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The Folklore of
Clare by Thomas Johnson Westropp
Introduction by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich
The earlier volume on the Archaeology
of the Burren, published by CLASP Press and containing a complete record
of the prehistoric monuments of northern Clare which were surveyed by
Thomas J. Westropp, includes a comprehensive note on Westropp’s
career and scholarship and a commentary on how his work contributed to
the development of the discipline of archaeology. Something may be said
here regarding his contribution to folklore studies through his activities
in gathering together and publishing in Folk-Lore - the journal of the
English Folklore Society - between the years 1910 and 1913 the materials
now being made available again in the present volume. More than another
decade was to elapse before the work of recording and publishing the materials
of Irish folklore on a comprehensive and sustained basis was to get under
way, with the founding of The Folklore of Ireland Society and the commencement
of the publication of its Journal Béaloideas in 1927. Some details
of the fruits of that later work, as it relates to Co. Clare folklore,
are given in the hope that Westropp’s earlier contributions can
be seen in the light of all of the known Clare ‘folklore archive’
in a way that is both comparative and complementary.
The list of officers and contributors
to the volumes of the journal Folk-Lore in the years preceding The Great
War, when Westropp’s Co. Clare material was appearing in its pages,
indicates the degree to which the collection and study of folklore was
then, still, in these islands, regarded as an aspect of antiquarian and
anthropological study as much as it was regarded as the work of nationalist,
cultural reclamation by scholars and writers sympathetic to the ideals
of the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival and the Gaelic League. The names of
Eleanor Hull and Alfred Nutt are to be found in the 1910 volume of Folk-Lore
along with those of the folklorists Andrew Lang and E. Sydney Hartland
and the anthropologists W.H.R. Rivers and R.R. Marett. It was in this
1910 volume that Westropp began his Co. Clare contributions with the observation
that his survey would show ‘many traces of ancient beliefs still
surviving’ and record the mythology and sagas of early days in the
place-names and the legends still then current in the oral narrative and
tradition of the county. Clare, ‘isolated by the Sea, the River
and the enmity of Connaught’, might, he says, be expected to preserve
until modern times an unbroken tradition from the prehistoric past.
Westropp’s awareness of the dynamic
and creative nature of folklore and tradition is evidenced in his assertions
that a) the bulk of the traditions he is presenting have, since 1790,
been collected from the mouths of the people and not from books or from
the notes of others; b) he has tried to gather versions of the legends
‘without the dangerous aid of "leading question" ’
and is conscious of how, in his view, the ‘Literary Revival’
will effect legends. He draws ethnographically sophisticated inferences
as to the transmission and interpretation of tradition from material involving
members of his own family. He reports on his having himself carried out
investigations on accounts of the seeing of ‘corpse-lights’
that traced their origins to the natural phenomenon of phosphorescence.
His Victorian rationalism in regard to the status of folk belief is hinted
at in his proclamation that ‘I distrust profoundly the dicta of
Clare people in comparative anatomy’.
As a child of his times - which of us
is not? - he can be seen, in hindsight, to have been subject to the failings
in perception and contextual understanding that later generations of cultural
scholarship take as given. Nevertheless, his scholarship is as meticulous
and as transparent as he was able to render it, in his day, and we can
endorse the judgement of Séamas Ó Duilearga, founding father,
pre-eminent exponent and touchstone of the next later era of Irish folklore
scholarship, that ‘he was a great man in his own way, and his name
is today [c. 1930] quite unjustly forgotten.’ Ó Duilearga
makes this remark in the course of a diary entry in which he recounts
the various personal and intellectual handicaps that, in his view, cut
Westropp off from the people of Clare and ‘of other parts of Gaelic-speaking
Ireland’. With our own version of hindsight today we would wish
to be far more circumspect in regard to the somewhat dismissive judgement
of Westropp and his folklore scholarship that is entailed overall in Ó
Duilearga’s estimate of his predecessor. Ó Duilearga’s
own extensive folklore collecting in Clare was undertaken between 1930
and 1943 and a substantial portion of it is to be found in his posthumously
published Leabhar Stiofáin Uí Ealaoire (1981) whose editor’s
introduction contains the diary entry on Westropp.
