The Folklore of Ireland is Behind those Hills: The Irish Folklore Commission 1935-1970

UNIVERSITE  RENNES  2  

Mémoire de Master 2 Etudes irlandaises

The Folklore of Ireland is Behind Those Hills: The Irish Folklore

Commission 1935-1970

Jillian KRUSE Sous la direction de Yann BEVANT

Année 2014-15

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TABLE  OF  CONTENTS:      1.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS               3  2.  INTRODUCTION                 4  3.  FOLKLORE  COLLECTION             12     Full-­‐time  Collectors               13     The  Schools’  Scheme               26     Part-­‐Time  Collectors  and  Questionnaires       33  4.  ARCHIVES  OF  THE  COMMISSION         40     The  Swedish  Connection             41     Cataloguing  and  Card-­‐Indexes           46     Classification  and  A  Handbook  of  Irish  Folklore     52  5.  PUBLICATION  AND  INTERNATIONAL  INFLUENCE   57     To  Publish  or  Not  to  Publish           58     Irish  International  Influence           65  6.  CONCLUSION                 74  7.  BIBLIOGRAPHY                 81                        

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:  

I would like to express my profound gratitude to my Director of Research, Dr. Yann Bévant for his advice and support, to the Department of Breton and Celtic Studies at the Université de Rennes 2, and to the staff at the Bibliothéque Centrale Universitaire and the Bibliothéque d’Anglais. I would also like to thank the librarians at the main branch of the Summit County Public Library in Frisco, Colorado for their help in borrowing books and journals through the Interlibrary Loan System. Without them, I would not have been able to complete this study. Finally, I would like to thank all of my family and friends who listened to me drone on incessantly about the Irish Folklore Commission, Séamus Ó Duilearga, Seán Ó Súilleabháin, and the Swedish Connection, and, who graciously agreed to read and give suggestions on this work.

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In the early years of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann), the question of

collecting the oral tradition of the people of Ireland came to the forefront of Irish

society. As the new nation forged ahead, a national identity was being formed with

many looking to the Gaelic past as well as the west of Ireland for inspiration. With

growing concern over the waning of the island’s folk tradition, the Fianna Fáil

government of Éamon de Valera along with the Department of Education agreed to

fund a five-year commission to collect and preserve the folklore of Ireland. The

governmental organization created to carry out this monumental task was founded in

1935 as the Irish Folklore Commission (Coimisiún Béaloideasa Éireann). So great

was the undertaking that the Commission’s terms of service were repeatedly extended

until its incorporation into the Department of Irish Folklore at University College,

Dublin in 19701. Its vast holdings—more than one million handwritten pages of

collected folk material, thousands of photographs, numerous volumes of field diaries,

as well as journals and monographs in English, Irish, and a multitude of other

languages—became the National Folklore Collection.

The Irish Folklore Commission was the first governmental body set up with

the specific purpose to collect, catalogue, and publish the folklore and folk material of

Ireland. Although the first organization of its kind in Ireland, the Commission was

largely based on and drew from the system of folklore collection and cataloguing

pioneered by Swedish folklorists at Uppsala and Lund. Much of the impetus in the

formation of the Commission also came from Sweden. In 1928, eight years before the

Commission was inaugurated, Séamus Ó Duilearga (James H. Delargy)—who

collected folklore during his holidays and who would later become the Honorary

Director of the Commission—was invited by the Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von

                                                                                                               1 Micheál Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission 1935-1970: History, Ideology, Methodology (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2007), 212.

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Sydow to make a tour of Scandinavia in order to benefit from the expertise of

Scandinavian folklorists, ethnologists, and archivists 2 . Ó Duilearga’s travels in

Scandinavia inspired the young Irishman to petition his government for funds to begin

the methodic collection of the folklore of the Irish people. Ó Duilearga met with

several government ministers including Éamon de Valera, President of the Executive

Council at that time. Here too, von Sydow proved to be instrumental: meeting with de

Valera in efforts to persuade ‘the Long Fellow’ of the necessity of such an

undertaking3. De Valera, who idealized and promoted the traditions of rural Ireland,

was sympathetic to the proposal of creating a folklore commission4. With von

Sydow’s help, the Irish Folklore Commission was officially inaugurated on April 2,

1935 ‘to undertake the collection, preservation, classification, study and exposition of

all aspects of Irish folk tradition5.’

Although the Commission was the first governmental body in Ireland to be set

up solely for the purpose of folklore collection, its collectors were not the first to

gather folklore in Ireland. A number of Irish men and women had begun to take an

interest in the folklore of Ireland as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The first published volume of Irish folktales appeared in 1825, as Thomas Crofton

Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. Croker’s published

tales were based on his notes from several walking-tours in the south of Ireland6.

Although Ó Duilearga and the collectors of the Commission were able to discover

versions of folktales similar to those collected by Croker, the early folklorist did not

                                                                                                               2 Séamas Ó Catháin (ed.), Formation of the Folklorist: The Visit of James Hamiliton Delargy to Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia and Germany, 1 April – 29 September 1928 (Dublin: Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, 2008), 5. 3 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 88. 4 Ibid, 107. 5 Ibid, 33. 6 Mary Helen Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980), 48.

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cite his sources, gave little importance or recognition to the storytellers themselves,

and altered some of the material he had gleaned for publication7.

After Croker, members of the Topographical Department of the Irish

Ordnance Survey collected folk material in the mid-1830s. Although the field staff—

namely John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, Patrick O’Keefe and Thomas O’Conor—

was commissioned to document and standardize (anglicize) place-names for the

Survey, they were encouraged by senior officers to collect folklore that would provide

illumination regarding ‘persons, places and events of historical significance and local

relevance8.’ Much of the material collected by the Survey came not from the ordinary

people of Ireland (the ‘folk’ in folklore), but rather from manuscripts or information

provided by the local gentry and clergymen9. This material, although a useful source

of information, was considered by many at the Commission to be inauthentic. Despite

the fact that the folklore collected by the Ordnance Survey did not adhere to the

standards of the Commission, the field diaries that the men were required to keep

were a great source of information about ‘the atmosphere in which the work was

done’ and served as an inspiration for the field diaries that all full-time collectors of

the Commission were required to keep10.

Irish folklorists of the next generation were members of the Irish Literary

Revival, a movement that characterized the intellectual life of last decade of

nineteenth century. Writers such as Lady Augusta Gregory, W.B. Yeats, and John

Millington Synge pulled inspiration from the oral tradition of Ireland and reworked it

                                                                                                               7 Richard Dorson, foreword to Folktales of Ireland ed. and trans. Seán Ó Súilleabháin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1966), v. 8 Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture, and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 86-87. 9 Stiofán Ó Cadhla, Civiliing Ireland: Ordnance Survey 1824-1842: Ethnography, Cartography, Translation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007) 219. 10 Seán Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia on Folklore, ed. Stith Thompson (1953: Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, reprint 1976), 3.

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‘to satisfy the aesthetic taste and artistic sensibilities of the non scholarly public11.’

For his own folklore anthologies, Yeats pulled heavily from printed works of Irish

folktales12. When using material that he had collected, Yeats often neglected to name

his sources and frequently altered the original material using it as inspiration for his

literary works13. The folk material published by members of the Irish Literary was

primarily in English largely neglecting the wealth of material available in the Irish

language. Of the folklorist of the Literary Revival, only Douglas Hyde worked

diligently to collect and write in Irish. Hyde, who was then a professor in Irish

Language and Literature at the National University of Ireland (later University

College Dublin), linked ‘the scientific collection of Irish folktales and folk poetry to

the renewal of the Irish tongue and Irish letters14.’ As such he understood the

importance of acknowledging his sources and served as an important inspiration to the

Commission’s work.

Despite Ireland’s early penchant for the collection of folklore, the creation of a

national collection of folk tradition would have to wait until after the establishment of

the Irish Free State in 1921 to garner sufficient support for the endeavor. In the period

following independence from Britain, the collection of Irish folklore, especially in

Irish, intensified. New provisions made for the Irish language under the new Irish

Free State attempted to bring the language to the forefront of Irish culture and

identity. In 1922, the Constitution of the Irish Free State gave the Irish language

priority by granting it the status of Ireland’s ‘national language15.’ The enhanced

                                                                                                               11 Alan Dundes, “The Message of the Folk-Lorist (W.B. Yeats),” in International Folklorisitcs: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999), 47. 12 Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 75. 13 Ibid, 83. 14 Dorson, foreword to Folktales of Ireland, xxiii. 15 “The Constitution of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) Act 1922, Article 4,” last accessed May 3, 2014, http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/E900003-004.

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position of the Irish language allowed new projects and governmental organizations to

be set up. These organizations helped to define and assess the Gaelic (Irish) identity

of the people and the status of the Irish language. The increased support for programs

dealing with Irish language and the Irish national identity enabled the creation of

organizations such as the Irish Folklore Commission.

Ó Duilearga’s 1928 tour of Scandinavia proved to be as equally important as

the new Irish government’s support to the foundation and methodologies of the

Commission. Invited by Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow to tour

Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, Ó Duilearga was exposed to Scandinavian

methodologies and practices in folklore collection and cataloguing 16 . These

methodologies influenced Ó Duilearga greatly and many were incorporated into the

practices of the Commission. As seen above, von Sydow played an important role in

the formation of the Commission and the Swede’s influence was a constant

inspiration in its inter-workings. Ó Duilearga would even send a number of the

Commission’s staff to train under von Sydow in Lund as well as with Swedish

ethnologist Åke Campbell at the Swedish Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research

in Uppsala. The Commission’s system of cataloguing its materials was primarily

based on and adapted from the Swedish model.

Although the Commission drew inspiration and support from its sister

Swedish organizations, it did not strictly adhere to the Swedish model of collection. In

Sweden, folklorists were generally attached as lecturers or professors to universities

where folklore archives and institutions were set up to further the study of

Folkloristics and Ethnology17. At these institutions, lecturers collected only during

                                                                                                               16 Ó Catháin, Formation of the Folklorist, 5. 17 Nils-Arvid Bringéus, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow: A Swedish Pioneer in Folklore, trans. John Irons (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2009), 76.

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time off from the lecturing positions. Graduate students and questionnaire

correspondents figured heavily in the field collection of folklore in Norway18 and

Sweden respectively19. As the Irish Folklore Commission was not officially attached

to any third-level educational institutions, other provisions were made to carry out the

necessary fieldwork. The Commission’s modest annual grant-in-aid of £3,250 enabled

Ó Duilearga to appoint six full-time collectors along with numerous part-time

collectors in 193520.

The Commission also faced circumstances that were drastically different to

those in the Scandinavia. The Irish language—in which most of the folklore of Ireland

was preserved—was rapidly disappearing. In order to preserve the oral tradition of

Ireland, the Commission and its field collectors would have to act quickly.

Throughout its history, the Commission raced against time to collect lore and tradition

in the Irish language. By the time the Commission had begun to collect folk material,

the Irish language had been ‘driven back to the western rim of the country, along the

Atlantic Ocean 21 .’ In addition to the dwindling number of Irish-speakers, the

Commission and its collectors had to deal with the reality of an aging population of

storytellers and tradition-bearers who were often elderly. To recover Ireland’s folk

tradition, the Commission relied on the efficient work of its field collectors.

During its lifetime, the Commission employed several different types of field

collectors in order to gather the wealth of folk material found in Ireland. The different

types of collectors utilized included: full-time collectors, part-time collectors,

schoolchildren (during the Schools’ Scheme of 1937-1938), and questionnaire

                                                                                                               18 Reidar Christiansen, Four Symposia on Folklore, ed. Stith Thompson (1953: Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, reprint 1976), 18. 19 Åke Campbell, Four Symposia on Folklore, ed. Stith Thompson (1953: Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, reprint 1976), 17. 20 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 526. 21 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 3.

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correspondents. While part-time collectors and questionnaire correspondents were the

main collectors of folklore in the Scandinavian countries, the Irish Folklore

Commission depended on the labors of its full-time field collectors to gather the

nation’s oral tradition. As early as 1940, the Commission had eight full-time

collectors working in the field22. The full-time collectors were largely confined to

those counties that comprised the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas) of Ireland, which

included Counties Clare, Cork, Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Mayo, and Waterford23.

Never before had full-time collectors worked around the clock in Ireland or elsewhere

in the world to gather the folklore of one nation.

Unlike most of the collections of Irish folklore made in the previous two

centuries, the material gathered by the Commission was to be collected in one place

for the common good. The Commission’s archives were to become a place where

scholars and the general population alike were given access to Ireland’s wealth of folk

tradition. In a period of just over thirty years, the Commission was able to amass more

than one million pages of folk material including field diaries, photographs, drawings

and sketches along with numerous sound recordings and volumes of published

material in a variety of world languages24. As the collections of the Commission

grew, a system of cataloguing and classification was needed to organize the material

flowing daily into the Commission’s Head Office in Dublin. Again finding inspiration

in the great folklore archives of Scandinavia, the Commission adapted the Swedish

model to Irish circumstances. The archival staff worked rigorously to compile the

                                                                                                               22 Seán Ó Súilleabháin, Foreword to A Handbook of Irish Folklore (1942: London: Herbert Jenkins, reprint 1963), i. 23 Seán Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 4 (December 1957): 451. 24 Dorson, foreword to Folktales of Ireland, v.

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types of the Irish folktale contributing significantly to the study of International

Folkloristics.

The collection and archival work undertaken by the Commission ensured its

place, along with the Scandinavians, as one of the giants of the study of folklore.

Folklorists and ethnologists from around the world looked increasingly to the

expertise of the Irish for help in starting their own folklore collections. The work of

the Commission both in the field and in the archives served as inspiration to

folklorists as far flung as the Faroe Islands or the United States. Actors, authors, and

filmmakers became regular visitors to the Commission’s Head Office. In an age when

Ireland was looking increasingly inward, the Commission was a truly international

organization whose influence stretched to the four corners of the earth. The

Commission’s successor, the Department of Irish Folklore at University College,

Dublin along with the National Folklore Collection remain key institutions in the

study of both Irish folklore and International Folkloristics.

Despite the influence exerted by the Irish Folklore Commission worldwide,

few publications came out of the Commission in its thirty-five year existence. The

Commission’s almost obsessive scramble to collect what folklore remained left little

time for analysis and publication of the material. As such, much of the material

collected by the Irish Folklore Commission remains un-translated and unpublished.

During the lifetime of the Commission only two monographs were published on its

behalf, while a handful of material was published on the popular market. Only

recently has consistent study and publication begun to come out of the National

Folklore Collection.

Although some historical research has been conducted in regards to the Irish

Folklore Commission, these studies tend to focus on the content of the lore collected,

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on the storytelling tradition, on the various informants of the Commission or on the

foundation of the Commission itself. Few studies have delved into the role of the

Commission’s collectors and no study has been made of the cataloguing and

classification of the Commission’s archives at present. This study will focus on the

work of the Commission’s field collectors along with the efforts of the Head Office

staff to catalogue, classify, and publish the material collected. The study will also

attempt to analyze the influence and legacy of the Commission in the academic study

of International Folkloristics. Part one of this study will focus on the role of the field

collectors of the Commission and their efforts to save the oral traditions of Ireland as

well as the materials and methodologies utilized to complete the undertaking. Part two

will attempt to analyze the development of the Commission’s archives along with the

system of cataloguing and classification used to organize it. Part three will deal with

the Commission’s record of publication as well as the international influence exerted

by the Commission. As I have limited knowledge of the Irish language, this study will

be confined to material available either in translation from the original Irish or

original material collected in English.

Part I: Folklore Collection

The success of the Irish Folklore Commission was dependent upon those

fieldworkers who were employed to collect the folklore, folk music, and folk material

of Ireland. Throughout the lifetime of the Irish Folklore Commission, different types

of field collectors were utilized to amass the wealth of material that now makes up the

world-renowned National Folklore Collection housed at University College, Dublin.

The most prominent among these collectors were the full-time field collectors.

However, the Commission also employed a number of part-time and special collectors

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as well as primary school children and schoolteachers under the Schools’ Scheme of

the 1937-1938 school year. While this section will highlight the work of the full-time

collectors, attention will also be paid to the work of the Commission’s other, less

conventional, field collectors.

