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.