An Irish Folklore Treasury: A Selection of Old Stories, Ways, and Wisdom from the Schools’ Collection

An Irish Folklore Treasury by John Creedon offers an earnest and intimate window into early twentieth-century life in Ireland through the eyes of young children. With this second written foray into the world of Irish folklife following a 2021 book on local place names, the Cork-based radio broadcaster offers an attractively produced and well-curated volume of over 200 accessible and engaging folklore texts. Irish schoolchildren originally wrote these texts between 1937 and 1939 for the Schools’ Collection, a project of the Irish Folklore Commission, which tasked teachers and students from primary schools across all 26 counties of the Irish Free State to collect folklore in their communities. The children's year-long homework assignment was to speak with family members and neighbors (as well as to reflect personally) and to document local lore, folklife, and traditions. The Commission then archived their entries, which now reside in the National Folklore Collection archive.There are more than 250,000 folklore items across nearly 1,200 volumes, which readers can access physically at University College Dublin and online (www.duchas.ie), the National Folklore Collection's digital archive. Without knowing where to look, one might not easily find the description by Séamus Mac Suibhne of County Longford, of his hedge school, or the story by Connie McGrath of County Galway, of the white hare. In his curation of this volume, Creedon provides a meaningful and approachable point of entry to the Schools’ Collection, while bringing to his readers texts that may not otherwise be read by a wide audience. Within this volume, Creedon introduces each chapter with a few pages of self-reflection, anecdotes, and explanations and then allows the lightly edited texts to stand for themselves. Below many entries, he also provides helpful definitions of potentially unfamiliar historic and Irish-language terms. As a public-facing anthology, Creedon's book does not include substantive textual analysis. It suits diverse readers within and beyond the field of folkloristics and is appropriate for younger audiences.The introduction is the only chapter without materials from the Collection. In it, Creedon narrates his family's knowledge of the Famine—and the realization that his father was born at a time in which there were still living survivors. His father was only a few years older than the children who would go on to contribute to the Schools’ Collection, highlighting that the Schools’ Project was similarly able to gather oral histories at a critical period in Ireland's the introduction, Creedon's book draws together texts from across the island, organized into 14 thematic chapters that broadly cover many of the original 55 “Subjects for Composition” of the Schools’ Collection. He begins with the otherworldly—supernatural beings, mythical heroes, and ghost legends. Following these first three chapters, the other 11 sections emphasize more practical aspects of (often rural) Irish life. Covering topics from crafts and celebrations to education and hard times, these chapters paint a picture of everyday life, often from a child's vantage point.Creedon's respect and reverence for the children's work—and his appreciation for the important historical documentation that the Schools’ Project created—is evident from his writing. Where his book shines is in the way that Creedon highlights the color and individuality of the children's writing; this is what makes the Schools’ Collection unique. It is also here that his departure from a traditional academic writing format, through personal and personable prose, imbues energy and sincerity into the collection.Creedon does not tell the reader about his methodology; this would be a useful addition to the volume. Most significantly, he does not thoroughly explain his selection principles in choosing which texts from the Schools’ Collection to highlight. There are tens of thousands of individual stories in the primary volumes alone—many of which overlap closely in subject and language—plus countless more in students’ notebooks that have not been incorporated into the formal volumes. Creedon also does not discuss his editorial policy. While it appears that he corrected some grammatical and orthographic errors from the children's original works for clarity, it is unclear how he approached this task. There is also no explanation of whether the stories came from the volumes or the archived copybooks, which makes it difficult to ascertain whether he edited them or retitled them. Some readers will be left wondering how and why Creedon selected and treated the stories in any particular way.Although Creedon's book curates an engaging collection of more than 200 texts from the Collection, it has no index, which renders much of his valuable curation difficult to access by researchers. The texts in this anthology provide substantive material for scholarly analysis, and there are many themes—from basket making to the bean sí—of interest to researchers. An index with the names of counties, towns, genres, and topics, beyond the anthology's 14 broad themes, would have been helpful.When uploaded to the Dúchas online archive, the Schools’ Collection was digitally indexed and later made text searchable. Researchers no longer needed to comb through the Collection's card catalog in Dublin and could access once-buried “treasures” through a simple keyword search. Publications like Creedon's are the result of this digitization project and, more broadly, the National Folklore Collection's monumental work in preserving and providing access to local folklore materials.One of the most exciting aspects of the Schools’ Collection is the way that it made—and continues to make—the study of folklore accessible to those outside the academy. Just as twentieth-century students in Ireland assisted the Irish Folklore Commission by documenting legends and lore, volunteers around the world have done the same by transcribing those stories through Meitheal Dúchas, a crowdsourced transcription project. In presenting his “treasury,” Creedon adds to this tradition of making cultural heritage and history accessible and engaging to a broad public. Although some scholars of Irish folklore may not find this book particularly useful in their research, it provides an excellent introduction to Irish folklore—and to the importance of folkloristics and heritage preservation—for an undergraduate course. With its more manageable size than the 250,000-plus entries of the larger Schools’ Collection, An Irish Folklore Treasury could also engage students of all ages in the process of folklore analysis. This anthology does the important work of connecting a diverse readership with the history and practice of folklore collection, and, in this, Creedon greatly serves our discipline.