National Folklore Collection

When I started conducting research for this trip, I immediately began looking for repositories of Irish folklore. Libraries would be helpful certainly, but archives or special collections, even better. I stumbled across the National Folklore Collection at the University College Dublin (UCD) while conducting a google search. Its website stated that the National Folklore Collection was, “home to one of the largest collections of [Irish] oral and ethnological material in the world." It supposedly contained books, manuscripts, musical recordings, and fine art all related to Irish folk history. It sounded like I had hit the jackpot.

It was necessary for me to apply for permission to use the Archives, so back in the early months of 2010 I filled out an application and faxed it overseas. I was thrilled when I found out that my application had been accepted. I had an appointment with Archivist Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh. Me... an official pseudo-researcher at the National Folklore Collection at the University College Dublin! If I had been asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, this would never had crossed my mind.

It was surprising to me that few people in the Dublin's City Centre could tell me how to get to UCD. It wasn't on any maps of the city, so I had to search maps of the region. I finally figured out how to get there via bus with the help of a friendly fellow at the Tourism Bureau. The trip only took about a half-hour via bus. The campus was quiet and small. Very green grass, a small lake, and cubic grey buildings. It didn't take too long to find the Archives in a building largely dedicated to theatre and language studies. The Archives were located in a small corner.

Upon entering the Collection, I introduced myself to a young man named Johnny, and he told me that Críostóir (pronounced Cris-to-er) would be 'round to help me in a few minutes. Eventually, a friendly man sporting a blue button-down shirt, about 50-years old, appeared. He introduced himself as Críostóir, shook my hand, asked a few questions about the kinds of material I wanted to look at, and took me behind a locked door. We then walked down another hallway. Beautiful paintings depicting different aspects of Irish life and lore adorned the walls.

Críostóir brought me to a room with a card catalogue stretched alongside a wall, and he taught me "the rules of using it". The card catalogue was divided into subsections such as: Historical Figures, Storytellers, Important Locations, The Otherworld, Fairies, Fairy Abductions, Fairies Trapped in Other Beings, Fairy Hills, Fairy Houses, Water Creatures, etc. The sections were not in any alphabetical order, and were labeled in English on the outside of the drawer, and Irish on the inside on large index cards fading with age.

Next, Críostóir explained that I was not allowed to remove any index cards from the card catalogue. If I saw a card written in English that interested me, I was to copy down the call number, get him, and he would go and find the material in another room. He advised that I ignore the cards written in Irish for, frankly, I wouldn't know how to read them. The archivist also gave me an old copy of a book he referred to as “the Bible of Irish Folklore”. It was a thick book with an old green cover and tattered binding called A Handbook of Irish Folklore by Seán Ó Súilleabháin. It was a thrill to see it as I had read about it in other books.

Flipping through the Handbook, and searching through the card catalogue, could have easily taken me days। The experience of flipping through the old, irreplaceable index cards in English and Irish – covering all kinds of topics and tales - was extraordinary. It felt like dipping my hands into a box and scrolling through hundreds of years of history and stories.


I noticed that many of the cards in the catalogue did not refer to stories with titles. Rather, they contained barely legible, brief synopses of folktales along with reference numbers. These stories were simple and concise. No character development, no description of setting, no real sense of tone. The event and the end. Take the following stories for example:

"Man thinks friends who [are] coming to visit him were delayed too long as he went with his dog. He hunted his dog in under the bridge[.] The whole crowd of wee folk went away [up] the fields laughing [and shouting]. They thought they were the fairies."

"People brought away by the fairies [are] put riding on white horses, brought over the hills and left back again before dawn…"

Now that I have been to the National Folklore Collection, I find myself left with more questions that answers. I am beginning to question what a folktale really is. Or perhaps I am broadening my description of a folktale. A Handbook of Irish Folklore gives incredibly precise directions for students of cultural anthropology on how to record a folktale. Incredibly precise. And I hope to write about those directions in a future post.

I see that my time at this Internet Cafe is winding down, and so I will have to bring this post to a close. Here is the tale of my trip to the National Folklore Collection as one might find in the old card catalogue: Student goes to place with many books. He receives help from a learned man. The student reads. He leaves with new appreciation and questions.

Leprechauns

Did you know that the cereal Lucky Charms is not sold in Ireland? Yup folks, that’s right… that sugar-wielding Lucky the Leprechaun, with his good luck charm marshmallows, somehow never made it to the Emerald Isle. This begs the question: How did Lucky the Leprechaun make it to America in the first place?

I learned this trivial factoid at the Leprechaun Museum yesterday, an institution dedicated to the teaching of Irish folklore located in the heart of Dublin. While the museum is geared in general towards children, one can learn a tremendous amount and, perhaps, life’s most important lessons from children's literature and folktales.

Anyhow, back to Lucky Charms.

You know those charm-shaped, artificially colored, crunchy magical marshmallows sprinkled throughout the cereal? It turns out that they're shaped in the form of objects that leprechauns - or any fairy for that matter - dread. Take the purple horseshoe-shaped marshmallow, for example. Iron was, and possibly still is, used to ward off leprechauns. Thus the Irish took to hanging horseshoes made of iron above entrances to their homes or barns. Why? They served as an unwelcome mat.

