Abstract
Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) is believed to be the first collection of oral tales published in Britain or Ireland and was influential in introducing Irish folklore to an international audience. This essay examines editions in the National Collection of Children’s Books, from an anonymously published collection aimed at preserving the tales of the Irish peasantry for the entertainment of a literate, privileged class in the early nineteenth century, to tales of enchantment for the amusement and education of middle-class children in the twentieth. In most editions, the tales themselves are unaltered and changes take the form of selection and presentation, illustrating the role of paratext in marketing works for particular readerships and in shaping reader interpretation.
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Notes
- 1.
See W.J. McCormack’s entry on Croker in H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds), Oxford dictionary of national biography, vol. 14 (Oxford, 2004), p. 279. Both Douglas Hyde and Joseph Jacobs also credit Croker with leading the way for collectors of oral tales in Ireland and Britain. However, although Hyde commends Croker’s lively style and his close contact with the Irish peasantry, he emphasizes that Fairy legends is as much a literary construct as a work of folklore. See Douglas Hyde, Beside the fire: a collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories (London, 1910), pp. ix–x; Joseph Jacobs, ‘Introduction’ in Celtic fairy tales (London, 1892), n.p.
- 2.
B.G. MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 32 (1943): 547.
- 3.
See Douglas Hyde, Beside the fire: a collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories (London, 1910) pp. ix–x; B.G. MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 32 (1943): 539–56; Richard Dorson, ‘The first group of British folklorists’, Journal of American Folklore, 68 (1955): 1–8; Francesca Diano, ‘Introduction’ in T. Crofton Croker, Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland, facsimile edition (Cork, 1998); Heinz Kosok, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’s fairy legends: a revaluation’, ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, 3 (2001): 63–76.
- 4.
Schacker, Jennifer, National dreams: the remaking of fairy tales in nineteenth-century England (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 47.
- 5.
Yonge, Charlotte, ‘Children’s literature of the last century’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 20 (1869): 306.
- 6.
Schacker, National dreams, p. 47. Schacker devotes a chapter to Croker in her examination of the importance of imported folktales to the development of the fairy-tale genre in England. Focusing primarily on the 1825 edition of Fairy legends, she argues that the implied reader, whether adult or child, is invited to assume a patronizing stance towards the infantilized Irish peasant in need of education and guidance. See pp. 46–77.
- 7.
Cited in Schacker, National dreams, pp. 47–48.
- 8.
See, for example, the John Murray 1826 edition, John Murray 1828 editions (2 vols), the Murray’s Family Library 1834 edition, and the George Allen 1912 new and complete edition edited by Thomas Wright.
- 9.
Claire Connolly, ‘Irish romanticism, 1800–1830’ in M. Kelleher and P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge history of Irish literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 407–448.
- 10.
See Gene Bluestein, ‘The advantages of barbarism: Herder and Whitman’s nationalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 24:1 (1963): 118.
- 11.
Their influential Kinder- und Hausmärchen was published in three volumes in 1812, 1815 and 1822.
- 12.
For a concise discussion of the discovery and study of folklore, see chapter 1 in Anne Markey, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales: origins and contexts (Dublin, 2011), pp. 17–36.
- 13.
T. Crofton Croker, Researches in the south of Ireland: illustrative of the scenery, architectural remains, and manners and superstitions of the Irish peasantry, with an appendix containing a private narrative of the rebellion of 1798 (Dublin, 1981), p. 2.
- 14.
Anon., Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland, vol. 1 (London, 1825), n.p.
- 15.
Anon., Fairy legends (1825), p. 11.
- 16.
See MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’; Markey, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, p. 24; Schacker, National dreams, p. 68.
- 17.
The letter concerns the juvenile annual, The Christmas box, edited by Croker in 1828 and 1829. Edgeworth’s ‘Garry Owen: or, the snow-woman’ appeared in The Christmas box of 1829. Her letter is published in T.F. Dillon’s ‘Memoir of the Author’ in the new and complete edition of Fairy legends edited by Thomas Wright and published by William Tegg in 1870, pp. xvi–xvii.