Full-time Collectors

From the early days of the Irish Folklore Commission, the full-time field

collector played a crucial role in the collection of Ireland’s folk material. While the

Commission’s Honorary Director, Séamus Ó Duilearga, initially requested a field

staff of ten to fifteen full-time collectors25, the Commission would never have more

than nine full-time collectors at any one time26. During the Second World War –

known as ‘the Emergency’ in Ireland – the Commission’s reduced annual grant

brought the number of full-time collectors down to three.27 These field collectors were

given limited training, sometimes after they started work, and were sent out into rural

Gaelic Ireland to discover the best way to gain peoples’ trust. They faced a

monumental and difficult task, characterized by suspicious locals, a disappearing

language, harsh weather, long hours, low wages, and a lack of job security.

The rewards the Commission reaped were great. More than one million

manuscript pages of folklore material were added to the Commission’s archives over

a period of roughly thirty-five years. In addition to the collection of folklore made by

the full-time collectors, the Commission also amassed a wealth of material culture,

folk music and song as well as proverbs, sayings and dialectal material. Finally, their

                                                                                                               25 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 109. 26 Sean Ó Súilleabháin (ed. and trans.), Introduction to Folktales of Ireland (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1966), xxxiv. 27 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 7.

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attempt to save ‘the last traces, as one may say, of Gaelic civilization28’ helped to

develop the scholarly study of Folklore and to advance methods of collection as well

as archiving which earned the Commission a worldwide reputation as one of the

leaders in Folkloristics.

The full-time field collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission came from

diverse backgrounds. As the academic study of folklore had not yet developed, no

graduate students were available to perform collection for the Commission nor were

there any lectureships in folklore or ethnology with stipends for collection during the

holidays as was common in similar organizations throughout Scandinavia. The

Commission, therefore, had to look elsewhere to find its full-time collectors.

According to the Commission archivist’s, Seán Ó Súilleabháin, they looked for their

collectors ‘among the fishermen along the coast’ as well as ‘to young primary

teachers who had not yet got positions in schools29.’ But how were these full-time

field collectors chosen? What experience or skills were necessary to become a full-

time collector for the Commission? What did working as a full-time field collector

entail?

Bríd Mahon, who worked as secretary to the Commission, states in her

memoir While Green Grass Grows, that Ó Duilearga ‘boasted that he had an unerring

gift for picking the right man or woman for the job30’. Although the academic study of

Folklore was not yet developed in this period, Ó Duilearga did have some criteria to

determine who was eligible to become a full-time field collector. Full-time field

collectors were generally male, native Irish-speakers or proficient in Irish, had local

ties to the community in which they were to collect, and had prior experience as a

                                                                                                               28 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 3. 29 Ibid, 4. 30 Bríd Mahon, While Green Grass Grows (Cork Mercier Press, 1998), 15.

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collector or correspondent with the Commission. The collector might also have been

qualified in a particular field, such as ethnography, that was deemed to be important

by Ó Duilearga.

Gender played an important factor in the employment of full-time folklore

collectors. Although the Commission employed several women as secretaries at the

Head Office in Dublin and occasionally as part-time collectors in the field, no woman

was ever employed as a full-time collector for the Commission in its thirty-five year

existence 31 . The female employees of the Commission were relegated to

administrative duties. Bríd Mahon worked as typist, answered much of the

Commission’s correspondence, and conducted research on behalf of authors or

dignitaries interested in the Commission’s work 32. Máire MacNeill, who was hired as

a secretary for the Commission, performed secretarial duties as well as archival

work33. MacNeill would go on to publish her monumental folk study of the Irish

harvest festival in The Festival of Lughnasa (1977) and both women would gain

recognition as folklorists.

Despite the intelligence and capability of the Commission’s female staff

members, no female folklorist was ever hired as a full-time collector in the field. One

possible reason for this gender inequality was the requirement in Irish Free State that

women working in civil service were expected to either be unmarried or widowed in

order to work. Married women did not gain the right to work until the Civil Service

Act (Employment of Married Women) took effect in 1973; a full three years after the

                                                                                                               31 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 461. 32 Mahon, While Green Grass Grows, 29. 33 Máire MacNeill, “Irish Folklore as a Source for Research,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 2, no. 3 (Dec 1965): 348.

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Commission had been transferred to University College, Dublin34. Another factor that

may have discouraged the employment of women as full-time field collectors was the

informants themselves. The majority of the Commission’s informants were male

storytellers who may not have been willing to recite some of the repertoire in mixed

company35. While this prejudice in favor of male collectors and informants may have

shaped the material collected by the Commission, the Commission did benefit from

the expertise of some female informants—such as the famed storyteller Peig Sayers—

if not from female collectors. The lack of female collectors meant that women such as

Peig Sayers had to relate their tales either to men (Sayers related her tales mostly to

full-time collector Seosamh Ó Dálaigh36), to the collectors’ wives (full-time collector

Michael J. Murphy found his wife, Alice, to be particularly useful in acquiring

information from female informants37) or to no one at all.

The maternal language of the full-time field collectors was another important

factor in determining who would be hired to work for the Commission. Throughout its

existence, the Commission focused on the collection of folklore in the Gaeltacht

(Irish-speaking) districts of rural Ireland where the folktale was believed to exist in its

most traditional form and in greatest abundance38. As of 1961, roughly two-thirds of

the written material collected by the Commission was collected in Irish39. The

Commission’s concentration on collection in the Gaeltacht districts and the Irish

language necessitated a full-time field staff well versed in the Irish language. Work

                                                                                                               34 “Civil Service (Employment of Married Women) Act, 1973, Section 2,” Irish Statue Book produced by the Office of the Attorney General, Acts of Oireachtas, last accessed May 1, 2014, http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1973/en/act/pub/0017/sec0002.html. 35 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 463. 36 Bo Almqvist, “The Scholar and the Storyteller: Heinrich Wagner’s Collections from Peig Sayers,” Béaloideas 72 (2004): 33. 37 Michael J. Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1973), 38. 38 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 54. 39 Caoimhín Ó Danachair, “The Irish Folklore Commission,” The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist 4, no. 1 (Spring 1961): 4.

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done to document and record the different Irish dialects, their pronunciation and

inflections as well as vocabulary and grammar also required the field-staff to be

native or near-native speakers of the different dialects of Irish Gaelic. Therefore, Ó

Duilearga was more likely to engage a native Irish-speaker as a full-time employee of

the Commission than native English-speakers who had either learned ‘school Irish’ or

who spoke no Irish at all.

In the first ten years of the Commission’s existence, only three of its full-time

collectors—Liam Mac Coisdeala, Caoimhín Ó Danachair, and Séamus Ennis—were

non-native Irish speakers all of whom had a command of the language40. Séamus

Ennis impressed informants as well as other collectors with his mastery of Irish, and,

in particular, with his mastery of the different Irish dialects41. Caoimhín Ó Danachair,

who was the Commission’s ethnologist and ‘Mobile Recording Unit’ specialist,

studied Irish at the National University of Ireland42 and would later become a visiting

Professor of Irish Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden 43 . At Uppsala, Ó

Danachair became the Irish Professor of Bo Almqvist who would, in 1971, become

the Director of the National Folklore Collection after the retirement of Ó Duilearga44.

Not until the 1950s did the Commission employ its first full-time collector without

any Irish, Michael J. Murphy45. The Irish-speaking collectors did collect English

language material, however, but with only one full-time English language collector,

roughly eighty-five percent of the material collected by the time of the transfer of the

                                                                                                               40 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 30-31. 41 Ennis, Going to the Well for Water, 300. 42 Patricia Lysaght, “In Memorium: Kevin Danaher (Caoimhín Ó Danachair) 1913-2002,” Folklore 113, no. 2 (Oct 2002): 261. 43 Lysaght, “In Memorium: Kevin Danaher (Caoimhín Ó Danachair) 1913-2002,” 262. 44 Bo Almqvist, “Seán Ó Súilleabháin (1903-1996),” Béaloideas 64/65 (1996/1997): 367. 45 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 232.

  18  

Commission to UCD in 1970 was in Irish 46. The Irish language’s place as the first

language of the Commission ensured that, with one notable exception, prospective

full-time collectors were required to have a command of the Irish language.

Ties to the local communities in which they worked were essential for the

work of the full-time collector of the Irish Folklore Commission. Those full-time field

collectors who were recruited by Ó Duilearga to undertake the Commission’s

collection work were often times intimately acquainted with their informants, either,

because they were collecting within their own districts or had close ties of friendship

or kinship in the area47. According to Bo Almqvist the fact that the collectors were

known in certain districts was a great advantage because ‘[t]hey would not be

mistaken for tax collectors, gunmen on the run, or whatever else a stranger might be

mistaken for48.’ Collectors working in their own districts were often able to collect

from their families and found it easier to understand the local dialect than those

folklorists who travelled to areas outside their home districts. Donegal folklore

collector Seán Ó hEochaidh, who worked as a full-time collector for the Commission

from 1935 through the transfer to the Department of Irish Folklore in 1971 until his

retirement in 1983, collected from his father-in-law Micky MacGowan49. Séamus

Ennis benefitted from having visited the areas in which he collected with his father

when he was younger. Some of the local men and women recognized him from these

trips and Ennis was able to gain their trust more easily than they would have trusted a

                                                                                                               46 Ó Súilleabháin, “Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” Jouranl of the Folklore Institute [Special Issue: The Anglo-American Folklore Conference] 7, no. 2/3 (Aug-Dec 1970): 122. 47 Georges D. Zimmerman, The Irish Storyteller (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 386. 48 Bo Almqvist, “The Irish Folklore Commission: Achievement and Legacy,” Béaloideas 45-47 (1978/79): 6. 49 Micky MacGowan was an Irish-speaker from Donegal who emigrated to the United States, participated in the Klondike Gold Rush, and eventually moved back to Donegal where Ó hEochaidh collected his tale published in English as The Hard Road to Klondike (1962).

  19  

complete stranger50. The sense of friendship and trust were key tools utilized by the

field collectors in order to elicit folk material from sometimes unwilling or bashful

informants.

When a collector did make a foray into an area where he was unknown, the

local population could be unwelcoming and suspicious until becoming better

acquainted with the collector. The suspicion of potential informants, who could deny

having any material, cost the collector precious time in his quest to preserve Ireland’s

folklore. When the collector Michael J. Murphy made his first expedition to collect in

County Tyrone, he met with a great deal of suspicion where some locals asked him if

he was a debt collector ‘or an IRA man on the run51.’ Previous knowledge of the area,

the people living in it, and the local dialect, therefore, was an important asset to any

field collector.

Previous experience with the Commission as a part-time collector also worked

in favor of any prospective full-time collector. At the time of the Commission’s

inauguration in 1935, the study of Folklore as an academic subject had not yet taken

roots and the only route available to those interested in preserving the folklore of their

nation was to become amateur collectors. Many sought out the advice of the

Commission and, if they showed promise, were employed as part-time collectors in

their own areas52. For many this part-time work served as a sort of initiation into the

subtleties of field collection and the more promising of these amateur collectors

would later become full-fledged field collectors working full-time for the

Commission. Collectors Calum MacLean, who collected full-time in Scotland53, as

                                                                                                               50 Séamus Ennis, Going to the Well for Water: The Séamus Eenis Field Diary 1942-1946 ed. Ríonach Uí Ógáin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), 223. 51 Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest, 30. 52 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 69-70. 53 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 300.

  20  

well as Leo Corduff, who took over the ‘Mobile Recording Unit’ after Caoimhín Ó

Danachair54, both started out as part-time collectors before working full-time for the

Commission. Michael J. Murphy also worked as a part-time collector in his own

native County Armagh55 before being recruited by Ó Duilearga to collect full-time in

County Tyrone in 194956. The Commission relied on the experience that these part-

time amateurs garnered in the field to enable them to become successful full-time

collectors.

Collectors with specific skills beyond the collection of folklore could serve as

important members of the Commission’s full-time staff. The Commission employed

four such collectors over varying lengths of time. Calum MacLean—who had been a

temporary cataloguer, part-time collector in Connemara57, and was a native Scottish

Gaelic speaker58—collected full-time in Scotland. Séamus Ennis—a talented musician

and perhaps the most famous uilleann piper—was hired in 1942 to collect folk music

and song full-time for the Commission59. Ó Duilearga, who believed that no one was

capable of collecting folk music60, sought a candidate who could act both as a folklore

collector and who would ‘be able to transcribe both music notation and song lyrics61’.

Caoimhín Ó Danachair—who trained as an ethnologist at the Universities of Berlin

and Leipzig—was recruited by Ó Duilearga in 1945-1946 to take on ‘the ethnological

dimension of the Commission’s work62’. Ó Danachair, who split his time between the

field and the Head Office in Dublin, also operated the Commission’s ‘Mobile

                                                                                                               54 Briody,The Irish Folklore Commission, 343. 55 Ibid, 293. 56 Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest, 7. 57 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 8. 58 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 299. 59 Ríonach Uí Ógáin (ed.), Introduction to Going to the Well for Water: The Séamus Eenis Field Diary 1942-1946 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2009), 4. 60 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 272-273 61 Uí Ógáin (ed.), Introduction to Going to the Well for Water, 4. 62 Lysaght, “In Memoriam: Kevin Danaher (Caoimhín Ó Danachair), 1913-2002,” 261.

  21  

Recording Unit,’ which circulated throughout the island of Ireland as well as on the

Isle of Man recording folk material from the Commission’s numerous informants63.

Finally, the painter Simon Coleman—a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy—

was hired to complete sketches of folk life as well as portraits of the Commission’s

informants64. For each, their specific skill sets allowed them to become full-time

collectors who harvested unique items of folk material and brought them into the

Commission’s archives.

After their initial appointment, full-time collectors were sent out into the field

to begin gathering folk material in earnest. The collectors received a week’s training

at the Commission’s Head Quarters in Dublin65 and were instructed to keep obligatory

field diaries (cinlae) which detailed their fieldwork and daily activities as well as

additional information regarding the different districts in which they worked and any

supplemental information regarding their informants66. The collectors were trained to

transcribe the material they recorded verbatim and were discouraged from making any

‘corrections’ to the material67. Their transcriptions were checked for accuracy at the

Head Office68. They were instructed to record ‘all kinds of information’ including

information which had already been collected ‘in other districts or from other

informants’ as well as any item which may be considered commonplace69. In the early

years of the Commission, full-time collectors were paid £150 a year, allowed a

‘nightly allowance’ for when they were travelling away from their homes, and                                                                                                                63 Lysaght, “In Memoriam: Kevin Danaher (Caoimhín Ó Danachair), 1913-2002,” 262. 64 Patricia Lysaght, “Visual Documentation of Irish Folklore Tradition: Simon Coleman, RHA, in County Donegal, 3-19 December 1949,” in Bo Almqvist et al. Atlantic Currents:Essays on Lore, Literature and Languagg, Essays in honour of Séamas Ó Catháin (Dublin: University Dublin Press, 2012), 101. 65 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 4. Xii. 66 Ó Súilleabháin, Introduction to Folktales of Ireland, xxxiv. 67 Seán Ó Súilleabháin, “Instructions to Collectors,” in A Handbook of Irish Folklore (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1963), xii. 68 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 16. 69 Ó Súilleabháin, “Instructions to Collectors,” in A Handbook of Irish Folklore, xii.

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supplied with materials essential for their recording work70. In later years, this stipend

would reach £350 per year71.

They were issued standardized notebooks, pens, ink, Ordnance Survey maps,

Ediphone recording machines (although not all full-time collectors were given access

to an Ediphone machine), and, after its publication in Irish in 1937 (Láimh Leabhar

Béaloideasa) and in English in 1942, Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s A Handbook of Irish

Folklore. These materials became an integral part in the success of the full-time

collectors and, therefore, the Commission. The standardized notebooks—roughly

twelve by nine inches72—pens, and ink were the bread and butter of the full-time

folklore collector. Collectors were asked to write ‘as neatly and legibly as possible’

and to leave a margin of ‘about half an inch wide’ on the left-hand side of the

notebook so that ‘no portion of the writing [was] hidden from view’ once the

notebooks were bound73. Collectors transcribed the folk material collected into these

standard notebooks along with gummed slips at the head of each tale that detailed

when, where, and from whom the information was gathered in addition to as much

biographical information concerning the informant as could be procured74 and later

sent them in to the Head Office to be bound and catalogued75.

