To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Thomas Crofton Croker, Collins Press is reprinting his work, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland.
Croker was a Corkman of the ascendancy class who roamed the southern countryside collecting tales and folklore. He published his collection anonymously in 1825. The book sold almost 1,000 copies within a week - a bestseller in its day - and in the same year, the brothers Grimm translated it into German, taking some liberties along the way.
The new edition has a foreword by an Italian scholar, Francesca Diano, an art critic from Padua who has lectured part-time at University College Cork and has a strong interest in Croker. While in London, in the 1970s, she stumbled across Croker's book, and a long time afterwards discovered the identity of its author. She translated the stories into Italian, mesmerising her own young children with them at bedtime along the way.
In her foreword to this facsimile edition, Diano's delight in exploring the world which Croker inhabited, and his success in placing a huge amount of Irish folklore before a wider audience, especially an English one, is palpable .
She tells us that Croker, who did not then speak the Irish language, but who would learn it later, was galvanised by an event in Gougane Barra, Co Cork, on June 23rd, 1813. He and a friend had decided to attend the Pattern Day pilgrimage to the Holy Well there. Croker, at that time, was particularly interested in the caoine, or lament - the "keen", as he described it.
His attention was drawn to the festival because it had origins in pagan ritual but like many others in Ireland, had been "adopted" by Christianity. This one, though, had more of the ribaldry of the pagan rites than the Christian ones. And that was why Bishop Murphy of Cork banned the festival in 1817 and threatened excommunication on anyone who attended it.
Diano quotes Croker in the foreword: "In the summer of that year I visited in company with Mr Joseph Humphreys . . . the Lake of Gougane Barra in the county of west Cork. The object of our little excursion was to witness what is called the pattern, held on St John's Eve, when many thousands of the peasantry usually assemble there for the purposes of piety and mirth, penance and transgression.
"This combination of purposes may sound odd to the English but it nevertheless correctly describes this and similar meetings in Ireland . . . As night closed in, the tent became crowded almost to suffocation . . . and a man, who, I learned, had served in the Kerry Militia and had been flogged at Tralee about five years before as a White Boy, began to take a prominent part in entertaining the assembly by singing Irish songs in a loud and effective voice."
Just then, an old woman sitting near Croker began to rock back and forth on her seat. She began a caoine, including the line lamenting a lost revolutionary - "Cold and silent is thy bed. Damp is the blessed dew of night."
Croker was hooked.
Because of his connections, Croker had a career in the British Admiralty in London after his father's death in 1818. By then, he had founded the Cork Scientific Society and had sent Thomas Moore the results of his researches on some 400 musical airs. In his preface to Irish Melodies, Moore acknowledged this contribution.
Diano says that while Croker condemned "the riotous upbringing of Irish education and the revolutionary character of many aspects of Irish traditions and superstitions", he felt the urge, as she puts it, "to point out the danger resulting from the English colonial policy.
"He is deeply convinced that Ireland should be respected more for what it was in England and in Europe, and that a wiser handling of the Irish problem would result in a more peaceful future. His aim is to research and inform. This is the underlying issue. Should the English reader know more about the beauty, the interest and the history of Irish tradition, much of the ignorance that fuelled the hatred (both sides), would be dissipated."
Diano ends the foreword with her own tribute: "This little anonymous book has given a new direction to my life and my interests and I would never have thought that I would have the honour to write an introduction to its facsimile edition on the bicentenary of Crofton Croker's birth. But life, as we all know, is very strange and often unexpected. So this is but a very small homage that I can pay to Crofton Croker and to Ireland, a land that I feel to be my second country but my first spiritual home."
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, by Thomas Crofton Croker, is published by Collins Press. Price £7.99.