous prose rich in imagery. Liam Mac Con Iomaire takes the reader into introductory territory with an introduction to local folklore collecting and to Mac Giollarnáth himself. As Mac Giollarnáth was the editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, an Irish-language weekly publication, he had remarkable access to the people and places of his region. His later appointment as a solicitor enabled him to travel across multiple communities in Connemara, working directly with local people. According to Mac Con Iomaire, Mac Giollarnáth worked closely with An Gúm, the Irish government’s Irish language publishing imprint, to develop a series of accessible books in Irish for both adults and children. Thus Mac Giollarnáth was well-positioned to serve as a collector when the attention of the newly formed Irish government turned toward the collection and publication of folkloric materials.

The central part of the book is broken into fourteen chapters. Some chapters focus on people: saints, politicians, traveling people, smugglers and thieves, fishermen, harvesters of seaweed, and many more. Other chapters feature the many small sayings, customs, allegories, rumors, blessings, and habits of the local people. As is often the case with stories about locals, metaphors and cautionary tales loom large. For example, a tale about a local man who made much more money than other people in the area logically features his eventual destitution from the loss of all his traded goods in a storm (136). Similarly, the heirs of ungrateful sons perish (163), and ungrateful beggars will be shot (70). The section of the book—Wisps of Straw—that features sayings such as “A potato under the loosestrife and famine under the fern. Land where purple loosestrife grows will give good potatoes, land where ferns grow is bad land for potatoes” (223) is fascinating in its encapsulation of ethnobotanical wisdom, place names, prayers, remedies, and more.

Part of the joy of reading this exceptional collection comes from recognizing the essential contributions of each of the award-winning translators. Liam Mac Con Iomaire—writer, translator, and radio broadcaster—understood when to allow the Irish word to stand with a translation. For example, in a discussion of place names, Mac Con Iomaire features sentences such as “Aill na mBroigheall (cormorant rock) is on the southeasternmost point of Muiríleach Island. The cormorants dry themselves on the rock, as do the shags. There could be ten of them there, sometimes twenty” (53). In a short sentence we have a vivid image of the cormorants extending their wings, and it is clear why the people retained the Irish name. Similarly, Mac Con Iomaire’s long-time friend and fellow translator Tim Robinson—whose publications on the landscape and metageography of Connemara are must-have books—is so intimately familiar with the place that his notes and parenthetical statements are both welcome and precise. From these two men who plumbed the depths of an extraordinary collection we learn not just the “straight translations” of the stories and patterns and customs; we learn that a person’s surname identifies her people as incomers from Munster, or that the tiny-shelled dulse is still referred to as creathnach. As a cartographer, Robinson offers us the communicative cartography of families and landscapes. As a local scholar and native speaker with decades of Connemara folkways in his own repertoire, Mac Con Iomaire carefully annotates and explains the customs and conversations that engaged people almost a century ago.

Because the original collecting took place in a pub, it was up to Tim Robinson to actually find all the places mentioned in the original annals. Because he had already published a detailed map of Connemara in 1990, he was the ideal person for the task. Liam Mac Con Iomaire took the original collection, wrote it out in Modern Irish, and both men worked out the translation over time in such a way that it preserves the feel of 1930s Connemara.

Parts of the collection seem to wander between narrators, without specific attribution, or from one topic to the next. While that topic-to-topic wandering is the very nature of collecting, it is not of editing. Readers can readily value what Mac Giollarnáth collected, and what it reveals about beliefs and ways of understanding people and lives in the region; readers may also criticize the organization of the book. This reviewer suggests for the casual reader a more aleatoric approach of selecting a single piece—rather than going through chapter by chapter—and reading that alone. Only then will one note the attention to detail: on what part of a body the injury occurred, how a guest was greeted, or whether someone’s animal was extraordinary. The biographies and photographs of contributors, historical maps, single-word translations of the original (as in Cruach na Caoile – Deer Island), and extensive footnotes all build a case for a rich and compelling collection. While this would not necessarily serve an undergraduate class as an introductory text on Irish folklore, it should take its place on the library shelves of Irish folklore scholars.

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[Review length: 1111 words • Review posted on October 4, 2024]