For centuries, Irish folktales were unknown to the outside world. During the Protestant Ascendancy, the ruling class had nothing but disdain for the stories of Irish farmers. Not only were the stories in the barbaric Irish tongue, but also they were all about fantastic heroes and fairies, which the English dismissed as a bunch of superstitious nonsense.

In the early nineteenth century folklore suddenly became fashionable. The brothers Grimm in Germany started collecting and studying folktales (which you can read in Grimm's Fairy Tales) and declared folklore a vital expression of a culture's heritage. Soon, enterprising Irish scholars began to explore the countryside, looking for stories of value. They found a gold mine.

The First Collections

The first volume of Irish folktales was Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, published in 1825 by Thomas Croker from Cork. Croker and other early scholars of Irish folklore visited the Anglicized areas of Ireland in the east and recorded stories in English; this limited the value of their work because it ignored the great majority of Irish folktales, which were told only in Irish. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and advanced the study of Irish folklore a great step forward.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Irish folklore studies became respectable. Oscar Wilde's parents, Sir William and Speranza Wilde, were important figures in this field and eccentric luminaries on the Anglo-Irish scene. The intellectuals of the Celtic Renaissance drew their inspiration from the Irish language and its folklore. Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire, William Butler Yeats's The Celtic Twilight, and Lady Augusta Gregory's Visions and Beliefs of the West of Ireland not only established Irish folklore as one of the great oral literature traditions of Western civilization, but also provided an immense source of pride for the growing Irish Nationalist movement.

The Irish Folklore Commission

Even as Yeats and Lady Gregory collected tales in the cottages of Sligo and Connemara, they recognized that the storytelling tradition was dying out. They knew that if the Irish language died, a vast literary heritage would die with it. To prevent that from happening, in 1935 the Irish government created the Irish Folklore Commission. In the following decades, Irish-speaking collectors scoured the countryside to record stories of saints, heroes, and spirits. Currently, more than a million and a half pages of folklore reside in the commission's collection. Since 1971, the work of the commission has been carried on by the Folklore Department at University College Dublin.