The Ediphone recording machine was one of the most important tools at the

disposal of the field collector. Full-time collectors were supplied with these machines

as well as five or six-dozen wax cylinders that held roughly 1,200 words each76. The

budget of the Commission did not allow it to provide its collectors with an unlimited

supply of wax cylinders, therefore, collectors were encouraged to use the Ediphone                                                                                                                70 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 9. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid, 6. 73 Ó Súilleabháin, “Instructions to Collectors,” in A Handbook of Irish Folklore, xii-xiii. 74 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 6. 75 Ibid, 6. 76 Ibid, 4 and 6-7.

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for longer tales, while shorter items were often written down directly from the

informant77. Not all field collectors were supplied with Ediphones78, however, despite

this fact, the Ediphone became an integral part of the collection methods of the

Commission.

Along with standardized notebooks and the Ediphone, Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s

A Handbook of Irish Folklore (1942) was an indispensible tool for the full-time field

collector. The Handbook served as a ‘guide for collectors of Irish oral tradition79’ and

serves as a ‘huge questionnaire’ used to elicit responses from informants80. It also

contained a list of ‘Instructions to Collectors’ which acted as guidelines to field

collection81. While the Handbook appeared as one 699-page volume for a limited

public, it was subdivided into three separately bound volumes for the full-time

collectors enabling them to slip the different sections into their pockets for

fieldwork82. The Handbook will be discussed in further detail in part two of this study.

Ordnance Survey books and maps were also an important part of the standard

‘kit’ of the full-time collectors. At the Midcentury Folklore Conference held at the

University of Indiana, Bloomington in 1951, the Commission’s archivist, Seán Ó

Súilleabháin, explained that the Ordnance Survey maps were used to plot the progress

of the Commission’s collectors in order to prevent pockets of folklore from remaining

untapped and to show collectors which districts they had already covered83. Collectors

would ‘put down a dot or a cross pointing out the glens, the valleys’ which they had

covered allowing the Commission to see after roughly a year ‘what areas are still to

                                                                                                               77 Ó Súilleabháin, Introduction to Folktales of Ireland, xxxiv. 78 Ennis, Going to the Well for Water, 158. 79 Ó Súilleabháin, “Instructions to Collectors,” in A Handbook of Irish Folklore, xi. 80 Jackson, “Review of A Handbook of Irish Folklore by Seán Ó Súilleabháin,” Folklore 57, no. 1 (March 1946): 44. 81 Ó Súilleabháin, “Instructions to Collectors,” in A Handbook of Irish Folklore, xi-xiii. 82 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 69. 83 Ibid, 7.

  24  

be tapped in that particular district84.’ The Ordnance Survey maps allowed collectors

to map their progress saving the Commission both valuable time and resources. These

materials, utilized by the full-time collector, were essential to his success and that of

the Commission.

In addition to their recording and transcription duties, full-time collectors had

additional duties that took up their time. Frequent visits from foreign scholars

(discussed in depth in part three) pulled collectors away from their regular collecting

duties. Collectors would introduce the foreign visitors to their informants and would

aid them in their research85. Collectors might be asked to help Caoimhín Ó Danachair,

the Commission’s ethnologist in charge of the Mobile Recording Unit, to record

material from various informants86. At times, the collectors were asked to travel to

different districts or counties to help either Ó Danachair or one of the foreign visitors

and they were expected to comply with the Director’s wishes without question87.

They were also asked by Ó Duilearga to complete certain questionnaires with their

informants. Music Collector, Séamus Ennis, had to put his collection of music on hold

in order to complete questionnaires on the Famine88.

The folklore collector was also expected to maintain good relationships with

his informants and the local communities in which he worked. In order to foster good

will with local people and to encourage a rapport with informants, full-time collectors

often offered small gifts to their informants. Gifts, such a glass of whiskey, a pint,

tobacco or snuff, were not uncommon. At Christmas, the Commission sent all of its

                                                                                                               84 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 7. 85 Almqvist, “The Scholar and the Storyteller: Heinrich’s Colletions from Peig Sayers,” 47. 86 Kerryman Tadhg Ó Murchú was directed by Ó Duilearga to act as Ó Danachair’s guide in County Clare. For more information see Patricia Lysaght, “Folklore Collecting in Co. Clare: Tadhg Ó Murchú’s Third Visit (1950),” Béaloideas 76 (2008), pp. 139-192. 87 Patricia Lysaght, “Folklore Collecting in Co. Clare: Tadhg Ó Murchú’s Third Visit (1950),” Béaloideas 76 (2008), 139. 88 Ennis, Going to the Well for Water, 241.

  25  

storytellers four ounces of tobacco89. Collectors also formed close relationships with

their informants and found themselves helping out with tasks in order to ease the load

of their informants. Running errands and doing household chores became secondary

duties of the full-time collector. Séamus Ennis sometimes worked in the field with his

informants, brought them supplies (potatoes or tobacco), or ran errands for them.

Collectors often helped informants to fill out paperwork or contact the proper

authorities in order to profit from government programs and schemes90. For example,

the collectors helped blind informants to receive the blind pension and aided

informants looking to build new houses to secure grants from the government91.

While these small offerings of presents and aid did much to ameliorate the lives of the

Commission’s informants, it also added extra hours of labor to the workday of the

full-time collectors.

The work of the full-time collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission helped

to make the organization into one of the most respected and innovative institutions

devoted to folklore collection in the world. While folklorists in other countries—even

in the Scandinavian countries of Finland and Sweden that pioneered the study and

collection of folklore92—continued to collect during sabbaticals, school breaks or

vacations, the Irish Folklore Commission were the first to send out full-time folklore

collectors into the field. Instead of professionals and academics, the Commission sent

men to work in their home districts ensuring complicity between collector and

informant. The gave them materials and asked them to keep field diaries preserving

the record of both the material collected and the endeavors undertaken to carry out the

mission. The use of full-time field collectors enabled the Commission to become an

                                                                                                               89 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 13. 90 Ennis, Going to the Well for Water, 234. 91 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 13. 92 Campbell, Four Symposia, 17.

  26  

innovator in the study of Folklore and to serve as an example and guide for folklore

collectors in other countries where the quest to preserve the oral traditions of the

nation had not yet taken place.

The Schools’ Scheme (1937-38)

While the full-time field collectors assembled a large portion of the National

Folklore Collection, they were not alone in the gathering folklore and folk material for

the Irish Folklore Commission. During the school year of 1937-1938, the Commission

launched the Schools’ Scheme (Scéim na Scoil): a project to involve Ireland’s school

children in the collection of the island’s oral tradition. Approximately 50,000 children

from the twenty-six counties participated in the Schools’ Scheme93 collecting roughly

half a million pages of material, now the Schools’ Manuscript Collection housed in

the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin94.

During his 1928 trip to Scandinavia, Germany and Estonia future Honorary

Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, Séamus Ó Duilearga met with the head of

the Estonian Folklore Archives (Tartu) one Professor Walter Anderson. From

Anderson, Ó Duilearga learned about the folk material that he had collected ‘through

the school system in Estonia95’. Almost ten years later, Ó Duilearga was to implement

a project to collect folklore through the National Schools of Ireland. The Irish

Folklore Commission’s Schools’ Scheme was launched in July 1937 and came to a

close a little over a year later in December 193896. This project would initiate a

                                                                                                               93 Rosita Boland, “‘Men who could catch horses and rabbits by running after them:’ the Schools’ Collection,” in Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh et al. Treasures of the National Folklore Collection (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 139. 94 Project to digitize the Schools’ Manuscript Collection was launched in December 2013 giving the public access to the Schools’ Collection via www.duchas.ie. 95 Ó Catháin , Formation of the Folklorist, 46. 96 Ó Súilleabháin, Introduction to Folktales of Ireland, xxxv.

  27  

generation of schoolchildren in the folklore of their home districts and provide the

Commission with valuable leads for potential informants.

Shortly after the foundation of the Irish Folklore Commission, Séamus Ó

Duilearga and Seán Ó Súilleabháin approached the Department of Education in

Dublin about the possibility of enlisting primary school children to collect folklore.

The Commission found the Department to be ‘very amenable’ to their suggestions. At

the Midcentury Folklore Conference in Bloomington, Indiana, Commission archivist

Seán Ó Súilleabháin expounded upon the beginnings of the Schools Scheme:

We got what we thought was a brilliant idea— that if we could get the school children in Ireland to help in collecting, a great lot of areas would be tapped which we would never hope to cover by our full-time or part-time collectors97.

The Commission also sought out the cooperation of the Irish National Teachers’

Organisation98. While many of the teachers were initially suspicious of the idea—fear

of the school inspector and how the project would alter their responsibilities played a

major factor—the Commission was able to formulate the program so that ‘the

inspectors would not find fault with the teachers99.’ Ó Súilleabháin, who had been a

schoolteacher himself before he joined the Commission, contrived to make sure ‘that

the teachers would not suffer in any way as a result of this scheme100.’ With the

support of the Executive Council of the Teachers’ Organisation, the Commission was

able to move forward with the Scheme.

Once the Scheme was approved by the Department of Education and the Irish

National Teachers’ Organisation, the Commission launched the Schools’ Scheme in

July 1937. The collaboration with the Department of Education and the Irish National

                                                                                                               97 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 10-11. 98 Ó Súilleabháin, Introduction to Folktales of Ireland, xxxv. 99 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 11. 100 Ibid.

  28  

Teachers’ Organisation went beyond simple approval. While the Commission handled

the organization of the Scheme, the Department of Education provided the schools

with the official notebooks they would use, covered all postal charges associated with

sending the material—to the schools and to the Commission upon completion—and

printed as well as circulated the guidelines drawn up by the Commission101. The Irish

National Teachers’ Organisation worked to persuade their members to cooperate with

the Scheme and endeavored to organize teachers’ meetings where ‘information about

the Scheme and its mechanisms’ would be distributed102.

On behalf of the Commission, Ó Duilearga and Ó Súilleabháin worked

tirelessly to ensure the success of the scheme. They contacted newspapers as well as

radio programmes in order to garner publicity for the Scheme and gave countless

lectures to teachers103. These lectures were designed to put the teachers at ease, to

explain the concept of folklore, and the mechanics of the Scheme. At one lecture in

Ballina (County Mayo), Ó Duilearga’s ‘impassioned appeal for support’ led Micheál

Mac Énri—a school principal at Bangor National School—to enthusiastically endorse

the Scheme. He also actively promoted it among other teachers104. Many of the

schoolteachers in the twenty-six counties wholeheartedly embraced the Schools’

Scheme. The Scheme, however, was not extended to the six counties of Northern

Ireland as the schools there were under the jurisdiction of Westminster and not

Dublin.

                                                                                                               101 Séamas Ó Catháin, “’Scéim na Scoil’: Proceedings from McGlinchy Summer School 1998,” It’s Us They’re Talking About 1 (1998): 4. 102 Ó Catháin, “’Scéim na Scoil’: Proceedings from McGlinchy Summer School 1998,” 4. 103 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 261. 104 Críostóir Mac Cartháigh, “’A Wooden Peg from which Emerged a Rope’: the Work of Erris folklore Collector Micheál Mac Énrí,” in Bo Almqvist et al. Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Language: Essays in honour of Séamas Ó Catháin (Dublin: University Dublin Press, 2012), 58.

  29  

So as not to burden the teachers with extra work, Ó Súilleabháin drew up a

book of guidelines to aid students in their collections. At the Midcentury Folklore

Conference, Ó Súilleabháin elaborated on his role in the guidebook’s composition: ‘I

drew up a little booklet of suggested compositions on folklore topics asking certain

questions. This was printed by the [D]epartment and issued to the schools along with

an official letter105.’ This guidebook, entitled Irish Folklore and Traditions, was teal

with a small ‘stylized image of a fir-tree in a pot on the cover106.’ This guidebook

served as a sort of miniature Handbook. In the foreword, the students were implored

to participate ‘in rescuing from oblivion’ the traditions of the Irish nation107. It was

printed in both Irish and English108 and contained a series of 55 potential topics for

collection and composition109. Some of the topics were:

The Leipreachan or Mermaid; Hidden Treasures; A Collection of Riddles; Weather Lore; Local

Heroes; Local Happenings; Severe Weather; Old Schools; Local Marriage Customs; Local Place-Names; Local Cures; Home-Made Toys; Travelling Folk; ‘Fairy Forts’; My Home District; The Potato Crop; Proverbs; Old Irish Tales110.

The teachers would copy these topics onto the blackboard, the students then copied

these into their notebooks, and, once at home, the students ‘would question their

people or their neighbors111.’ Once the guidebooks were issued, Ó Duilearga and Ó

Súilleabháin went around the country ‘nearly every Saturday and Sunday’ and spoke

to the teachers that were involved in the Scheme112. These lectures allowed Ó

                                                                                                               105 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia of Folklore, 11. 106 Rosita Boland, A Secret Map of Ireland (Boston: Gemma Media, 2005), 96. 107 Boland, A Secret Map of Ireland, 96. 108 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 452. 109 Boland, “ ‘Men who could catch horses and rabbits by running after them’ the Schools’ Collection,” 136. 110 Ibid. 111 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 11. 112 Ibid, 63.

  30  

Duilearga and Ó Súilleabháin to convey the goals of the Scheme to those teachers

who would be actively participating in it as well as allowing the teachers to ask

questions about the operation of the Scheme113. The guidebooks and the lectures

given be Ó Duilearga and Ó Súilleabháin relieved much of the potential burden the

Scheme would have put on the teachers of the National Schools.

The principal teacher from each school114 along with roughly fifty thousand

children115 participated in the Scheme between July 1937 and December 1938.

However, for schools in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford—districts that were

considered to be ‘poor’ in folklore—the Scheme was entirely voluntary116. In the

majority of Ireland’s National Schools, the collecting commenced in earnest in the

autumn of 1937. Senior primary school pupils in the fifth and sixth standards (ages

eleven to fourteen) were asked to question their families and neighbors in order to

glean as much folk material as possible117. The students utilized questions laid out by

the guidebook and assigned to them by their teachers; they were then asked to record

the responses and to write them down in the school copybook118. The collecting that

the students did replaced their normal composition work in Irish or English. Seán Ó

Súilleabháin’s description of the mechanics of the Scheme is worth quoting at length:

The teacher would have a composition on Tuesday or Thursday, and a day or two before he would suggest some of the topics to the children. Especially if there were any festivals going on they would have children inquire at home about the festival and about any stories connected with it. Then when a composition day came the children wrote

                                                                                                               113 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 63. 114 Ibid. 115 Boland, “ ‘Men who could catch horses and rabbits by running after them’ the Schools’ Collection,” 139. 116 Ó Catháin, “’Scéim na Scoil’: Proceedings from McGlinchy Summer School 1998,” 8. 117 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 63. 118 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 452.

  31  

down in the copybook the accounts they had received from their family and other informants119.

The best students—those with the best handwriting and orthography—were

asked to copy the material to the school’s official standardized notebook issued by the

Department of Education120. The Scheme was immensely popular and was extended

until December 31st 1938—the original end date was June 1938—in order to

accommodate the enthusiasm radiating from the schools121. In early 1939, the schools

began to send in their standard notebooks along with the children’s individual

copybooks to the Commission. The notebooks—which totaled roughly 1,125 volumes

or 500,000 pages of manuscript material—were bound ‘in geographical sequence’ by

the Commission’s Head Office staff in Dublin122. The Schools’ Collection is now

housed at University College Dublin as part of the National Folklore Collection. A

joint-project sponsored by the National Folklore Collection at University College

Dublin, Fiontar at Dublin City University, and the Department of the Arts, Heritage,

and the Gaeltacht is now underway to digitize the Schools’ Collection and make it

available to the pubic via the website Duchas.ie.

The Schools’ Scheme of 1937-38 was a resounding success for the Irish

Folklore Commission. Schools and students were enthusiastic about the project, a

large amount of material was collected, and the Commission was able to make

valuable contacts in hitherto untapped districts of the twenty-six counties. The limited

funding of the Commission meant that they were unable to send full-time collectors to

every county in Ireland leaving large areas of the island undocumented in terms of

folklore. Full-time collectors had collected most intensely in the counties of Clare,

                                                                                                               119 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 63. 120 Ibid. 121 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 452. 122 Ibid.

  32  

Donegal, Galway, Kerry and Mayo 123 , but large areas of Ireland remained

undocumented by the Commission. The Scheme gave the Commission a good idea of

the ‘available oral material’ in areas where they had not yet been able to send

collectors124. From the Scheme, the Commission was able determine what districts

might merit further collection and where full-time collectors might be sent in the

future.