The collecting and publishing activities
of the Irish Folklore Commission from the 1930s, inspired, motivated and
directed by Ó Duilearga were undertaken in accordance with a Nordic
philosophy, or model, of folklore study rather than the British one, with
its anthropological and archaeological leanings, with which Westropp’s
work is associated. The perspectives, the styles and the methodologies
of the two models are quite different as can be seen from a comparison
of the classification principles which each employed. These principles
are best exemplified in two publications:-
1) Notes and queries on anthropology
(1874. 6th edition 1951) - edited and updated by successive committees
of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland whose
members include some of those mentioned in the 1910 volume of Folk-Lore.
2) A handbook of Irish folklore (1942)
- the vade-mecum of the Irish Folklore Commission’s collectors,
prepared by the Commission’s archivist, Seán Ó Súilleabháin,
with a foreword by Ó Duilearga himself. The reproduction in the
present volume of Westropp’s Co. Clare material, on the earlier
classification principles, is a valuable contribution to the history of
the methodology of folklore study in Ireland, providing as it does, a
substantial basis for comparative analysis of the paradigms underlying
fieldwork and their outcomes.
Apart from Séamas Ó Duilearga’s
major collection of Co. Clare folklore, referred to above, we can note
the extent of the other Clare material that exists in the Commission Archive
whose manuscripts and other field recordings are among the holdings of
the Department of Irish Folklore at NUI (UCD). From the Collector Index
of the Commission Archive we learn that something in excess of 14,500
manuscript pages of Co. Clare folklore was assembled in the mid-20th century
by a total of approximately 126 contributors and collectors of various
degree. Of these 29 were females who, between them, contributed some 500
pages - 140 of these from one individual female collector, Máiréad
Uí Mhartáin. The implications of such statistics for the
existence of gender bias in the collection is something of which contemporary
students of folklore are keenly aware. Half a dozen of the male collectors
were full-time or major field-workers for the Commission. Chief among
these, in his sustained work in Clare, is Seán Mac Mathúna
who is responsible for more than 9,000 manuscript pages of the Clare material
in the Commission Archive. Other major Commission collectors of Clare
material were Seán Ó Flannagáin with c. 2750 pages
and Seán MacGrath with 2,000 pages. Of the nearly 16,000 pages
contributed by the major Clare collectors about a quarter consists of
the Diaries which the Commission field-workers were required to keep and
enter up.
In these Diaries many vivid and vital
contextual accounts are given that have significance for the interpretation
of the material collected and these diaries form an integral and important
part of the Clare folklore record with a considerable potential for contributing
to our understanding of the Folklore Process. This process of the construction
and transmission of Tradition - not least through the channels of collector
activity - is something that has received considerable attention in folklore
scholarship since the separate eras of Westropp and Ó Duilearga
and it would be very desirable to have any notebooks or other fieldwork
records of Westropp’s to add to the Commission Diaries for the fuller
understanding of the enterprize of representing the vernacular culture
of Co. Clare in all its phases since the study of vernacular culture and
folklore (or ‘popular antiquities’ to give it its former name)
arose in the later 18th century. That Westropp should, so early in the
last century, have noted for us in regard to his own materials, the focus
on an oral transmission that he dates to 1790, is further evidence of
the acuteness of his understanding of the enterprize on which he was engaged
and the nature of the cultural materials with which he worked. In this,
as in other ways that will be obvious to the careful reader of his work,
he was an enlightened and progressive scholar to whose labours the study
of folklore in Ireland, and in general, is much indebted.
This volume will reintroduce his work
and will restore his name to the respect and the affections of all those
- in Clare and beyond - for whom folklore, tradition and popular culture
are an important and ever-dynamic aspect of identity and cultural heritage
- local and national - in a world where the local and the global, the
vernacular and the cosmopolitan continue, as always, to play upon each
other in complex and interesting ways that contemporary cultural research
is finding new ways to explore.
Gearóid Ó Crualaoich,
Béaloideas/Folklore,
NUI (UCC),
October, 2000.
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