“He was, if you like, a bastard.” So says “an old-timer” of Co. Longford, Ireland, speaking of William Sydney Clements, the Third Earl of Leitrim, landlord of a 95,000-acre estate extending through Counties Leitrim and Donegal. So despised was Lord Leitrim--by Catholics and Protestants alike--that one April morning in 1878 three of his tenants from the Fanad Peninsula of Co. Donegal ambushed and assassinated him. According to the legends, songs, and a memorial that commemorate the event, these “Fanad patriots” had put in motion an end to the “tyranny of landlordism” locally and throughout Ireland. Likewise, the Lord Leitrim depicted in folklore, popular literature, and journalism came to personify the worst abuses of a corrupt and near-feudal land tenure system. Having selected a resonant topic, one with implications for a better appreciation of the dynamics of folk history and memory, D. K. Wilgus and Eleanor R. Long-Wilgus provide an impressive and at times overwhelming number and variety of texts for consideration--both printed and oral, official and unofficial, poetic and prosaic, collected near the assassination and farther afield, contemporary and later, retrieved from archives and elicited during four fieldwork excursions in Ireland between 1969 and 1987.
Contrasting their book to historical works that seek to discredit oral traditions about Lord Leitrim, Wilgus and Long-Wilgus state that their purpose is not to reconstruct the past accurately but to “record and celebrate the products of folk experience, folk memory, and folk imagination as created and preserved by those who were most directly affected by the career of William Sydney Clements” (xvi-xvii). The first two chapters discuss his reputation as a cruel, capricious, greedy, and lecherous landlord alternately feared and hated by his tenants who, in folklore, occasionally defeat him in brief moral victories. The third chapter discusses popular stories of Lord Leitrim alternately tormenting and being bested by his peers, his agents, and the clergy. In these first chapters and those following, much counter-evidence of his underlying benevolence and good intentions is also produced from contemporary correspondence and written accounts and from later apologist and/or revisionist historians.
Unfortunately, the relentless point/counter-point organization (he was evil/he was misunderstood) becomes slightly tedious but more importantly begins to undermine the stated purpose of the book. If the “real” Lord Leitrim is not on trial here, then the number of rebuttals of the “folk” Lord Leitrim is overkill for the task of suggesting the imaginative and rhetorical license of oral tradition--itself a topic that deserves fuller articulation. This counter-evidence to Lord Leitrim’s popular reputation becomes distracting because it creates an expectation for a very different project the authors claim to disavow: determining what Leitrim was really like, what daily life was really like for his tenants, what really happened that April morning in 1878, what really became of the killers, etc. The result is a potential confusion over which Lord Leitrim is being discussed at any given moment--the flesh-and-blood mortal or the oral-literary character shaped over time by collective political preoccupations and psychological needs.
This confusion is perhaps most pronounced in chapter 4 where the authors provide, from Lord Leitrim’s (the mortal’s) biography, psychological motivations and circumstantial explanations for his (the oral-literary character’s) ill temper and bad behavior. (Briefly put, daddy didn’t like him, and yet when his much-loved big brother died young, the young William was recalled from a happy life in the military.) Much more interesting in chapter 4 are popular beliefs about why this Third Earl was so much worse than his predecessors. Among them: he was literally a bastard, a gypsy or tinker child substituted in infancy, or even more interesting, a fairy changeling. In keeping with the book’s stated purpose, these folk theories deserve more of the main focus and fuller contextualization and interpretive treatment.
Chapters 5 and 6 deal with a battery of versions of early attacks on Lord Leitrim and his agents, the final successful (though apparently protracted and messy) attempt on the landlord’s life, and the lives of the assassins and their accomplices before and after the killing. Chapter 7 is more of an appendix than a chapter, dealing with songs and poems about the assassination. Disappointingly little contextual information and no additional interpretation accompany these poetic texts.
Wilgus and Wilgus-Long succeed in their mission to record and celebrate Lord Leitrim lore, and the narratives they gather are often quite intriguing in their content, style, and variety of permutation. On the Banks of Mulroy Bay, however, is much more successful as a thematically organized and bound archive than as a book. A successful, thesis-driven book would have required at least one more phase of processing, starting with more selectivity with the materials presented. (Also part of that process would be the Chapel Hill Press providing proper copy-editing; egregious typographical errors appear every five to ten pages.) In its current form, however, the project makes somewhat sparse and inconsistent interpretive moves. For instance, the authors construe Lord Leitrim lore generally as a compensatory fantasy of resistance in which the righteous weak triumph through disarming wit and common decency. They also suggest that if Lord Leitrim had not been killed, he may not have become his era’s symbol for the iniquitous legacy of British colonization. These are evocative and potentially persuasive claims that appear too infrequently and beg to be expanded upon, complicated, supported, and/or qualified. The door is open for a more nuanced discussion of the relationship between folk history and memory. Instead the reader mostly gets block quotes from archives and interviews, seven- and eight-deep, where two or three would have covered the range of primary-source perspectives on a given issue. (Still, this offers a fascinating if inadvertent glimpse into intertextuality.) In the end, while On the Banks of Mulroy Bay may be a model of thorough research on a folklore topic of interest beyond our field, it lays the groundwork for a great book but unfortunately does not follow through.
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[Review length: 982 words • Review posted on June 5, 2007]