The Schools’ Scheme also opened the way for collection via correspondents

and additional part-time collectors. Approximately six hundred teachers were selected

by the Commission to work as local correspondents125. These correspondents replied

to questionnaires sent out by the Commission, sent in collections of their own, and

helped to “open up” districts where full-time collectors had not yet been sent. Once

the Commission was able to send collectors to those districts, they were already in

contact with local schoolteachers who could serve as guides to the Commission’s

collectors. Full-time collector, Séamus Ennis, benefited from the Commission’s

relationship with one such schoolteacher upon his arrival in Mayo to collect the area’s

folk music and song126. With the help of the schoolteacher, Pádraic Ó Moghráin,

Ennis was more readily accepted into the community—therefore, more able to elicit

music and song from his potential informants—than if he had entered the district with

no contact at all. Some of these schoolteachers, such as Micheál Mac Énrí, would also

become part-time collectors for the Commission.

The Schools’ Scheme was essential to the success of the Irish Folklore

Commission. The Scheme came a little cost to the Commission and proved to be a

substantial success. The Scheme enabled the Commission to gage the oral material

                                                                                                               123 Ó Súilleabháin, Introduction to Folktales of Ireland, xxxvi. 124 Ibid, xxxv. 125 Ibid. 126 Ennis, Going to the Well for Water, 176.

  33  

available throughout the twenty-six counties, open up new districts for their full-time

collectors, and provided the Commission with numerous correspondents who would

aid the Commission in its collection of Ireland’s folk material. It preserved valuable

information about folk practices and belief in the twenty-six counties, encouraged

communication between the older and younger generations of Irish men and women,

and it also served to stoke the national interest in the oral traditions of Ireland. The

Commission’s Schools’ Scheme was applauded by the press and served as an example

of unconventional methods of field collection for folklore organizations throughout

the world.

Part-time Collectors and the Questionnaire System:

When the Irish Folklore Commission was inaugurated in April of 1935,

Seámus Ó Duilearga envisioned a staff of at least fifteen full-time collectors gathering

folklore around the clock. The budget of the Commission was, however, limited to

£3,250 a year and keeping a staff of fifteen full-time collectors was not feasible127.

The Commission was forced to look towards other options in order to collect the

folklore of Ireland. As detailed above, one of the options the Commission looked

towards was the Schools’ Scheme, but it was not the only alternative that they

utilized. The Commission also depended heavily on the work of its part-time

collectors and questionnaire correspondents. This section will discuss the role of the

part-time collectors as well as the questionnaire system and the correspondents that

worked to answer them.

In the years leading up to the establishment of the Irish Folklore Commission,

Ó Duilearga and other prominent Irish folklore enthusiasts founded the Irish Folklore

                                                                                                               127 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 3.

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Institute (Institiúid Bhéaloideas Éireann), which relied on part-time collectors to

gather the oral tradition of Ireland. Ó Duilearga, who was made the Honorary Director

of the Irish Folklore Commission, continued to utilize the services of part-time

collectors to supplement the work of the collectors working full-time in the field. The

Commission’s part-time collectors were no less committed than their full-time

counterparts and worked tirelessly to preserve the lore of their nation. Many of the

part-time collectors—both for the Irish Folklore Institute and the Irish Folklore

Commission—would later become full-time collectors for the Commission.

Since the Commission first came into being in 1935, part-time collectors had

been a part of the Commission’s field team. Amateur folklore collectors regularly

contacted the Head Office in Dublin. These aspiring folklorists often times sought

advice on methodologies that could best be used in folklore collection128. While the

Commission offered copies of Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s A Handbook of Irish Folklore to

its full-time collectors, budgetary constraints did not allow them to do the same for

those amateur collectors requesting aid in their own folklore collection. Instead, the

Commission drafted a ‘mimeographed list’ that covered ‘the main heads and subheads

of the whole field of folklore.’ The Commission also sent the prospective collectors a

notebook, gummed slips, and a letter informing the collectors ‘how to use the list’ as

well as a promise to pay them for the material sent to the Commission129. If the

collector showed promise and was willing to take on part-time work as a folklore

collector, the Commission would bring the collector to Dublin where they would

receive limited training130. Part-time collectors were paid—dependent on the value

and quality of the material collected—roughly £5 for filled notebooks of around

                                                                                                               128 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 70. 129 Ibid, 69-70. 130 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 70.

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ninety-six pages131. Part-time collectors who showed unusual talent, such as Calum

MacLean or Michael J. Murphy, were later “promoted” to full-time collectors132.

The part-time collectors employed by the Commission came from a variety of

different backgrounds and districts. They came from both Irish-speaking as well as

English-speaking districts and collected in the areas surrounding their home

district133. As the Commission focused the energies of its full-time collectors on the

Gaeltacht of Ireland, the responsibility of collecting in the English-speaking districts

fell mainly to part-time collectors134. These part-time collectors had ordinary jobs and

worked only in their spare time. Many of these men were schoolteachers, farmers,

fishermen or secondary students who had a passion for the oral traditions of the Irish

nation. They had varying levels of education and some, though they might have been

able to speak Irish, were unable to write it135. Although these collectors only worked

in their spare time, the amount material collected by them—up until the Second

World War—was greater than the output of Commission’s full-time collectors136.

Unlike the full-time collectors, however, part-time collectors were not required to

keep a field diary and the Commission had less control over their work137. While the

general output of the part-time collectors prior to the Second World War was greater

than that of the full-time collectors, the diaries kept by the full-time collectors

provided exhaustive and essential information about the collector’s methods,

experiences, and especially their informants.

                                                                                                               131 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 9. 132 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 451. 133 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 9. 134 Ó Súilleabháin, “Research Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” 117. 135 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 9. 136 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 241. 137 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 9.

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In addition to the part-time collectors, the questionnaire correspondents of the

Irish Folklore Commission played an important role in the Commission’s

accumulation of folklore and traditional material. The questionnaire system was

utilized throughout the history of the Commission. Ó Duilearga first came into contact

with the questionnaire system on his trip to Sweden in 1928, and acknowledged that

the questionnaire system used by the Commission owed much to ‘that Swedish

exemplar’138. In 1936, the Commission issued its first questionnaire in the twenty-six

counties139. It proved to be a success and the Commission continued to issue

questionnaires through its transfer to University College Dublin in 1970.

For the Commission, questionnaires proved to be a very practical source for

collecting folklore and folk material throughout the twenty-six counties. With few

resources available to it, the Commission made every effort to collect the lore of the

island. The questionnaire system enabled the Commission to gather material from

counties ‘where next to no systematic collecting’ had taken place140. While the

Commission issued a few questionnaires before the Schools’ Scheme of 1937-38,

questionnaires were produced more frequently after the Scheme. The Schools’

Scheme had provided the Commission with a plethora of willing correspondents

namely the national schoolteachers who had participated in the Scheme141. The

national schoolteachers made up roughly two-thirds of the Commission’s

correspondents and warranted ‘special praise’ for their endeavors in collection142.

The increased number of correspondents allowed the Commission to issue

questionnaires with increasing frequency. Between 1938 and 1945, the Commission                                                                                                                138 Ó Catháin, Formation of the Folklorist, 29. 139 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 281. 140 Bo Almqvist, “The Banshee Questionnaire,” Béaloideas 42/44 (1974/1976): 88. 141 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 452. 142 Caoimhín Ó Danachair, “The Questionnaire System,” Béaloideas 14, no. 1/2 (June-Dec 1945): 204.

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issued seventeen questionnaires spanning topics such as ‘The Feast of Saint Brigid

(1942)’ and ‘Roofs and Thatching (1945)143.’ These generalized questionnaires were

sent out to roughly five hundred correspondents along with ‘blank paper, gummed

slips’ and ‘a stamped envelope’ to return the material collected to the Commission’s

Head Office in Dublin 144 . The Commission worked to bring many of their

questionnaire correspondents to the archives ‘for three or four days’ and where they

were taken through the catalog ‘in detail145.’ They were encouraged to record any

information in the ‘language in which it is preserved’ as it ensured that the tradition

was ‘preserved exactly as heard’ and provided the Commission with a ‘body of

expressions and terms relating to a particular custom146.’ Correspondents were asked

to return the questionnaires to the Commission even if the responses were negative.

From the responses, the Commission was able to plot on a map the distribution of a

tradition throughout Ireland (Máire MacNeill had been trained to make such maps in

Uppsala, Sweden)147. These correspondents were volunteers only and received ‘as

payment only a free copy of our journal, Béaloideas, each time it [was] issued148.’

They were also made honorary members of the Folklore of Ireland Society149.

From time to time, the Commission would send out a ‘special questionnaire’

to specific correspondents on behalf of Irish or foreign scholars. Special

questionnaires were generally sent out to roughly fifty to one hundred

correspondents150. In addition to compiling questionnaires for Irish and foreign

scholars, many of the questionnaires were compiled in conjunction with the National

                                                                                                               143 Ó Danachair, “The Questionnaire System,” 205. 144 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 10. 145 Ibid, 70. 146 Ó Danachair, “The Questionnaire System,” 204. 147 Ibid. 148 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 10. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid.

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Museum of Ireland 151 . Although the questionnaires issued by the Commission

appeared in both English and Irish, those questionnaires issued on behalf of the

National Museum were produced solely in English152. The questionnaires added a

large amount of material to the Commission’s archives and provided invaluable

information about the folk traditions of Ireland.

The material collected by the questionnaire correspondents proved to be useful

in the study of folk traditions of Ireland as a whole. The questionnaires, which were

compiled in large part by archivist Seán Ó Súilleabháin, focused on ‘a particular

custom, belief, or practice’ that was known throughout country and provided the

Commission with ‘a complete survey of the distribution of one aspect of oral tradition

over the whole country (although the Commission correspondents were generally

limited to the twenty-six counties)153.’ From these questionnaires, a number of in

depth studies on folk beliefs, customs, and traditions were often published by various

folklore societies throughout Ireland and Scandinavia or in the journal Béaloideas that

served as the Commission’s mouthpiece. Studies such as Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s Irish

Wake Amusements (1961) 154 or Máire MacNeill’s monumental The Festival of

Lughnasa (1962)155 drew heavily from material solicited by the questionnaire system.

MacNeill’s study of the harvest festival of Lughnasa, also known as Garland Sunday,

utilized the information recorded by the Commission’s correspondents from the

questionnaire ‘Observances of Garland Sunday’ sent out in July 1945. The

Commission received replies to the questionnaire from some 316 correspondents

                                                                                                               151 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 285. 152 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 10. 153 Ó Danachair, “The Questionnaire System,” 203-204. 154 Séan Ó Súilleabháin, Irish Wake Amusements (Cork: Mercier Press, 1961). 155 Máire MacNeill, The Festival of Lughnasa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

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totaling roughly 1,000 pages of text156. The responses to the questionnaires were

bound together in separate volumes and now make up a whole series in the National

Folklore Collection at University College, Dublin157.

The part-time collectors and questionnaire correspondents proved to be an

integral part of the success of the Irish Folklore Commission. Although they did not

work around the clock, as the full-time collectors did, to preserve the oral traditions of

Ireland, their contributions to the Commission and the preservation of the folklore of

the Emerald Isle were no less impressive. Part-time collectors and questionnaire

correspondents enabled the Commission to collect in areas where they could not

afford to send full-time collectors, to collect more extensively throughout the island of

Ireland, and to initiate collection in English-speaking areas where collection had

hitherto been minimal. The questionnaires served to enlighten the Commission on the

frequency and variants of certain traditions throughout the twenty-six counties and

highlighted which areas might benefit from the presence of a full-time collector.

The collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission made up an indispensible

component of the Commission’s works and proved to be the backbone of the

Commission’s success. Full-time collectors enabled the Commission to collect

thoroughly in Irish-speaking districts—primarily in the western counties of Clare,

Donegal, Galway, Kerry, and Mayo—that were particularly strong in the oral

traditions of Ireland. They also facilitated the collection of material culture and folk

music and the collection of traditional material in Northern Ireland as well as Scotland

and the Isle of Man. The full-time collectors, however, were not the only collectors

who contributed to the assortment of material amassed by the Commission. The

                                                                                                               156 Máire MacNeill, Foreword to The Festival of Lughnasa, (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), ix. 157 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 94.

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Schools’ Scheme opened up untapped districts to the Commission, gave them a good

idea of what type of material was to be found there, and provided them with

correspondents on the ground who served as informants for the highly successful

questionnaire system. Part-time collectors supplemented the work of the full-time

collectors and worked diligently during their spare time to provide the Commission

with much valuable material and many fruitful leads. The collectors, however, were

not the only ones who worked tirelessly to ensure the success of the Commission. The

second part of this study will examine the construction and cataloguing of the

Commission’s archives in Dublin.

Part Two: Archives of the Irish Folklore Commission

Perhaps the crowning glory of the Irish Folklore Commission is the National

Folklore Collection (NFC) housed in the Newman building on the Belfield campus of

University College, Dublin. The Collection contains over a million handwritten pages

of folklore material along with numerous photographs, sound recordings, drawings

and sketches as well as a large collection of international journals and folklore

material in a variety of languages. While the NFC continues to grow, the great

archives was started under the leadership of Séamus Ó Duilearga and expanded under

the Irish Folklore Commission until its transfer to UCD in 1970. A significant portion

of the material was collected and catalogued during the lifetime of the Commission

and its Head Archivist, Seán Ó Súilleabháin. Following the Swedish example, Ó

Súilleabháin created a classification system containing several card-indexes which

worked to organize the material collected by the Commission into a logical archives

ready for use in scholarly research. In addition, Ó Súilleabháin combed the

Commission’s material in order to develop a comprehensive guide for potential

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researchers as well as its collectors This guide, entitled A Handbook of Irish Folklore,

not only detailed the classification of the Commission’s material, it also served as a

comprehensive guide to the types of material that could be found in the Commission’s

archive. This section will focus on the archives of the Irish Folklore Commission, its

connections to the study of folklore in Sweden as well as the cataloguing and

classification of its material.

The Swedish Connection

After the transfer of the Commission’s Archives to University College, Dublin

in 1970, Séamus Ó Duilearga became the Director of what is now the National

Folklore Collection. Upon his retirement in 1971, Ó Duileargas was replaced by

Professor Bo Gunnar Almqvist158. That Almqvist, a Swede, succeeded Séamus Ó

Duilearga as Director of the National Folklore Collection is no coincidence. From the

early days of the Irish Folklore Commission, and even before its inauguration, the

folklorists of the Scandinavian countries—and Sweden in particular—played an

important role in the development of the study and classification of folklore in

Ireland. The ‘Swedish Connection’ proved to be influential in the success and acclaim

that the Commission garnered worldwide.

The Commission’s Swedish connection can be traced back to 1927, roughly

eight years before its foundation. In the spring of 1921, a young Séamus Ó

Duilearga—then a student of Celtic Studies at University College, Dublin—met a

‘friendly stranger from Norway’ in a Dublin bookshop159. The Norwegian turned out

to be Reidar Thorolf Christiansen, archivist of the Norwegian Folklore Collection in

                                                                                                               158 “Swedish Scholar at the Summit of Irish Folklore Studies, Bo Gunnar Almqvist: May 5th, 1931-Nov 9th, 2013,” Irish Times, November 16, 2013. 159 Séamus Ó Duilearga, “A Personal Tribute: Reidar Thorolf Christiansen (1886-1971),” Béaloideas 37/38 (1969/`970): 345.

  42  

Oslo (Norsk Folkeminnesamlingen)160. The two kept in contact and six years later

when Christiansen gave a series of lectures at University College, Dublin, Ó

Duilearga met the man who would become so important to the success of the Irish

Folklore Commission: the Swede, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow161. Shortly after their

initial meeting, von Sydow—who was felt a great affinity with Ó Duilearga—

approached the President of University College, Dublin, and was able to ‘secure a

stipendium’ for Ó Duilearga, which enabled him to travel to Scandinavia in order to

study under the great folklorists of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland162. On

April 1, 1928, Ó Duilearga left Dublin for Lund in Sweden in order to study under

von Sydow. During his six months in Scandinavia, Ó Duilearga visited many folklore

archives and folk museums throughout the region including: The Danish Folklore

Archive (Dansk Folkemindesamling) in Copenhagen, The Swedish Institute for

Dialect and Folklore Research (Landmáls- och Folkminnesarkivet) in Uppsala, The

Nordic Museum (Nordiska Museet) in Stockholm, The Norwegian Folklore

Collection (Norsk Folkeminnesamling) in Oslo, and The Estonian Folklore Archives

in Tartu.