- 18.
Fairy legends (1825), p. 363.
- 19.
T. Crofton Croker, Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland (London, 1834), pp. 46–7.
- 20.
See David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture (Manchester, 1988).
- 21.
Alfred Nutt, ‘The discrimination of racial elements in the folklore of the British Isles’, Folk-Lore, 9 (1898): 30–52.
- 22.
T. Crofton Croker, Fairy l egends and traditions of the south of Ireland, vol. 2 (London, 1828), p. vii.
- 23.
Markey, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, p. 21.
- 24.
Croker, Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland, vol. 3 (London, 1828), pp. iv–xxviii.
- 25.
Croker, Fairy legends, vol. 3 (1828), pp. 1–154. This essay is a translation by Croker of the Grimms’ introduction to Irische Elfenmärchen.
- 26.
These tales appear to have been compiled by William Owen Pughe, about whom Croker writes: ‘Although imperfectly qualified for the task, his (the compiler’s and my own) aim has been to excite a general interest towards the more abstruse legends of Wales.’ See p. 161.
- 27.
Croker, Fairy legends (1834), p. 2.
- 28.
The five categories from each of the first two volumes are included in the 1834 edition.
- 29.
Croker, Fairy legends (1834), p. iv.
- 30.
Croker, Fairy legends (1834), p. iv.
- 31.
Anon., ‘Our portrait gallery’, Dublin University Magazine (August 1849): 206–7. Croker names Dr Maginn, David R. Pigot, John Humphreys and Thomas Keightley here, but they are not named on the title pages or in the prefaces of any editions of Fairy legends.
- 32.
Schacker, National dreams, p. 50.
- 33.
MacCarthy argues that given the first volume was a collaborative work and the stories well-known folktales, it is impossible to know exactly which tales can be attributed to Croker. The fact that two novels were later published under his name but subsequently revealed to have been penned by his wife did not help Croker’s reputation. See MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’. Also, ‘Daniel O’Rourke’ is attributed to William Maginn in Alfred Percival’s anthology, The Irish fairy book (London, 1925), published as part of the T. Fisher Unwin series of fairy tales from eleven different countries.
- 34.
The section on fairy legends in Researches in the south of Ireland is followed by an apology for dwelling too long upon ‘the notions of the ignorant’ and allowing ‘early associations’ to cloud his ‘maturer judgement’. See the digital version on CELT, pp. 90–91: http://www.ucc.ie/celt
- 35.
Croker, Fairy legends (1834), p. iv.
- 36.
In light of the omission of Maclise’s full-page illustrations, it is interesting that his name is included for the first time on the title page. The drawings that Maclise, as a young art student, had contributed to the second edition were engraved by W.H. Brooke, the illustrator of the first edition, whose name appeared on the title page, with Maclise only gaining brief mention in the preface. By the time the 1834 edition was published, Maclise was rising to prominence in London, having painted a series of celebrated character portraits of famous literary personages of the day, and his name carried greater weight.
- 37.
Edmund Curtis (ed.), ‘Unpublished letters of T. Crofton Croker’, The Irish Book Lover, 28: 2 (1941): 6–12.
- 38.
A shorter memoir had been included in an undated William Tegg edition (1850s).
- 39.
Thomas Wright, ‘Editor’s preface’ in Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland, a new and complete edition edited by T. Wright Esq. MA, FSA, with a memoir of the author by his son T.F. Dillon Croker Esq. FSA (London, 1870), p. i.
- 40.
Swan Sonnenschein edition (London, n.d.), n.p.
- 41.
There are some exceptions, for example ‘Flory Cantillon’s funeral’.
- 42.
Interestingly, four of the tales excluded by Swan Sonnenschein are among the very tales selected by Yeats in his collections, Fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry (1888) and Irish fairy tales (1892).
- 43.
Irish fairy tales was published by Collins in London and in Glasgow and by Browne and Nolan in Belfast as well as in Dublin, Waterford and Cork.
- 44.
Herbert Hayens (ed.), Irish fairy tales (Dublin, Waterford, Cork & Belfast, n.d.), p. 53.
