An Irish Folklore Treasury by John Creedon is just that—a treasury of lightly edited primary sources detailing Irish folklore from the early-twentieth century. As a folklorist interested in Ireland, I found this book to be a refreshing reminder of why I do the work I do—it gives the reader an array of succinct descriptions of Irish folklore that are a pleasure to read. I recommend this book for any scholar who wants to access a diverse selection of primary sources of Irish folklore.
The introduction highlights the role of asking the right questions in collecting folklore. To illustrate this, Creedon provides a narrative from his personal life, where he discovers that his father knows a first-hand account of the Great Famine. Creedon heard this story in his adulthood on a long car ride, prompted by his question, “Do you think the people who suffered in the Famine would be happy or disappointed with us?” (3). He uses this example to show the magnitude of what’s lost when we forget to ask our elders for their stories. The 1937-1938 Schools’ Collection was a folklore collection project spearheaded by the Irish Folklore Commission (IFC), based in University College Dublin (UCD). The IFC was directed by the prodigious folklorists Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Séamus Ó Duilearga, who created a list of topics in Irish folklore as a basis for the children to solicit information from their family and local elders. The IFC worked with the Department of Education, commissioning 5,000 schools across the Republic of Ireland to assign folklore collection as homework for elementary schoolchildren.[1] The children approached their elders with questions, meticulously copying their responses into copybooks, in both Irish and English languages. The schools submitted the copybooks and created bound volumes of the best-written entries, all still available to researchers in what is now known as the National Folklore Collection (NFC) archives housed at UCD. Several years ago, the NFC began a digitization effort of several hundred bound volumes, uploading images of the handwritten texts into the website www.duchas.ie. Using the concept of meitheal (teamwork), the website invites readers to type transcriptions of the handwritten pages, making the entries text-searchable. While Creedon never explicitly states his methodology, the acknowledgments section makes it clear that he consulted both the online resources as well as the NFC archives for the non-digitized collections.
An Irish Folklore Treasury is divided into fourteen chapters, not including the introduction. Each chapter consolidates texts from categories of Irish folklore, based on the categories arranged by the Schools’ Collection initiative. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction by Creedon, and the remainder of the chapter consists of writings by the schoolchildren. The largest category of texts is legends, found in the first three chapters. The rest of the book deals with the folklore of the everyday, from games and pastimes to weather lore and cures. In the chapter, “Life on the Land,” Creedon compiles examples of useful farm animals and butter making. This is followed by chapters on thatching, weaving, common foods, and stories from hedge schools. There are chapters on local history and feast days as well. My favorite chapter is the one on ghost stories, where we learn of the headless horseman and ghosts that haunt people for the rest of their lives. I appreciate the variety of texts selected and only wish that there were a chapter dedicated to fairy lore.
While this book provides rich examples of Irish folklore, it lacks any in-depth analysis. I wouldn’t recommend this book for anyone seeking a scholarly interpretation of Irish folklore. It would have been helpful if the author had described his process of selecting, organizing, and editing the texts collected. Were the chosen texts exceptional among many, or were they typical examples among hundreds of similar items? For example, we find several texts dealing with the bean sí (fairy woman). It would be interesting to note how common certain themes are in these texts, such as the frequency of the bean sí combing her hair or screaming into the night. Are most of the encounters with the bean sí through the sound of her scream? Additionally, we don’t learn where the majority of these legends come from. Were they found more commonly in Clare than Wicklow? The Schools’ Collection’s online platform divides its results by county, providing valuable information on distribution. It’s a shame that Creedon left these details out of his work. More context and citations of other texts would have made the work a more critical contribution to Irish folkloristics.
This book would be valuable in an introductory folklore class or in a class on Irish folklore. It provides rich, brief, first-hand accounts that can be further analyzed individually or as a collection. For researchers, this book might provide valuable primary source material for further study. Primarily, I see this book as an enjoyable work that can stimulate the minds of Irish folklore enthusiasts, in or outside of academia. This book will especially appeal to those looking for an introductory, unfiltered survey of Irish folklore for light reading.
[1] https://www.duchas.ie/en/info/cbe
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[Review length: 846 words • Review posted on May 13, 2023]