Ó Duilearga’s time in Scandinavia proved to be essential to the young

folklorist’s education and when the Irish Folklore Commission was inaugurated in

April 1935, Ó Duilearga looked to his Scandinavian colleagues for guidance. Ó

Duilearga quickly realized that the Commission would need an archivist to catalogue

the material pouring in from the field. In March 1935, he recruited Seán Ó

Súilleabháin to fill the position163. Before his recruitment to the Commission, Ó

                                                                                                               160 Ó Duilearga, “A Personal Tribute: Reidar Thorolf Christiansen (1886-1971),” 345. 161 Ibid. 347. 162 Ó Catháin, Formation of the Folklorist, 5. 163 Patricia Lysaght, “Seán Ó Súilleabháin (1903-1996) and the Irish Folklore Commission,” Western Folklore 57, no. 2/3 (Spring-Summer 1998): 139.

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Súilleabháin had worked as a schoolteacher and collected folklore in his native

County Kerry164. He had no experience in archival work, but Ó Duilearga agreed to

give the position to Ó Súilleabháin on the condition that he travel to Sweden for

training165. Ó Duilearga would regularly look to Sweden in order to train his Head

Office and cataloguing staff.

In the spring of 1935, Ó Súilleabháin was sent to Sweden where he was

‘trained as Archivist for the cataloguing of folk-traditions166.’ He spent a week in

Lund—one of the branches of the Swedish Dialect and Folklore Archive—studying

under C.W. von Sydow. In Lund, the Swedish folklorist showed him the system of

classification used at the archive167. Ó Súilleabháin continued onto the Archive in

Uppsala, which was housed by the University there. Ó Súilleabháin spent three

months at the Archive in Uppsala. He studied under the Swedish ethnologist Åke

Campbell, with whom he became close friends, and, who, according to Ó

Súilleabháin, taught him ‘most of what I know now about archiving168.’ Máire

MacNeill and Caoimhín Ó Danachair would also be sent to Sweden in order to study

under the great Scandinavian folklorists and ethnologists who worked there. Mac

Neill spent ten weeks in Lund and Uppsala where she learned to make the tradition

maps utilized to map information supplied by the questionnaire system169. Caoimhín

Ó Danachair spent two months in Scandinavia visiting many of the same institutions

that Ó Duilearga himself had visited. As Ó Danacháir was to be the Commission’s

ethnologist and collector of material culture, his visit to the Nordic Museum in

Stockholm and its outdoor folk museum at Skansen were particularly important to his                                                                                                                164 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 4. 165 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 324. 166 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1942) vii. 167 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, vii. 168 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 4. 169 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 325-326.

  44  

Scandinavian education170. The training undertaken by members of the Commission’s

Head Office staff was essential to the successful organization and cataloguing of the

Commission’s folklore collection.

Although this study focuses on the work of the Irish Folklore Commission,

some enlightenment in regards to the history of Swedish folklore collection and the

Swedish classification system—particularly as used at the folklore archives of

Uppsala and Lund—is needed. Folklore collection in Sweden started relatively early

on and the scholarly collection of folklore in Sweden began as early as the 1870s171.

The Swedish Institute of Dialect and Folklore Research was founded by folklorist

Herman Geijer in 1914, more than twenty years before the Irish Folklore

Commission172. Much like the Commission, the Swedish Institute was responsible to

the Ministry of Education and had strong ties to the University of Uppsala where

some of its staff also taught173.

The Archive was organized into four separate branches that received material,

at least in theory, from the different provinces of Sweden. Uppsala was responsible

for northern Sweden, Lund for southern Sweden, Göteborg for western Sweden, and

Stockholm for the entire nation174. Once material was returned to the different

archives—the Swedish used sheets of papers rather than notebooks to collect—it was

stored in envelopes ‘containing only one type of folklore175.’ Each item in the

envelope was stamped with an ‘entrance number’ and was filed in geographic order

‘for every Swedish province (landskap), and in alphabetical order within these groups,                                                                                                                170 Lysaght, “In Memoriam: Kevin Danaher (Caoimhín Ó Danachair), 1913-2002,” 262. 171 Stith Thompson, “Folklore Trends in Scandinavia,” The Journal of American Folklore 74, no. 294 (Dec 1961): 313. 172 Folke Hedblom, “The Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research,” The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist 4, no. 1 (Spring 1961): 1. 173 Hedblom “The Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research,” 1. 174 Thompson, “Folklore Trends in Scandinava,” 315. 175 Manne Eriksson, “Indexing Materials for the Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research at Uppsala, Sweden,” The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist 4, no. 1 (Spring 1961): 2.

  45  

according to the field collectors’ names176.’ The Swedish archives also utilized the

Aarne-Thompson Tale Type-Index System—an international folktale type-index

system originally developed by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne and later enlarged upon

by American folklorist Stith Thompson—to classify the folktales collected throughout

Sweden.177 A detailed subject-index was made to facilitate research and was created

‘depending upon the type of materials indexed and the interests of the particular

archive178.’ According to Ó Súilleabháin, ‘it was a subject-index, and every item of

traditional information which could be construed as folklore came within its ample

scope179. The subject-index—also called systematic index—contained the following

headings:

A) Settlement and dwelling; B) Livelihood and household support; C) Communication and trade; D) The community; E) Human life; F) Nature; G) Folk Medicine; H) Time and division of time; I) Principles and rules of popular belief and practice; J) Myths; K) Historical tradition; L) Individual thoughts and memories; M) Popular oral literature; N) Music; O) Athletics, dramatics, playing, dancing; P) Pastimes, card games, betting, casting lots, toys; Q) Architecture, R) Special ethnic units; S) Swedish culture in other countries; T) Traditions about foreign countries and people; U) Additional180.

These card-indexes also functioned as a ‘shelf or finding index’ to help researchers

locate specific material within the archives themselves181.

                                                                                                               176 Eriksson, “Indexing Materials for the Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research at Uppsala, Sweden,” 2 177 Thompson, “Folklore Trends in Scandinavia,” 316. 178 George List, “Archiving,” in Folklore and Folklife: an Introduction, ed. Richard Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972): 461. 179 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, vii. 180 Eriksson, “Indexing Materials for the Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research at Uppsala, Sweden,” 2. 181 List, “Archiving,” in Folklore and Folklife: an Introduction, 461.

  46  

This was the system of cataloguing and classification that Ó Súilleabháin

learned during his three month sojourn in Sweden. Upon his return to Dublin, Ó

Súilleabháin dove into his archival duties in earnest. Although not identical to the

Swedish system of classification, the system that Ó Súilleabháin devised for the

archives of the Irish Folklore Commission was largely based on the Swedish system

and the methods of classification that he learned in Lund and Uppsala. The Swedish

connection forged by Ó Duilearga in the 1920s continued to be influential to the

collection and classification of folklore in Ireland throughout the lifetime of the Irish

Folklore Commission and beyond. This special relationship between Irish and

Swedish scholars was reaffirmed with the selection of Bo Almqvist as Director of the

National Folklore Collection after the retirement of Séamus Ó Duilearga in 1971.

Cataloguing and Card-Indexes

When the Irish Folklore Commission came into being in April 1935, no great

archive of the nation’s folklore existed. Collection of folklore in Ireland had begun in

the early 19th century, but had served as literary inspiration for those authors who took

an interest in such things, rather than as the beginning of a great folklore archive182.

Authors such as Thomas Crofton Croker, the American Jeremiah Curtin, Sir William

and Lady Wilde, Lady Gregory, and W.B. Yeats wove the folklore they collected into

their stories and poems183. The source material—and those who provided it for that

matter—however, was not preserved in its original form. Vast sources of collected

oral material did not await cataloguing or filing in an archives. Nor did the Folklore of

Ireland Society, founded in 1930 by Ó Duilearga and others, amass enough material

                                                                                                               182 Dorson, Foreword to Folktales of Ireland, v. 183 For more information regarding these early “folklorists” see Georges D. Zimmerman, The Irish Storyteller (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).

  47  

to warrant a classification system. Only when the material harvested by the field

collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission began to arrive at the Head Office in

Dublin did the problem of cataloguing begin to present itself.

In a relatively short period of time, the archives of the Commission began to

grow almost exponentially. With six field collectors—Liam Mac Coisdeala (Counties

Galway, Mayo and Clare), Prionnsias de Búrca (Counties Galway and Mayo), Seán Ó

hEochaidh (Counties Donegal, Galway and Sligo), Tadhg Ó Murchadha (Counties

Kerry, Cork, and Clare), Liam Mac Meanman (County Donegal), and Nioclás

Breatnach (Counties Waterford and Tipperary)184—working in the field full-time, the

inaugural year of the Commission saw an influx of material flood into the Head

Office. At the Midcentury Folklore Conference in Bloomington, Indiana, Ó

Súilleabháin stated that it was normal for the Commission’s full-time collectors to

write around one hundred pages a week185. In addition to the oral material they

collected, the full-time collectors were expected to keep a field journal of their daily

activities. In the mid 1960s, the Commission had roughly one hundred and fifty

volumes of collector diaries186. Additional material from the Commission’s part-time

collectors and questionnaire correspondents also flowed into the Head Office making

it difficult for the archival staff to keep pace. In all, more than a one and half million

pages of handwritten material were collected and sent to the Head Office for

cataloguing and classification between 1935 and 1970187.

In addition to the material sent in by collectors and correspondents, the

Commission’s contained printed material from Ireland and abroad. During his 1928

                                                                                                               184 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 526. 185 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 8 186 Ó Súilleabháin, Introduction to Folktales of Ireland, xxxiv. 187 Seán O Súilleabháin and Reidar Christiansen, Preface to The Types of the Irish Folktale (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1963), 6.

  48  

voyage to Scandinavia, Ó Duilearga had diligently purchased books—in Danish,

Estonian, Finnish, German, Norwegian, and Swedish—for the library of the Folklore

of Ireland Society. Ó Duilearga also established a series of exchanges between the

journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, Béaloideas, and several journals from the

different folklore organization of Scandinavia188. These acquisitions were passed on

to the Commission upon its foundation in 1935189. The materials that came to the

Commission from the Folklore of Ireland Society numbered around one hundred

volumes190. The Commission’s foreign book collection expanded over the years to

contain works in various languages including Frisian, Faroese and Icelandic191. Some

acquisitions came from generous gifts from the Commission’s sister organizations

worldwide, others were purchased with funds from the Commission’s annual grant-in

aid. The personal library of Swedish folklorist, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, was

donated to the Commission after he passed away in 1952192. This large collection of

printed material along with the manuscript collections of the Commission make up

what is now the National Folklore Collection housed at University College Dublin.

All of the material sent into the Commission required sorting, cataloguing and

classification. In the spring of 1935, Commission archivist, Seán Ó Súilleabháin

travelled to Uppsala in Sweden to receive training at the hands of the Swedish

ethnologist, Åke Campbell, then working as the archivist of the Swedish Institute of

Dialect and Folklore Research. In Sweden, Ó Súilleabháin was trained in the

‘Swedish Classification System’ and gained invaluable experience from his Swedish

colleagues. At the Commission’s Head Office in Dublin, Ó Súilleabháin began to

                                                                                                               188 Ó Catháin. Formation of a Folklorist, 29-30. 189 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 132. 190 Ibid. 191 Bo Almqvist, “Icelandic Metrical Romances,’ in Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh et al. Treasures of the National Folklore Collection (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 34. 192 Bringéus. Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, 177.

  49  

catalogue and classify material based on the Swedish model193. Ó Súilleabháin also

worked tirelessly to bind the materials and paginate them making them more suited to

cataloguing and use by future researchers194.

Ó Súilleabháin organized the work of the Commission into four different

sections, which, in turn, formed the Commission’s Archives. These sections were: (a)

Card-index of Informants; (b) Card-index of Collectors; (c) Card-index of Areas; and

(d) Subject-index195. While the use of the card-index was prevalent in the Swedish

system, it tended to focus on cataloguing the material geographically with the

collector featuring as a secondary form of cataloguing within the geographical areas.

In the Swedish system, the collectors were indexed in alphabetical order according to

the provinces they collected in and the informants were not indexed at all196.

In the Irish model established by Ó Súilleabháin, card-indexes were created

for the informants who gave the information, the collectors who recorded the material

and the areas from which the material was recorded as well as an additional subject-

index that gave information as to certain motifs collected. The development of the

four sections of card-indexes allowed the archives of the Folklore Commission to

become more approachable to potential researchers. If a scholar were interested in a

particular informant or collector they need not look through the geographically

organized card-index, but rather, they would need to search only for the collector’s or

informant’s name in either the Card-index of Collectors or the Card-index of

Informants. Likewise, if a researcher wanted to study the material collected in one

county in particular, they need only to search the Card-index of Areas.

                                                                                                               193 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, viii. 194 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 327. 195 Ó Súilleabháin, “Research Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” 119-120. 196 List, “Archiving,” in Folklore and Folklife: an Introduction, 461.

  50  

The four card-indexes were organized and completed as the material flowed

into the Commission’s Head Office. In an article written for the Journal of the

Folklore Institute in 1970—the Commission’s last year of service—Ó Súilleabháin

commented on the progress of each of the indexes detailing the work that had already

been completed. The cataloguing of the Card-index of Informants was completed for

the main collection, roughly 1,746 volumes, and ‘the names and addresses of all

informants [were] listed on cards, in alphabetical order, giving the MS197. Roughly

30,000 informants were listed in this card-index. The index also indicated the volume

and page number where the material could be found along with the name of the

collector who gathered the information198. The Card-index of Collectors contained

nearly 4,000 cards, which account for all of the different types of collectors except for

the Schools’ Collection199. The Card-index of Areas was also complete for the main

collection and the cards had been ‘arranged under Provinces, with sub-divisions of

counties, baronies and parishes or districts200.

The Subject-index, however, was another matter. Ó Súilleabháin, who had

been working on the index since 1935, was convinced that it ‘would require a

cataloguing staff of six persons for twenty years’ to finish the index201. As of 1970,

only one-quarter of the main collection had ‘been excerpted in a proper manner

(according to the Irish adaptation of the Uppsala cataloguing system […] laid out in

English in A Handbook of Irish Folklore)202.’ Ó Súilleabháin estimated that the

limited cataloguing staff—namely Ó Súilleabháin himself and occasionally one other

staff member—had managed to create roughly 250,000 reference cards, but that the

                                                                                                               197 Ó Súilleabháin, “Research Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” 119. 198 Ibid. 199 Ibid, 120. 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid.

  51  

main collection would require upwards of a million cards203. The Subject-index was

particularly important because it enabled the Commission to open their manuscript

collections to international scholars. It streamlined the research process in regards to

particular motifs and folktale types for potential researchers opening the

Commission’s Archives to Comparative Folkloristics.

Although Ó Súilleabháin continued to work on the Subject-index, the

Commission decided in 1950 to start an interim-catalogue. The small annual grant-in-

aid from the Irish government was often not enough to provide adequate staffing in

the field or at the Head Office. Ó Súilleabháin, who also directed field-collectors and

questionnaire correspondents by letter, was stretched thin in an effort to catalogue the

wealth of material coming in daily to the Commission’s headquarters. While Ó

Súilleabháin occasionally had help cataloguing the task was too monumental to be

completed quickly. According to Ó Súilleabháin, the collections had become so large

that they ‘had grown far beyond the range of the cataloguers power to deal with

them204.’ By 1950, only one-twentieth of the material had been catalogued for the

Subject-index205. The creation of an interim catalogue was decided upon to aid

researchers until the Subject-index could be completed. Ó Súilleabháin explained the

Commission’s Interim catalogue as follows:

That is for each bound volume we leaf through it and we make a typed sheet of its contents. We list all folk tales under the Aarne-Thompson numbers if they are

of that type. Other folk tales we summar- ize. If they are heroic Irish folk tales we put them under the title by which they are usually known. The rest we more or less

                                                                                                               203 Ó Súilleabháin, “Research Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” 120. 204 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man.” 454. 205 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 101.

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lump together206.

The Interim catalogue was completed five years later. It contained 1,243 volumes

from the Main Manuscript Collection and 1,126 volumes from the Schools’

Manuscript Collection207. The Interim catalogue allowed Ó Súilleabháin to continue

cataloguing material for the Subject-index while allowing the Commission to have a

record of the material found in each volume.