- 45.
Croker, Fairy legends (1834), p. 40.
- 46.
Hayens, Irish fairy tales, p. 60.
- 47.
Croker, Fairy legends (1834), p. 34.
- 48.
Croker, Fairy legends (1834), pp. 34–5; Hayens, Irish fairy tales (n.d.), p. 63.
- 49.
Croker, Fairy legends (1825), p. 102. Francesca Diano commends Croker for this absence of didacticism and compares him favourably with the Grimms in this regard. See the introduction to her facsimile edition (Cork, 1998). However, Croker’s ambiguous comment could be interpreted as a critique of the native Irish population, whom his implied English readers were likely to regard as in need of reform.
- 50.
Hayens, Irish fairy tales, p. 26.
- 51.
Hayens, Irish fairy tales, p. 21.
- 52.
Hayens, Irish fairy tales, p. 3.
- 53.
See MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’. See also Frances Shaw, ‘The Irish Folklore Commission’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 33 (1944): 30–36. More recently, however, Heinz Kosok has attributed repeated references to Croker’s condescension to post-colonial oversensitivity on the part of Irish critics. See Kosok, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’s fairy legends; a revaluation’, p. 67.
- 54.
MacCarthy, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’.
- 55.
Markey, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, p. 33.
- 56.
Some of his tales are included in Mary McGarry, Great folk tales of old Ireland (London, 1972); Croker, T. Crofton and Sigerson Clifford, Legends of Kerry (Tralee, 1972); Croker, T. Crofton and James Lyons, Legends of Cork (Dublin, 1988); Felicity Trotman, Irish folk tales (Dublin, 2008).
- 57.
The stories selected are: ‘The legend of Bottle Hill’, ‘The giant’s stairs’, ‘The soul cages’, ‘The legend of Knocksheogowna’, ‘Fior Usga’, ‘Rent-day’ and ‘The enchanted lake’. Three of the stories selected for the schooltext adaptation are also included here under their original titles.
- 58.
Máire Kennedy, ‘Irish myths, legends, folktales and fairy tales’ in V. Coghlan and C. Keenan (eds), The big guide to Irish children’s books (Dublin, 1996), pp. 81–90.
- 59.
W.B. Yeats, The book of fairy and folk tales of Ireland (London, 2007), p. 7.
Selected Bibliography
Anon., Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1825).
Cairns, David and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Connolly, Claire, ‘Irish romanticism, 1800–1830’ in M. Kelleher and P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge history of Irish literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 407–48.
Croker, T. Crofton, Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland (London: John Murray, 1826).
———, Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1828).
———, Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland (abridged) (London: John Murray, 1834).
Croker, T. Crofton and Sigerson Clifford, Legends of Kerry (Tralee: Geraldine Press, 1972).
Croker, T. Crofton and James Lyons, Legends of Cork (Dublin: Anvil, 1988).
Diano, Francesca, ‘Introduction’ in T. Crofton Croker (ed.), Fairy legends and traditions of the south of Ireland, facsimile edn (Cork: Collins Press, 1998).
Kennedy, Máire, ‘Irish myths, legends, folktales and fairy tales’ in V. Coghlan and C. Keenan (eds), The big guide to Irish children’s books (Dublin: Irish Children’s Book Trust, 1996), pp. 81–90.
Kosok, Heinz, ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’s fairy legends: a revaluation’, ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, 3 (2001): 63–76.
Markey, Anne, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales: origins and contexts (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
MacCarthy, B.G., ‘Thomas Crofton Croker’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 32 (1943): 539–56.
McGarry, Mary, Great folk tales of old Ireland (London: Wolfe, 1972).
Schacker, Jennifer, National dreams: the remaking of fairy tales in nineteenth-century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
Trotman, Felicity, Irish folk tales (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2008).
Yeats, W.B., The book of fairy and folk tales of Ireland (London: Folio Society, 2007).
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Bhroin, C.N. (2017). From Superstition to Enchantment: The Evolution of T. Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland . In: O'Sullivan, K., Whyte, P. (eds) Children's Literature Collections. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59757-1_8
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