Half a century after its publication in Irish Gaelic, the Irish Folklore Commission’s Scéalta Cráibhtheacha has been translated into English and released as Miraculous Plenty: Irish Religious Folktales and Legends. The new edition contains 135 religious folk narratives gathered by the Irish Folklore Commission during its massive collection efforts in the 1920s and ’30s.
Former Irish Folklore Commission archivist Seán Ó Súilleabháin compiled Scéalta Cráibhtheacha for its initial release in 1952. Predictably, Miraculous Plenty preserves many of Ó Súilleabháin’s organizational and stylistic inclinations. Chapters are divided by theme—“Our Saviour and His Mother” or “Visits to the Other World,” for example—yet they are also subtly intertwined. The final tale in a given chapter often contains some motif or turn of phrase that recurs in the first tale of the next chapter. Thus, the texts seem to have been arranged fondly, as if they were photographs in an old family album.
Each chapter benefits from Ó Súilleabháin’s introductory commentary, which suggests what can be surmised from the following tales, as well as what cannot. Prefacing a chapter focusing on Irish saints, Ó Súilleabháin reminds readers that “these stories are simply not history, but attempts to fill the gaps left in history” (161).
Finally, a concluding index provides annotations for the tales, naming their tellers, the dates and places of their collection, and in many cases, notes on international variants. From start to finish, such mindful organization lends Miraculous Plenty a pleasing narrative movement of its own.
Particular credit is due to William Caulfield, whose translations artfully capture the syntax and cadences of the Irish Gaelic in which Ó Súilleabháin originally worked. Caulfield’s attention to detail recalls the collections of linguist and folklorist Jeremiah Curtin, who completed similarly effective English translations of Irish folk narratives at the end of the nineteenth century.
Thus presented, the pages of Miraculous Plenty give English-language readers a chance to experience the wonder and terror that Irish-language readers have known in Scéalta Cráibhtheacha for several decades. Here, God recognizes a good farmer’s piety by sparing his fields from a howling storm that ravages the rest of the locality. There, the devil, disguised as a cat, disappears in a shower of sparks as his true identity is revealed. Elsewhere, a young man must thwart the attacks of his dead mother, who has returned from hell with the intention of cannibalizing him. These are not the lives-of-the-saints narratives used to teach Catholic schoolchildren during religion lessons. These are provocative vernacular interpretations of Irish Catholicism at its most pious and profane.
The collection’s sole misstep is a lack of additional contextualization for tales that might be interpreted as anti-Semitic or anti-Protestant. In one tale, Christ addresses the religious doubts of a Jew by turning him into a pig. In another, a Protestant drowns for questioning the authority of St. Colmcille. Several other tales follow along similar lines. Although Ó Súilleabháin’s 1952 introduction offers a blanket apology for harmful content (19), many years have passed since he expressed this sentiment. Today, it is necessary to more deeply explore what is known of the history and use of tales that contain sectarian undertones. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 has established a tenuous yet persistent end to large-scale sectarian violence in Ireland. Subsequent collections of folklore should account for this contemporary social context, even if only to include an orienting footnote for readers who are unfamiliar with advances in the Irish peace process.
Beyond its plentiful successes and minimal faults, Miraculous Plenty also serves to celebrate the life and work of Seán Ó Súilleabháin, who passed away only in 1996. A new introduction by Bo Almqvist describes Ó Súilleabháin as “a great scholar and a good man” in the field of international folkloristics (14). To be sure, Ó Súilleabháin deserves the attention he receives in this regard. Any folklorist working in Europe or North America today is likely to run across his publications at some stage, and folklorists working in Ireland cannot deny the infrastructure he laid for the contemporary study of Irish folk narratives.
However, the point here is to review Miraculous Plenty, which, in short, is everything a collection of narrative folklore should be. It offers a wide variety of stories that are annotated just enough to provide the beginner with suggestions for further study, and to remind the expert of the categories of knowledge used to index Irish vernacular expression at an earlier moment in that country’s folkloristic enterprise. This work is highly recommended for the researcher of folk narratives, Irish or otherwise.
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[Review length: 753 words • Review posted on March 27, 2013]