While the Commission’s cataloguing system was not identical to the system

devised in Sweden, it pulled heavily from its framework. Ó Súilleabháin used

Swedish methods and adapted them to the Irish context providing a system which

emphasized the collectors and informants rather than where the material was

collected. By the Midcentury Folklore Conference in 1950, folklorists in other

counties were implementing either the ‘Swedish system’ or the ‘Irish system’ in their

own folklore archives208. The Irish cataloguing system as well as the wealth of

material amassed by the Commission enabled the Commission to become a well-

respected and world-renowned organization in a span of just fifteen years.

Classification and A Handbook of Irish Folklore

The material of the Commission’s archives needed classification in addition to

cataloguing. While creating a card-index catalogue the Commission was able to

organize their archives in a systematic manner that facilitated research, a classification

system would allow the Commission’s material to have international relevance. By

creating a subject-index along the lines of those utilized in Sweden, the Commission

                                                                                                               206 Ibid. 207 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 455. 208 Stith Thompson (ed.), Four Symposia on Folklore (1953: Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, reprint 1976), 95.

  53  

was able to open its material up to scholarship in Comparative Folkloristics. As

Ireland had been long isolated from the rest of Europe, Irish folklore and myth were

considered to be particularly important to decoding the origins of many international

folktales. Therefore, a clear, organized system of classification was necessary in order

to provide scholars internationally with a means of delving into the wealth of material

amassed by the Commission.

The classification of the material pouring into the Commission’s archives was

born of the system of cataloguing developed by Head Archivist Seán Ó Súilleabháin.

Like the card-indexes used to create a catalogue of the Commission’s manuscripts, the

new classification system was largely based on a Swedish model observed by Ó

Súilleabháin during his training at the Swedish Institute of Dialect and Folklore

Research in Uppsala209. The classification of folklore material in Uppsala was largely

based on the Subject-index catalogue. The Swedish Subject-index catalogued outlined

twenty-one main categories of subject matter and motifs common in Swedish

folklore210. Seeing the ‘suitability’ of the Swedish system, Ó Súilleabháin began to

build an adapted Subject-index211. The advantage of a Subject-index, according to Ó

Súilleabháin was that ‘every item of traditional information which could be construed

as folklore came within its ample scope’ allowing a comprehensive and systematic

cataloguing and classification of the varied material collected by the Commission212.

Although work to complete the Subject-index was slow, Ó Súilleabháin was

nonetheless able to successful implement the system in the Commission’s archives.

Utilizing the Subject-Index, Ó Súilleabháin was able to classify the

Commission’s folklore material into fourteen main categories covering all aspects of

                                                                                                               209 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, vii. 210 See pages 45-46. 211 Ó Súilleabháin, “Research Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” 120. 212 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, vii.

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Irish folklore and folk life. These main categories borrowed heavily from the Swedish

system, however, Ó Súilleabháin shrewdly adapted several of the categories to be

more suited to material in the Irish archives. Ó Súilleabháin found these ‘minor

changes’ were necessary in order ‘to cope with the various types of traditions found in

Ireland213.’ The main categories devised by Ó Súilleabháin were as follows:

1) Settlement and dwelling; 2) Livelihood and household support; 3) Communication and trade; 4) The Community; 5) Human life; 6) Nature; 7) Folk Medicine; 8) Time; 9) Principles and rules of popular belief and practice; 10) Mythological tradition; 11) Historical tradition; 12) Religious tradition; 13) Popular oral literature; and 14) Sports and pastimes214.

Ó Súilleabháin utilized fewer categories believing that the ones he did not use could

be incorporated into the others. Ó Súilleabháin also added ‘Religious Traditions,’ a

category, which ‘occup[ied] a prominent place in Irish oral tradition’ and had been

omitted from the Swedish system215. Although Ó Súilleabháin did perform some

alterations to the Swedish system in order make it more suited to Irish material, his

system of classification was generally considered to be an accurate translation of the

Swedish system for English-language Folkloristics216.

A detailed rendering of Ó Súilleabháin’s classification system was published

as A Handbook of Irish Folklore (1942)217. A Handbook served simultaneously as a

‘key’ to the material available in the Commission’s archives and as a guide to folklore

collectors in the field218. It was also considered by many international folklorists to be

                                                                                                               213 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, viii. 214 Ó Danachair, “The Irish Folklore Commission,” 1. 215 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, viii. 216 Hedblom, “The Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research,” 1. 217 A reprint was issued in 1963. 218 Almqvist, “Seán Ó Súilleabháin (1903-1996)” 336.

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‘a key in English to the Swedish archive arrangements219.’ Ó Súilleabháin’s 699-page

Handbook was formatted as a series of several thousand lines of questions regarding

the folk traditions of Ireland. It was divided into fourteen main categories (see above).

Each of these fourteen main categories was sub-headed by a short explanation of the

category as well as recommendations for collection. The main categories were then

subdivided again into several hundred subsidiary headings including a lengthy list of

varied topics such as townlands, fishing, livestock, travellers, place-names, women

and girls, waterfalls, Garland Sunday, etc. According to Ó Súilleabháin, each example

in the monumental volume was taken from traditions that actually existed and had

already been compiled by the field collectors of the Commission220.

In addition to working as a key to the Commission’s archives and

classification system, the Handbook also served as a guide to the Commission’s

collectors as well as an example to international folklorists. Ó Súilleabháin’s

Handbook had originally been published in 1937 as a concise Irish-language volume

entitled Laímhleabhar Béaloideasa (it was only about 120 pages)221. In 1942, the

volume was expanded and republished in English under the title A Handbook of Irish

Folklore. In the Handbook, Ó Súilleabháin created a detailed set of instructions with

fourteen points that he found to be particularly important for the success of the field

collector222. The Handbook itself was meant for field use and Ó Súilleabháin

encouraged collectors to ‘work through’ the volume ‘chapter by chapter223.’ In order

to make the Handbook a practical guide for the field, the Commission subdivided it

into three separate sections, which made it possible for the Commission’s collectors                                                                                                                219 Stith Thompson, “Review of A Handbook of Irish Folklore by Seán Ó Súilleabháin,” American Anthropologist 66, no. 4 (Aug 1964): 963. 220 Ó Súilleabháin, Preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, ix. 221 Ó Súilleabháin, Introduction to Folktales of Ireland, xxxiv and Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 5. 222 Ó Súilleabháin, “Instructions to Collectors,” in A Handbook of Irish Folklore, xi-xiii. 223 Ibid, xi.

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‘to slip these sections into their pockets while they go around working in the field224.’

Full-time collector, Michael J. Murphy, found the volume to be invaluable in his

fieldwork and referred to it as a ‘600-page questionnaire’ that he could not hope to get

through with his informants in a period of less than ten years225.

While Ó Súilleabháin’s Handbook served as an invaluable guide to collectors,

its contribution to international fokloristics was its unparalleled and detailed

representation of the classification system utilized by the Commission and pioneered

by the Swedish Institute of Dialect and Folklore Research in Uppsala. Although Ó

Súlleabháin’s Handbook was the first comprehensive guide to the classification of

folklore, he owed a great deal to the Swedish system from which his own system was

adapted. Ó Súilleabháin acknowledged his Swedish colleagues226 in the Introduction

to his Handbook and dedicated his work to ‘the Swedish People whose scholars

evolved the scheme of folklore classification outlined in these pages 227 .’ The

Handbook was recognized worldwide as ‘a guide to anyone setting up an archive or

even a small collection of folklore materials228.’

While the collection of folklore proved to be the Commission’s main mission,

the cataloguing and classification of its materials into a world-class archive of folk

material was no less important. In the archives, more than anywhere else, the

influence of the Commission’s Swedish colleagues played an important role.

Organizations and innovations pioneered by the Scandinavians guided the

Commission in its efforts to organize and preserve its own material. The Commission

and it’s Head Archivist, did not, however, follow the work of their Swedish

                                                                                                               224 Ó Súilleabháin Four Symposia, 69. 225 Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest, 81. 226 Ó Súilleabháin acknowledged the help of C.W. von Sydow, Herman Geijer, Åke Campbell, Sven Liljeblad and Ella Odstedt. 227 Ó Súilleabháin, Dedication to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, xv. 228 Thompson, “Review of A Handbook of Irish Folklore by Seán Ó Súilleabháin,” 963.

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counterparts blindly. The Commission shrewdly adapted the Swedish model to Irish

circumstances serving as an example to other folklorists worldwide. The third and

final section of this work will discuss the publications and international influence of

the Commission.

Part Three: Publication and International Influence

Almost from its conception, the Irish Folklore Commission was lauded for the

work of its field staff as well as the work done at the Head Office in Dublin, however,

little published material came out of the Commission’s archives in the period of 1935

to 1970. Despite the Commission’s lack of publication, the organization enjoyed a

prestige among folklorists worldwide. The Commission’s standing as one of the

foremost folklore organization in the world led to many exchanges, lecture tours, and

increased interest of foreign scholars in Ireland and its folklore. Growing numbers of

foreign folklore societies looked to Ireland as an example to start their own

collections. The innovators of the field of folklore were no longer confined to the

Scandinavia, but had spread westward to Ireland and the names of the Irish folklorists

ranked with those of the great folklorists: the Brothers Grimm, Kaarle Krohn, Antti

Aarne, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, Åke Campbell, and Reidar Thorolf Christiansen. At

a time when Ireland was looking inward—or rather westward to ‘Gaelic Ireland’—the

Irish Folklore Commission was truly an organization of international importance. Part

three of this work will delve into the Commission’s history of publication as well as

its international relationships and contributions to the study of folkoristics.

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To Publish or Not to Publish

As the material collected by the Commission’s field collectors began to flow

into the Head Office in Dublin, many, in Ireland and abroad, believed that the output

of published material would be as equally substantial. However, during the lifetime of

the Irish Folklore Commission (1935-1970) very little material was published. Over

one million manuscript pages of material were available to scholars of the

Commission, yet little publication occurred. A small fraction went to press in both

Irish and English, but the majority of the material remained tucked away in the

archives of the Commission. Why did an organization that had so much material at its

fingertips fall short when it came to publication?

Upon its foundation in 1935, the Commission was tasked not only with the

collection of Ireland’s dying oral tradition, but also with its publication. Its mission

was laid out in the Commission’s Terms of Reference. The Commission was expected

to perform the following duties:

(a) the collection, collation, and cataloguing of oral and written folklore materials; and (b) the editing and publication of such materials when thought desirable229.

While the Commission diligently collected and catalogued the folklore of Ireland, the

publication of materials was mostly neglected. From 1935 to its transfer to UCD in

1970, the Commission published mostly Irish-language material in the journal of

Folklore of Ireland Society, Béaloideas. In addition to the material published in

Béaloideas, two monographs were published under the auspices of the Commission.

The Commission was also expected ‘to arrange to give access […] to its collected

materials to students and scholars desiring to avail thereof for the purpose of study

                                                                                                               229 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 521

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and or/publication230.’ Although the Commission welcomed scholars from Ireland and

abroad to perform research utilizing the material compiled by the Commission’s field

collectors, few scholars, from the Commission or otherwise, were granted permission

to publish their work outside of Béaloideas.

One of the forums that the Commission did utilize to publish collected

material was the journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society: Béaloideas. The Folklore

of Ireland Society was established in 1926 by Séamus Ó Duilearga and several other

Irish intellectuals who had a vested interest in the folklore of Ireland231. The first

volume of the Society’s journal, Béaloideas, appeared in 1927. Béaloideas was

published biannually and Ó Duilearga acted as the editor until his retirement232. In this

journal, excerpts of material from the Commission’s archives as well as articles

written by members of the Head Office staff and foreign scholars were published in

Irish (with English summaries) as well as in English. Some articles written by Ó

Duilearga, Ó Súilleabháin, and Ó Danachair also appeared in other international

folklore journals. However, no excerpts from the archives were published in folklore

journals other than Béaloideas. As such the journal for the Folklore of Ireland Society

also served as the sole mouthpiece of the Commission.

In addition to the material published in Béaloideas, two monographs were

printed on behalf of the Commission between 1935 and 1970. The first was not

published until 1959—twenty-four years after the foundation of the Commission—

and was written, not by a member of the Irish Folklore Commission, but by the

Norwegian folklorist: Reidar Thorolf Christiansen 233 . Rosenkilde and Bagger

                                                                                                               230 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 521. 231 Ó Duilearga, “A Personal Tribute: Reidar Thorolf Christiansen (1886-1971), 345. 232 Séamus Ó Duilearga, “Ó’n Bhfear Eagair,” Béaloideas, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1927) 3 quoted in and translated by Séamas Ó Catháin (ed.), Formation of the Folklorist, 331. 233 Ó Súilleabháin, “Research Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” 121.

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International Booksellers and Publishers printed Studies in Irish and Scandinavian

Folktales on behalf of the Commission. The study utilized material collected by the

Irish Folklore Commission in order to compare certain motifs and tales from the Irish

and Scandinavian oral traditions. The second monograph published on behalf of the

Irish Folklore Commission was Máire MacNeill’s monumental study The Festival of

Lughnasa (1962)234. MacNeill’s study of the Irish harvest festival, Lughnasa—

alternatively called Garland Sunday—was lauded as ‘one of the most important

works’ in Irish Folkloristics and pulled material from the Commission’s archives235.

MacNeill utilized the responses to the Commission’s 1942 questionnaire on

‘Observance of Garland Sunday’ as well as other published sources in the

Commission’s archives to compile her study 236 . Despite the success of the

Commission’s printed works, publications remained relatively low.

One of the main reasons for the lack of publication was Séamus Ó Duilearga,

the Commission’s Honorary Director. Ó Duilearga, who played an integral role in the

foundation of both the Folklore of Ireland Society and the Irish Folklore Commission,

was obsessed with collecting Ireland’s oral traditions. As a young student and later

lecturer at University College, Dublin, Ó Duilearga spent his holidays collecting

folklore in Counties Kerry and Clare (one of the great influences of Ó Duilearga’s life

was a west Kerry storyteller named Seán Ó Conaíll)237. After Ó Duilearga’s trip to

Scandinavia in 1928, his determination to collect and preserve the dying tradition of

Ireland had become stronger than ever. His musings on his return to Ireland are worth

quoting at length:

                                                                                                               234 Ó Súilleabháin, “Research Opportunities in the Irish Folklore Commission,” 121. 235 Bo Almqvist, “Dr. Máire MacNeill-Sweeney (1904-1987): In Memoriam.” Béaloideas 56 (1988): 221. 236 Máire MacNeill. Foreward to The Festival of Lughnasa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), ix. 237 T.K. Whitaker, “James Hamilton Delargy,” Folk Life 20 (1981-82): 104-105.

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I remember coming in the mail-boat from Holyhead. I went out to the bow and I saw the Irish hills. That is a long time ago, 1928, and I said ‘the tradition of Ireland is behind those hills and we’ve got to rescue it before it’s trampled to dirt238.’

Ó Duilearga’s obsession with collecting the folklore of Ireland before it disappeared

only grew in intensity after the foundation of the Commission.

Ó Duilearga feared that the Commission could not work fast enough to save

the folklore of Ireland. He regularly stressed that the Commission was racing to

collect Irish folklore before the few active tradition-bearers who remained died out. In

a 1957 memo to the Department of Education, Ó Duilearga stated: ‘The Commission

has to push ahead without stop and stay with collecting. The narrator who is alive this

year, may well be dead next year, and the knowledge he has will go with him to the

grave239.’ Ó Duilearga’s anxiety about the decline of Irish tradition, led him to focus

the majority of the Commission’s efforts on the collection of folklore largely ignoring

the Commission’s duty to publication. According to Bríd Mahon, a member of the

Commission’s Head Office staff, Ó Duilearga believed that the ‘main task’ of the

Commission was to collected ‘the folk tradition of Gaelic Ireland’ and that all else

‘must take second place 240 .’ The collection of Irish oral tradition was the

Commission’s top priority. For Ó Duilearga and the Commission, publication could

wait.

The methodology employed in field collection did nothing to facilitate

publication on the part of the Commission. As field collectors worked tirelessly to

                                                                                                               238 Séamus Ó Duilearga, Unpublished interview with T.K. Whitaker quoted by Ó Catháin (ed.), Formation of the Folklorist, 78. 239 Séamus Ó Duilearga, “Ó Duilearga to the Secretary of the Department of Education dated 15.11.1957,” Files of the Department of Fianance, National Archives, Dublin S101/0011/34 quoted and translated in Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission. 240 Mahon, While Green Grass Grows, 112.