The first reference to the leprechaun is found in the story of Fergus Mac Léti, a King from the ancient province of Ulster. Members of the fairy (sídhe) family, leprechauns became known in rural Ireland for their red hair, green clothing, love of the drink, and rebellious temper. Leprechauns are portrayed in folklore as short, clever men with thin legs that carefully guard their gold found at the end of rainbow or in bushes.

Over centuries, the legend of the leprechaun spread to other areas of Europe. Irish and British cousins include brownies, hobs, the drunken clurichaun, and far dirrig.

It was important to keep all sorts of sídhe away from one's home. Of course iron horseshoes couldn't possibly do it alone. Other mechanisms to keep changelings - evil fairies bent on kidnapping mortals and replacing them with shapeshifters - emerged. For example, the Irish took to spitting on their hands before shaking someone else's as a means of greeting. If the other person refused to shake hands, it was a fairy, and immediately told to leave. Another way to ward off fairies? Put a bucket of dirty water outside of one's home. Fairies don't care for muck.

I suppose feisty leprechaun could be seen as having some of the traits of the stereotypical Irishman: red hair, green clothing, love of the drink, and rebellious. One might also see a parallel between the spirit of the leprechaun and that of famous Irish writers.

Earlier in the day, I visited the Dublin Writer’s Museum. There I learned that Irish literature can be classified into one of two general bodies: rural tradition (stories influences by folklore and writing in Irish) and urban writing. The earliest forms of written literature can be found in poems of praise, satire, and lament written by professional poets in the 6th century. They were passed on by oral tradition via the seanachie, traditional storytellers, and eventually collected and written down. Legends such as the Tain Bó Cúlaigne and Fenian Cycle are still being translated into English today, and are studied by people of all ages. They survive today and shed light on early Irish and Scots-Gaelic life.

The following is a quote I copied down from signage at the Dublin Writer's Museum yesterday: "It has been claimed that the greatest weapon the English ever gave to the Irish was their own language."

When the English came to Ireland, literary movements emerged as a means of rebellion. At first, writers took aim at organized religion, particularly that of the Roman Catholic Church. Several hundred years later, the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 was enforced upon the people of Ireland by British authorities. Writers were no longer able to publish work with references to sexuality and "individual consciousness".

How did the rebellious, fiery Irish writers respond? They became disrupters of established literary forms. They questioned rules, invented new genres of writing, and ultimately created new forms of literature found nowhere else in the world.

There is so much more that I could write about in this posting… about the work of writers and collectors such as Lady Gregory, John Synge, and W.B. Yeats, writers that worked to preserve the Irish rural tradition. Perhaps it is best to end this post with one of my favorite piece of Irish literature, an excerpt from Celtic Twilight by W. B. Yeats called The Golden Age:

A while ago I was in the train, and getting near Sligo. The last time I had been there something was troubling me, and I had longed for a message from those beings or bodiless moods, or whatever they be, who inhabit the world of spirits. The message came, for one night I saw with blinding distinctness a black animal, half weasel, half dog, moving along the top of a stone wall, and presently the black animal vanished, and from the other side came a white weasel-like dog, his pink flesh shining through his white hair and all in a blaze of light; and I remembered a pleasant belief about two faery dogs who go about representing day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by the excellent omen. But now I longed for a message of another kind, and chance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the fiddler put away his old blacking-box and held out his hat for a copper, and then opened the door and was gone.

Kaleidscopes and Cracks

My first “day” in Dublin was one of simply wandering the streets. I observed the people, listened to their beautiful accents, and took in the different architecture.

Dublin is kaleidoscopic to me. If you scratch a little beneath the surface, you can see chapters of history playing and mingling with one another, almost like cracks or rifts that are trying to weave together. For example, there are marks of Christianity alongside those of pagan traditions, signs are written both in the native language Irish, and the outsider English, and there is a sense of there being native Irish and those from other parts of the word.

Geographically, one may think of Dublin as being bisected by the River Liffey. This inlet from the Irish Sea was used by the Vikings when they began to settle here during Medieval times.

The last time I was in Dublin, I stayed south of the River Liffey, an area known for its striking Georgian architecture, many museums and libraries, and greenery। This time, I’m staying north of the river. It is much more industrial and worn down. As I walked along the streets, I noticed houses with broken windows, garbage strewn about the pavement, and houses with crusted paint just about to snap off their sides… another crack: north and south of the river.

As I walked down one particular street, I saw a rusted gutter pipe run down into the corner of someone’s porch. It occupied a space between the stairs and a rusty rail. From underneath grew a beautiful blanket of clover-like weeds speckled with lavender and white flowers. It grew like ivy up and around the decayed wooden façade and iron gate… another crack: growth and decay.

Finally, I was struck by a poem I found resting before a statue of St. Patick in the St. Francis Xavier Church. It read: O Patrick…/ In spite of the King of Tara/You kindled the paschal fire on the/Hill of Slane/While smoke and flame have never/yet been enlightened.

In this poem we find the exultation of St. Patrick. He is praised for managing to enlighten a nation of pagan kingdoms with the words of Christianity… another crack: monotheism and polytheism.

What cracks and kaleidoscopes will I find today?