During the school year of 1937-1938, and some portion of the following year (finishing, for the most part, by the end of the 1938 calendar year), thousands of Irish school children in the twenty-six counties of the newly-designated Republic of Ireland collaborated with teachers, family, and neighbors in a nation-wide scheme to collect local folklore and tradition. Implemented by the Department of Education, the scheme was the brainchild of the newly-established Irish Folklore Commission, its director, J. H. Delargy, and its archivist, Seán Ó Súilleabháin. The scheme was spectacularly successful; the result of this collective labor is known as the Schools' Collection, and is preserved in the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin (NFC). For less than a decade, it has also been available online, on a designated website, www.dúchas.ie, where almost half a million manuscript pages can be consulted by the public online. Thanks to a very successful crowdsourcing initiative, almost all of the English-language material, and most of the Irish-language material, has also been transcribed and is now fully text-searchable. The corpus is enormous: 1128 tall bound volumes on the shelves of the NFC, amounting to just under half a million digital pages on the dúchas website.
The Schools' Collection constitutes an immense storehouse of oral tradition which can serve a great number of different folkloristic purposes. The two volumes under review here demonstrate one important use of the material--popular outreach and education--which will, one hopes, inspire further publications on this material. The author, Mike Baldwin, compiled material collected in two coastal communities, creating a well-rounded and engaging reader of the two areas' folk customs, traditions, and unwritten history. Baldwin trained as an instrument maker before pursuing PhD research that led to his recent publication Harp Making in Late-Georgian London (2020). London-based and educated, he has roots in county Cork, and both of his folklore books focus on the southwest corner of Ireland, where county Cork borders on county Kerry. Mizen: Rescued Folklore Histories and Songs from Ireland's South-West (2019) and Skibbereen: Rescued Folklore and Histories from Ireland's South-West (2022), were edited and transcribed by Baldwin from the dúchas website. They are thus an outcome of the digital revolution that has been embraced by the NFC (as by other folklore archives around the world) in its ongoing dedication to bringing the folklore collected by and from the people back to the people of Ireland. The current director of the NFC welcomed the publications as bringing the material collected in 1937-38 to the attention of a new generation.[1]
The overall structure of both books is geographic, as Baldwin looks in turn at each area's villages and townlands. Each locality has sections on topics such as Farming, Trade and Crafts, History and Archaeology, Local Customs, Songs, and Cures; there is also a heading Sea and Shipwrecks, reflecting the area's maritime location. These topics, for the most part, reflect the topic headings of the Schools' Collection: the topics originate in the guide-booklet drafted by the Irish Folklore Commission for use by the teachers. In the booklet (the text of which can be found on the dúchas website), the Commission suggested a list of over fifty topics covering every aspect of folklife, comprising material culture, social tradition, and oral literature; by and large, teachers followed the headings for the children's folklore assignments.
To many a modern reader--especially a twenty-first century American reader--the topics may seem rural, remote and unreal, conjuring up a quaintly idyllic, "folkloric" world of old-time "heritage." To the 1930s collectors and informants they are the stuff their lives are made of. It is the world described by Conrad Arensberg in The Irish Countryman (published in 1937, the same year in which the Schools' Scheme was implemented), and analyzed comprehensively in Arensberg and Kimball's classic of social anthropology, Family and Community in Ireland (1940). Rural electrification is still a decade or more away. Cash is scarce, and while industrial goods are coming in, and the old trades and crafts are fading, large parts of the population are still employed in what is essentially a subsistence economy, and many families need to be as self-sufficient as possible. The Schools' Collection is a giant, multifaceted snapshot of this culture on the point of transition. The Schools' Collection does not particularly seek out difficult topics, but neither does it avoid them entirely. The trauma of the Great Famine is still alive in people's memory, and many entries give concise accounts of harsh living conditions and rural exploitation (see, for example, the chilling local accounts of the Famine in Skibbereen, pages 70-71; or of the widespread abuses by landlords, pages 182, 416, and 366).
The editor has taken great care with the lay-out and documentation, conscientiously referencing the source of each archival entry. His expressed editorial stance is to leave the source text as is, although punctuation and some of the children's orthographic lapses have been silently emended. Both volumes have been illustrated with images--old postcards, photographs, etc.--of the locality, and the editor has additionally supplemented the readings with occasional snippets from local newspapers or other printed sources. There is an excellent index in each volume that allows the reader to research specific topics, personal names, or place names. An effort is made to translate the Irish-language words and place names which abound in the material, as is natural in a region that had only recently shifted to English as a community language. The author acknowledges the work's indebtedness to the NFC, but a fuller introduction to the Schools' Collection and the activity of the Irish Folklore Commission would have usefully contextualized the material and thrown light on the term "rescued folklore" used in the titles of both books.
The two volumes present a new harvest from the Irish Folklore Commission's extraordinary effort to gather, for the first time, the sayings and songs, stories and customs, the oral history and living landscape of every county and parish of the Republic. The attractively produced volumes are a tribute to the author, who recognized the material's value for anyone interested in the two communities of Mizen and Skibbereen and who edited and selected the material with loving care. They are also a tribute to the foresight and effectiveness of the Irish Folklore Commission and its heir, the NFC, to the Irish Department of Education that was willing to include this unorthodox assignment into the national curriculum, to the teachers, who for the most part entered whole-heartedly into the spirit of the project, and to the child collectors, their families and neighbors who shared and documented the rich and intimate knowledge of their world.
[1] Zoom conversation with NFC Director Dr. Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, 6/28/2022.
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[Review length: 1115 words • Review posted on February 16, 2023]