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glean Irish oral tradition from their informants, they sent their transcriptions—written

in standardized notebooks—as well as their field diaries back to the Head Office in

Dublin to be added to the Commission’s growing archives. Once the material had left

their possession, the collectors had ‘no particular control over’ the material they had

collected or their diaries241. Few of the full-time collectors ever contributed to

Béaloideas or published in the popular market. Of the full-time collectors only Seán Ó

hEochaidh, Caoimhín Ó Danachair, and Michael J. Murphy published on the popular

market. Ó hEochaidh published the autobiography of his father-in-law, Mickey

MacGowan, in Irish as Rotha Mór an tSaoil (1959)242 and Siscéalta ó Thir Chonaill

(1977) in conjunction with Máire MacNeill243. Ó Danachair published numerous

works on the public market the most famous being Irish Customs and Beliefs

(1964)244, Irish Country People (1966)245 and The Year in Ireland (1972)246. Michael

J. Murphy, who was a popular BBC broadcaster and author before joining the

Commission247, published Tyrone Folk Quest (1973)248 based on copies he had made

of his own field diaries249. By limiting the collectors’ access to the material they had

collected and their own field diaries, the Commission unintentionally diminished the

possibility of publication as journal articles in Béaloideas and on the popular market

as autobiographies or monographs.

Nor was the staff of the Commission guaranteed the use of the material for

publication outside of Béaloideas. Ó Duilearga was possessive of the material in the                                                                                                                241 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia, 16. 242 The work was translated into English by Valentin Iremonger and appeared in 1962 by the title The Hard Road to Klondike. 243 MacNeill translated Ó hEochaidh’s work into English under the title Fairy Legends from Donegal in the same year. 244 Kevin Danaher. Irish Customs and Beliefs. (Cork: Mercier Press, 1964). 245 Kevin Danaher. Irish Country People. (Cork: Mercier Press, 1966). 246 Kevin Danaher, The Year in Ireland. (Cork: Mercier Press, 1972). 247 Mahon, While Green Grass Grows, 90. 248 Michael J. Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest. (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1973). 249 Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest, 5.

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Commission’s archives. According to Ó Súilleabháin, Ó Duilearga discouraged and

even prevented his staff from publishing250. Other staff members were discouraged

from working as journalists, in radio or publishing books on the popular market251.

Any staff member who wished to utilize the material in a journal article, for a book, or

even for a radio program had to obtain permission ahead of time from the Director252.

When Michael J. Murphy was asked by the BBC to present an in-depth program on

fairy lore, he had to get the project approved by Ó Duilearga. The Director agreed

‘providing that the Commission got copies of all the discs253.’ Other members of the

Commission asked for permission to use material in different projects and found their

requests denied. In letters to Åke Campbell, archivist Seán Ó Súilleabháin admitted to

noting material from the archive to use in his publications. Ó Danachair took the same

actions in order to publish his work Folktales of the Irish Countryside (1967)254.

While Ó Duilearga’s motives for discouraging publication among his staff remain

unknown, his discouragement undoubtedly hindered publication both on behalf of the

Commission and on the popular market.

There were, however, two publications printed on the popular market that

were published with Ó Duilearga’s permission. Both publications were completed and

printed in collaboration with folklorists and folklore institutions from around the

globe. The first of these publications was a joint work by the Commission’s archivist

Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Norwegian Reidar Thorolf Christiansen entitled The Types

of the Irish Folktale (1963)255. Christiansen was persuaded ‘to join the Commission’s

staff’ where he worked with Ó Súilleabháin to compile the nearly 43,000 items into a                                                                                                                250 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 378-379. 251 Mahon, While Green Grass Grows, 183. 252 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 396. 253 Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest, 77-78. 254 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 397-398. 255 Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Reidar Thorolf Christiansen. The Types of the Irish Folktale. (FF Communications 188, Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1963).

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type-index for the Irish folktale256. It was published in Helsinki by the ‘internationally

famous series, the Folklore Fellows Communications257.’ The other work printed on

the popular market was Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s The Folktales of Ireland (1966)258.

Folktales was published as part of American folklorist Richard Dorson’s series

Folktales of the World. Dorson ‘count[ed] it a great stroke of fortune to have obtained

his [Ó Duilearga] consent to allow Sean O’Sullivan [Seán Ó Súilleabháin], archivist

of the Commission, to select and translate from the Commission’s holdings

material259.’ The fact that Ó Duilearga gave his consent for these two publications is

no coincidence; both The Types of the Irish Folktale and Folktales of Ireland

enhanced the prestige of the Commission in the international folklore community and

contributed to the development of Comparative Folkloristics.

The lacuna in the success of the Irish Folklore Commission was its lack of

publication. Ó Duilearga’s insistence on putting collection before all else meant that

publication of material from the Commission’s holdings suffered greatly. Significant

publication would have to wait for the Commission’s transfer to UCD in 1970. The

compulsion of the Commission’s staff to seek permission from the Director also

greatly hindered the printed material produced by the Commission. Many foreign

scholars regretted the lack of Irish material available to them and lamented the

inaccessibility of the journal Béaloideas, which was almost entirely in Irish. Had the

task of the Commission not been so great, perhaps the amount of published material

from the Commission would have been greater. The lack of publication of its

materials did not, however, diminish the reputation or prestige of the Commission

                                                                                                               256 Ó Duilearga, “A Personal Tribute: Reidar Thorolf Christiansen (1886-1971),” 347-348. 257 Ibid. 258 Seán Ó Súilleabháin (ed. and trans.). The Folktales of Ireland. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1966) 259 Richard M. Dorson. “Editor’s Comment: Katharine Briggs, James Delargy, Vance Randolph.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 18, no. 1 (Jan-Apr, 1981): 92.

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among folklorists worldwide. In the next section, this study will examine the

influence of the Irish Folklore Commission abroad.

Irish International Influence

Despite the Commission’s lack of publication, the ambition of the

Commission’s field collection along with the sheer magnitude of its archives ensured

the Commission—and Ireland—a place among the great folklore institutions of the

world. Already at the Midcentury Conference in 1950, the Irish Folklore Commission

was lauded along with the Swedish folklore institutions as an example for collection

and cataloguing that other nations could follow in order to ensure success. Alan

Lomax, an American folklorist working for the Library of Congress, went so far as to

compare the American folklore institutions to ‘small children’ in the shadow of ‘men

from Ireland and Scandinavia260.’ In a few short years, the Commission had managed

to set Ireland up as an innovator in Folkloristics on the international stage. Friendships

cultivated by Seámus Ó Duilearga led to exchanges of scholarly journals, the presence

of foreign scholars in Ireland, and Irish folklorists giving lectures abroad. The

Commission’s success and influence led to the collection of folk material as well as

the establishment of folklore institutions in countries such as Scotland, Iceland and

the Faroe Islands. While the Irish government began to look increasing inward, the

Commission became an increasingly international body influencing the progress,

scholarship, and methodologies of Folkloristics worldwide.

During his 1928 journey through Scandinavia, Ó Duilearga met and

befriended a number of influential folklorists employed in important Scandinavian

folklore institutions such as the Swedish Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research,                                                                                                                260 Alan Lomax, Four Symposia of Folklore (1953: Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, reprint 1976), 20.

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the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, and the Finnish Folklore Archive—part of the

Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (Academia Scientiarum Fennica). These

friendships enabled Ó Duilearga to set up a series of exchanges between the Folklore

of Ireland Society’s journal Béaloideas (later the mouthpiece of the Commission) and

a number of folklore journals from ‘the following countries: Belgium, Denmark,

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Germany, Austria, and Czecko-Slovakia [sic]261.’

Unsurprisingly the first exchange that was organized was between Béaloideas and the

journal of the Swedish Institute for Dialect and Folklore Research, Namn och Bygd262.

Ó Duilearga also arranged an exchange with the National Museum of Estonia263. The

exchanges coordinated by Ó Duilearga continue to this day fostering an international

exchange of folk material and methodologies. Although his trip to Scandinavia

occurred before the founding of the Commission, it benefitted from the exchanges put

in place by Ó Duilearga.

In addition to the journal exchanges pioneered by Ó Duilearga, Irish folklorists

were sought out by folklore journals to write articles for their volumes. Seán Ó

Súilleabháin, Caoimhín Ó Danachair, and Máire MacNeill, in particular, were highly

sought after and contributed a number of articles to scholarly journals of the study of

Folklore. Articles written by the Head Office staff of the Commission appeared in

journals such as The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist (Indiana University,

Bloomington), The Journal of the Folklore Institute (Indiana University,

Bloomington), The Journal of American Folklore (American Folklore Society), The

Geographical Journal (Royal Geographical Society), and Folklore (The Folklore

Society). Ó Súilleabháin, Ó Danachair, and MacNeill also published in a number of

                                                                                                               261 Ó Duilearga, “Ó’n Bhfear Eagair,” Béaloideas, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1927) pp. 416-418 quoted in and translated by Ó Catháin (ed.), Formation of the Folklorist, 340. 262 Ó Catháin, Formation of a Folklorist, 29. 263 Ibid, 46.

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Irish journals such as Studia Hibernica (St. Patrick’s College), The Journal of the

Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and the Irish-language journal Comhar

(funded by Foras na Gaeilge). The majority of these articles highlighted the

methodologies used by the Commission in both field collection and cataloguing in the

archives.

As well as writing scholarly articles, Ó Duilearga and Ó Súilleabháin attended

and presented at a number of academic conferences. Ó Duilearga attended the First

Viking Congress in the Lerwick, Shetland, UK in 1950, at which he and Swedish

folklorist Dag Strömbäck ‘made a proposal for extended collection of Shetland

folklore264.’ He was also present at the Fifth Viking Congress at Tórshavn in the

Faroe Islands in 1963265. and served as an Honorary President of the Seventh Viking

Congress held in Dublin in 1973. Ó Súilleabháin played a key role in the Midcentury

Folklore Conference held at the University of Indiana, Bloomington in 1950. The

Midcentury Conference took the form of four symposia on the collection of folklore,

archiving folklore, making folklore available, and studying folklore 266 . Ó

Súilleabháin, who also gave a special lecture on Irish folklore, figured prominently in

the proceedings and acted as Chairman to the symposium on making folklore

available. Ó Súilleabháin’s presence at the Midcentury Conference was particularly

important. His expertise in collection and archiving was often sought by other

folklorists who were in attendance and who wished to replicate the methodologies as

well as the success of the Commission. In the following year, he was also in

                                                                                                               264 Bo Almqvist. “’The Greatest and Bravest Small Nation on Earth’: Séamus Ó Duilearga’s Faroese Contacts and their Aftermath,” in Bo Almqvist et al. Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Language, Essays in honour of Séamas Ó Catháin (Dublin: University Dublin Press, 2012), 30. 265 Almqvist, “’The Greatest and Bravest Small Nation on Earth’: Séamus Ó Duilearga’s Faroese Contacts and their Aftermath,” Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Language, in 18. 266 Thompson, Four Symposia, xi.

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attendance at the Stockholm Congress 267 . In addition to attending folklore

conferences, Ó Duilearga also made a lecture tour of the United States. The lecture

series, which was organized by American folklorist Stith Thompson, brought Ó

Duilearga up and down the eastern coast of the United States in 1939268 . Ó

Duilearga’s and Ó Súilleabháin’s presence at various international congresses and

conferences helped to solidify friendships made with folklorists and ethnologists from

around the world while their talks and lectures helped to enhance the prestige of the

Commission in the study of Folkloristics.

A number of folklorists, ethnologists and dialectologists travelled to Ireland in

order to benefit from the expertise of the Commission and to conduct research or field

work of their own. Åke Campbell and Reidar Christiansen made numerous forays into

the Irish countryside accompanied by Ó Duilearga or other members of the

Commission. Campbell, who was deeply interested in Irish folk life, was

accompanied by archivist Seán Ó Súilleabháin in his survey of Irish vernacular

architecture the result of which was his 1935 Béaloideas article ‘Irish Fields and

Houses269.’ Another frequent visitor was the Swiss dialectologist Heinrich Wagner

who was fluent in Irish. Wagner was interested in recording the different Irish dialects

and was accompanied by full-time collectors in order to conduct his research. The

Commission worked hard to provide their foreign guests with any aid they could

offer. Ó Súilleabháin even lent Wagner his bicycle270.

                                                                                                               267 Stith Thompson, A Folklorist’s Progress: Refelctions of a Scholar’s Life, ed. John H. McDowell et al (Bloomington: Special Publications of the Folklore Institute No. 5, 1996), 282. 268 Thompson, A Folklorist’s Progress, 155-157. 269 Patricia Lysaght, “Focus on Cill Rialaigh, Co. Kerry: Photographs, Drawings and Plans,” in in Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh et al. Treasures of the National Folklore Collection (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 76. 270 Almqvist, “The Scholar and the Storyteller: Heinrich’s Colletions from Peig Sayers,” 38.

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The collectors brought Wagner along with them during their collections and

introduced him to their informants. In his research, Wagner was helped by full-time

collectors Seosamh Ó Dálaigh in County Kerry, Tadhg Ó Murchú in County Clare,

Seán Ó hEochaidh in County Donegal, and Michael J. Murphy in County Tyrone271.

Wagner also took advantage of pauses in collection to record the Uíbh Ráthach dialect

from Tadhg Ó Murchú, a native of County Kerry272. Some of the visiting scholars

were invited by Ó Duilearga to give lectures at University College Dublin. In 1937,

American folklorist, Stith Thompson, came to Dublin to give a lecture on ‘recent

advances in folklore study, with especial relation to the remarkable folktale

collections being made in Ireland273.’ After such lectures, Ó Duilearga would often

take foreign scholars to the west of Ireland introducing them to the Commission’s

full-time collectors and even to some gifted storytellers. The presence of these foreign

scholars in Ireland helped to enhance the reputation of the Commission. Ó Duilearga

worked hard to accommodate the Commission’s foreign guests and asked its

collectors to go out of their way to help them in their research.

The work of the Commission in Ireland and abroad helped to give rise to

several folklore institutions outside of Ireland. The collection of material by the

Commission in Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Northern Ireland helped to stimulate

scholars in those countries to begin collection initiatives of their own. Before much

collection had taken place in Scotland, the Commission employed native Scottish-

Gaelic speaker Calum MacLean274. The Commission, which was interested in the

Gaelic traditions of Scotland because they were closely related to Irish traditions, sent                                                                                                                271 Murphy describes Wagner’s visit in his memoir, Tyrone Folk Quest. Wagner was particularly accomplished in the Irish language, a fact that Murphy’s informants remarked upon. 272 Patricia Lysaght, “Folklore Collecting in Co. Clare: Tadhg Ó Murchú’s Third Visit (1950), Béaloideas 76 (2008), 158. 273 Thompson, A Folkorist’s Progress, 136. 274 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia of Folklore, 5.

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MacLean to Scotland as a full-time collector. Although some attempt had been made

in Scotland before MacLean’s arrival to establish a folklore institute, lack of interest

and funds from the government retarded the formation of such an institution275. The

work that MacLean carried out in Scotland and the methods of the Commission,

however, inspired the foundation of the School of Scottish Studies under the auspices

of the University of Edinburgh276. The School acknowledged a great personal debt of

gratitude to Ó Duilearga in particular and hoped to establish ‘a number of full-time

collectors […] as the Irish Folklore Commission has—local men with local

knowledge277.’ The Commission also presented the School of Scottish Studies with

microfilm copies of the material collected by MacLean278.

Caoimhín Ó Danachair, the Commission’s ethnologist, also made collections

on the Isle of Man. During a period of three weeks in 1938, Ó Danachair—who also

ran the Mobile Recording Unit—worked to record the last remaining native-speakers

of Manx279. Ó Danachair’s mission to collect in the Isle of Man was conceived by

then Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera. De Valera, who visited the Isle of Man in

1947, encouraged the Commission to make recordings there ‘of old speakers of the

Manx language 280 .’ Following Ó Danachair’s collecting mission, a full-time

collector—Leslie Quirke, a native Manx-speaker—was appointed by the Manx

Language Society and the Manx Museum281. Quirke was sent to the Commission for

training and the material he collected was deposited in the Manx Museum282.

                                                                                                               275 Ó Súilleabháin, Four Symposia of Folklore, 8. 276 Stewart F. Sanderson, “The Present State of Folklore Studies in Scotland,” Folklore 68, no. 4 (Dec 1957): 458. 277 Sanderson, “The Present State of Folklore Studies in Scotland,” 463. 278 Ibid, 459-460. 279 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man.” 456. 280 Ibid. 281 Ibid, 457. 282 Ibid.

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The Commission also collected in the six counties of Northern Ireland. As

early as 1949, Michael J. Murphy was appointed as a full-time collector to the

Commission in order to gather material in the six counties of Northern Ireland283. The

Commission had several part-time collectors as well as questionnaire correspondents

in the North in addition to Murphy who worked in Counties Armagh, Tyrone, Antrim

and Down284. Not until 1952 was an institution to collect folklore formed in Northern

Ireland. This institution, the Committee of Ulster Folk Life and Traditions, adopted

some of the collecting methods of the Commission. Collection by the Committee

began with the printing of five questionnaires and in 1957, the Ministry of Education

in Belfast sponsored a schools scheme similar to the Irish Folklore Commission’s

Schools’ Scheme of 1937-38285. Although not as successful as the Commission, the

Committee of Ulster Folk Life and Traditions was able to collection a substantial

amount of traditional material and lore in Northern Ireland.

Scholars in the Iceland and the Faroe Islands also took inspiration from the

Commission and took advantage of advice offered by Ó Duilearga. Folklorists from

Iceland and the Faroe Islands visited Ireland and received essential training in folklore

collection. When the Collecting Committee of the Faroese Academy

(Innsavningarnevnd Fró∂skaparsetursins) was established in 1967, Ó Duilearga gave

a lecture ‘in which he both described how collecting had been carried out in Ireland,

and also outlined the ways in which he envisaged how work should be done on the

Faroe Islands286.’ After Ó Duilearga’s 1967 visit to the Faroe Islands, Faroese

                                                                                                               283 Murphy, Tyrone Folk Quest, 5. 284 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 455. 285 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 455-456. 286 Almqvist, “’The Greatest and Bravest Small Nation on Earth’: Séamus Ó Duilearga’s Faroese Contacts and their Aftermath,” in Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Language, 26.

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folklorist Jóan Pauli Joensen came to Ireland where he benefitted from time spent in

Donegal with full-time collector Seán Ó hEochaidh287. The methods that Joensen

learned from Ó hEochaidh and the Commission enabled him to collect a substantial

amount of material on Faroese folk tradition.

The archives of the Commission also received much attention from those

outside the Commission interested in Irish folklore. The archives hosted famous

personalities both from Ireland and abroad. In her memoir the Commission’s

secretary, Bríd Mahon, details the comings and goings of many famous characters all

of whom visited the archives for inspiration. First among the Commission’s visitors

were authors, actors, and playwrights based in Ireland. The actor and playwright

Micheál Mac Liammóir had used folklore motifs in his plays before and was looking

for material regarding the changeling theme for his next play. For him, Mahon

‘hunted out descriptions of charms and spells, how used and when they were most

potent288.’ Mahon received tickets to the opening night of Ill Met by Moonlight for her

trouble289. Another playwright, Michael J. Molloy, also visited the archives when in

Dublin where he ‘divided his time’ between the Abbey Theatre and the archives of the

Commission290 . Mahon also helped author Frank O’Connor with research and

welcomed actress Maureen Cusack at the Commission’s archives. Mahon and Cusack

had even discussed writing a children’s book together, although, the idea was quickly

squashed by Ó Duilearga291.

One of the Commission’s most famous visitor’s was none other than Walt

Disney. According to Mahon, in 1946 the Department of External Affairs notified the                                                                                                                287 Almqvist, “’The Greatest and Bravest Small Nation on Earth’: Séamus Ó Duilearga’s Faroese Contacts and their Aftermath,” in Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Language, 25. 288 Mahon, While Green Grass Grows, 18. 289 Ibid. 290 Ibid, 21. 291 Ibid, 44.

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Commission that Walt Disney would be coming to Dublin and that ‘his first port of

call would be the office of the Irish Folklore Commission292.’ Disney, who was taken

on a tour of Ireland by Ó Duilearga, was interested in making a film about

leprechauns. On his tour of Ireland, Ó Duilearga introduced Disney to a man ‘who

had a story for every day of the year’ and tried to discourage him from making a film

about leprechauns293. Ó Duilearga desperately wanted to persuade Disney to utilize

one of the heroic cycles of Irish folklore294. Disney, however, could not be persuaded

and the resulting film, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, premiered in Dublin in

1959. Mahon and other members of the Commission were invited to the premiere and

given gifts by Disney to thank them for their help295. The Commission also received a

visit from the great linguist and author, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, who was visiting a

former student and ‘was anxious to learn something of Irish folklore296.’ These two

visits demonstrate the level of acclaim to which the Commission had risen,

particularly in the post-war period.

In a span of just thirty-five years, the Irish Folklore Commission was able to

cultivate working relationships with folklorists and folklore institutions throughout

the world. The efficiency and deliberateness with which Ó Duilearga and his staff

collected and catalogued the oral traditions of Ireland earned the Commission an

unparalleled respect in the folklore community. The Commission’s elevated position

in the scholarly study of Folkloristics and Ó Duilearga’s willingness to open up

Ireland as well as the Commission to foreign scholars only enhanced its reputation.

The Commission’s efforts to collect folklore outside its national boundaries advanced

                                                                                                               292 Mahon, While Green Grass Grows, 48. 293 Ibid, 53. 294 Ibid, 50. 295 Ibid, 52-53. 296 Ibid,105.

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the study of folklore in Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Northern Ireland and Ó

Duilearga’s encouragement to scholars in Iceland and the Faroe Islands led to

collection efforts in those countries as well. The Commission’s influence also

extended to actors, authors, playwrights, and even filmmakers. In an age when Ireland

was looking in and becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, the

Commission was able to create a internationally recognized institution that examined

the oral tradition of Ireland while developing and maintaining important cross-cultural

relationships with folklore institutions across the globe. Folklorists from around the

globe admired and respected the Commission, an admiration that was paralleled only

by their respect for the Scandinavians who had long been held as the pioneers of

Folkloristics. The Commission and, therefore, Ireland advanced the study of Irish folk

tradition and became one of the founders and innovators of modern Folkloristics.

Conclusion

While the Commission was undoubtedly successful in its attempt to collect the

oral tradition of Ireland creating an archive unparalleled in the world of folklore, the

Commission was not outstanding on all counts. The monumental task of collecting the

folklore of Gaelic Ireland left little time for the Commission to concentrate on its

other tasks. As collectors desperately tried to retrieve the island’s oral tradition from

aging tradition-bearers, much of the Commission’s other work fell to the wayside.

Cataloguing and classification of the material continued, as it too could not be put off.

However, publication of the Commission’s material was postponed for another time

in the indefinite future when the collection of Ireland’s folklore would be completed.

Nor was the Collection itself a perfect representation of the oral tradition of Ireland.

As the Collection grew, certain lacunae began to present themselves. Oral traditions in

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the English-language were grossly ignored with the exception of collection work

carried out by full-time collector Michael J. Murphy. Urban folklore from the cities

and towns of Ireland was left virtually uncollected and the oral history of those places

was overlooked for material from the more ‘Irish’ west. Not until after the

Commission’s transfer to University College, Dublin in 1970 would these lacunae be

addressed.

During the tenure of the Irish Folklore Commission little material was made

available for publication. As a result minimal research has been done on the lives of

the collectors, the informants, the inter-workings of the Head Office and archives as

well as the material collected on oral tradition by the Commission. The matter of

publication has only begun to be addressed since the Commission’s transfer to

University College, Dublin in 1970. In 1972, the Department of Education established

the Folklore of Ireland Council (Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann) with a view to

continue the work of the Commission ‘particularly with regard to indexing, archiving

and publication297.’ Since the foundation of the Folklore of Ireland Council an

increase in publication—both about the Commission itself as well as monographs

utilizing the materials found in the National Folklore Collection—has occurred.

The earliest of the publications of the Folklore of Ireland Council was a study

of Dublin street-games. The work entitled All in! All in!: A selection of Dublin

children’s traditional street-games with rhymes and music was written by Eilís Brady

and appeared in 1975298. The most recent publication, The Otherworld: music and

song from Irish tradition edited by Ríonach uí Ógáin and Tom Sherlock, appeared in

                                                                                                               297 “History of the Folklore of Ireland Council,” Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann Official Website. http://comhairlebheal.ie/history.html. Last accessed 19 May 2014. 298 Eilís Brady. All in! All in!: A selection of Dublin children’s traditional street-games with rhymes and music (Dublin: Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, 1975).

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November of 2012299. In a span of roughly forty years, the Folklore of Ireland Council

has published thirteen monographs based on material from the National Folklore

Collection including a reprint of Máire MacNeill’s The Festival of Lughnasa in

2008300. In addition to publications put out by the Folklore of Ireland Council, a

number of studies have been published about the Commission or its material from

various academic publishing houses including Ríonach uí Ógáin’s Going to the Well

for Water: The Séamus Ennis Field Diary 1942-1946301, Michéal Briody’s The Irish

Folklore Commission 1935-1970: History, Ideology, Methodology 302 and Guy

Beiner’s Remembering the Year of the French: Irish folk history and social

memory303. In the past ten years, a number of studies utilizing the material collected

by the Commission have also appeared in various academic journals. In June 2012,

the National Folklore Collection launched a project entitled Béal Beo to allow the

public access to a number of sound recordings, including wax cylinder recordings, via

the website Bealbeo.ie304. Another website, Duchas.ie, was launched in December

2013. The project—which combines the efforts of the National Folklore Collection

(UCD), Fiontar (Dublin City University), and the Department of Arts, Heritage, and

the Gaeltacht—is working to digitize the National Folklore Collection and has already

put a selection of the Schools’ Collection online305. Increased access to the material of

the National Folklore Collection can only increase study, publication, and

understanding of the material, however, the surface of the Collection has only been

scratched and increased research and publication is needed.                                                                                                                299 Ríonach uí Ógáin and Tom Sherlock (eds). The Otherworld: music and song from Irish tradition (Dublin: Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, 2012). 300 The publications are available on the Council’s website. http//comhairlebheal.ie/publications.html. Last accessed 19 May 2014. 301 Published by Cork University Press in 2009. 302 Published by the Finnish Literature Society in 2008. 303 Published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2007. 304 “About Béal Beo,” http://bealbeo.ie/about.html. Last accessed 19 May 2014. 305 “Objective of dúchas.ie,” http://duchas.ie/en/info. Last accessed 19 May 2014.

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Although much progress had been made in regards to publication, the majority

of the National Folklore Collection remains in accessible to researchers and students

who have limited or no Irish. Much of the field collection done by the Commission

between 1935 and 1970 was in the Irish-speaking areas of Counties Clare, Cork,

Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Mayo, and Waterford306. Roughly eight-five percent of the

Commission’s holdings are in Irish. While the Irish material is invaluable to the

preservation and study of the oral tradition of Ireland, the language in which it is

preserved keeps the material inaccessible to international scholarship. The National

Folklore Collection could be made more accessible to scholars and students with little

to no Irish if portions of the material could be translated. While it is unrealistic to

suggest translating the entire collection into English, the translation of even a small

portion of the Collection would be beneficial to international scholarship. Translation

of the field diaries of the full-time collectors could prove to be a useful insight into the

work of the Commission and the material available in its holdings. Ríonach uí

Ógáin’s 2009 translation and publication of music collector Séamus Ennis’ field diary

has thrown light onto the experience of the individual collector as well as the material

collected and the lives of individual informants. The translation and publication of

additional field diaries could further scholarship on the Irish Folklore Commission as

well as its holdings. Additional collection in traditionally English-speaking areas

could also bring in additional material as well as perspective on the folklore of Ireland

in both English and Irish.

Another lacuna that presents itself in the holdings of the Commission is the

lack of urban folklore collected by its full-time as well as part-time collectors. During

the Commission’s terms of service, folklore collection was concentrated on the rural

                                                                                                               306 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 451.

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districts of the Gaeltacht307. Little collection occurred in the urban areas of Dublin,

Limerick, Cork, and Waterford. No full-time collector was ever sent to gather

material in Dublin, the island’s largest city308 and during the Schools’ Scheme of

1937-1938 many of the urban schools were exempt from participation309. The sheer

wealth of folklore in rural areas kept the Commission occupied far longer than its

original five-year terms of service and, as with publication, it was thought that

collection of urban folklore—if it existed at all—could be completed later. Folklore in

Dublin and other urban areas was generally not addressed until after the

Commission’s transfer to University College Dublin. In 1979, Séamas Ó Catháin—

archivist of the National Folklore Collection—began an initiative to collect the

folklore of urban Dublin. The Urban Folklore Project was funded by the Departments

of Education and Finance and ran from 1979 until 1980310. Roughly sixteen graduate

students, including author Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, from the Department of Irish Folklore at

University College Dublin participated in the project carrying out ‘intensive collecting

of a wide range of traditions and customs all over Dublin311.’ Ní Dhuibhne called the

project ‘a folkloristic blitzkrieg, a systematic and intensive trawl of the oral culture of

one place312’ and found that the Dublin neighborhood of Ringsend was particularly

rich in folklore313. During the project, a significant amount of lore was collected in

Urban Dublin and collectors made tape and video recordings, took photographs and

                                                                                                               307 Ó Súilleabháin, “The Collection and Classification of Folklore in Ireland and the Isle of Man,” 451. 308 Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 521. 309 Ó Catháin, “’Scéim na Scoil’: Proceedings from McGlinchy Summer School 1998,” 8. 310 Bo Almqvist, “Introduction,” in Bo Almqvist et al. Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Languagg, Essays in honour of Séamas Ó Catháin (Dublin: University Dublin Press, 2012), 5. 311 Almqvist, “Introduction,” in Atlantic Currents: Essays on Lore, Literature and Language, 5. 312 Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, “The Made Me Tea and Gave Me a Lift Home: Urban Folklore Collection 1979-80,” Béaloideas 73 (2005), 68. 313 Ní Dhuibhne, “The Made Me Tea and Gave Me a Lift Home: Urban Folklore Collection 1979-80,” 66.

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notes, and used questionnaires314. Like the full-time collectors of the Commission,

members of the Urban Folklore Project were expected to keep a diary to record the

circumstances, impressions, and additional information concerning informants315.

Folktales, some fitting international folktale types, were recorded in Dublin316. The

richness of the material collected in Dublin is immeasurable and other urban areas in

Ireland could benefit from similar studies. The material collected is part of the

National Folklore Collection and helps to address an oversight made by the

Commission in their collection work.

While there are many lacunae in the collections made by the Irish Folklore

Commission, the National Folklore Collection remains one of the largest and richest

repositories of folklore in the world. Research opportunities in its holdings are

limitless. Scholarship of Irish folklore and international Folkloristics would benefit

greatly from further research. The material housed in the National Folklore Collection

could provide studies into specific traditions such as Máire MacNeill’s The Festival of

Lughnasa or supplement historical traditions concerning events such as the Famine,

1798, the Land War, and the Easter Rising. Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s A Handbook of

Irish Folklore as well as his system of cataloguing and classification merits further in

depth study. Further publication and study of materials can only work to enlighten us

further on the Irish oral tradition and the Ireland of time gone by.

Although the work of the Commission did have its deficiencies, Ó Duilearga

and the staff of the Commission were relatively successful in actualizing the mission

of the Commission laid out in its Terms of Reference. The efforts of a just a few men

and women to collect and preserve the oral tradition of Ireland was largely successful

                                                                                                               314 Ní Dhuibhne, “The Made Me Tea and Gave Me a Lift Home: Urban Folklore Collection 1979-80,” 66. 315 Ibid. 316 Ibid, 77.

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and their example contributed to folklore collection and study across the globe. No

other Irish organization of the twentieth century was able to make a similar impact

worldwide. Irish expertise including collection methods as well as systems of

cataloguing and classification are utilized in numerous folklore organizations to this

day and the work of the Commission is held up as an example of success. The

relationships formed and nurtured under Ó Duilearga, particularly with Sweden,

continue to contribute to international fellowship and scholarship. Although the

Commission focused on the Gaelic traditions of Ireland, it was a truly international

organization that helped to develop and further the academic study of Folkloristics.

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