“Collect the fragments, lest they perish”. These words, adopted by The Folklore of Ireland Society in 1927, outline their mission to collect, preserve and publish the folklore and folklife of a fast-changing Ireland. Out of the society came the Irish Folklore Commission, who between 1935 and 1970, gathered one of the world’s largest folklore collections from every county in Ireland.
These collections go beyond fragments. They include transcribed tales from Peig Sayers, first-person recollections from the 1916 Rising and questionnaires that describe matchmaking, tally sticks and The Great Famine.
Jonny Dillon, Archivist with the National Folklore Collection, outlines the background to the collection, how they collected and collated such an enormous body of work and the challenges that come with protecting and utilising this material for our modern age.
It’s a story that is as interesting and steeped in history as the collections themselves.
Background to National Folklore Collection - why was it set up?
The National Folklore Collection continues the work of the Irish Folklore Commission, an institution which was established in 1935 with the aim of collecting, preserving and publishing items of Irish folk tradition; the unofficial, informal, traditions and customs, beliefs, narratives, and crafts of the Irish people.
The Commission received government funding throughout its existence – a sum of one hundred pounds was initially set aside for the collecting of folklore from every county in Ireland (including Northern Ireland) and folklore collectors were trained and sent out to conduct fieldwork, the results of which they posted to Commission headquarters in Dublin. The collections they made, consisting of manuscript and audiovisual material, form the basis of our archival collections today. These collections are now known as the National Folklore Collection and held at University College Dublin. In December 2018, the collections were inscribed into the UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ Register, The Book of Kells is the only other Irish inclusion.
What was Ireland like at that time? What led to it being established?
Ireland at that time was a newly independent state. The years preceding the establishment of the Commission saw the country racked by the 1916 Rising, the 1919-1921 War of Independence, the partition of the island into separate states and the 1922-1923 Irish Civil War – a conflict which left deep bitterness and political polarisation in its wake.
I think that following this period of great upheaval and discord, the country was seeking to renew and affirm itself; the valorisation of folk culture offered a means through which new visions and forms of national identity could be asserted in order to emphasise our independence as a nation.
The Structure of collecting and collating
Folklore scholars from Britain, Finland, Germany, Norway and Sweden were hugely instrumental in supporting the work of the Commission. International scholars felt that the work being done in Ireland could shed light on the broader European cultural landscape; since Ireland is a peripheral nation located at Europe’s north-western fringe, many customs and traditions which had died out elsewhere still formed part of a living tradition here.
The Commission worked carefully to document and collect traditions at a point in Ireland when the Irish language was in serious decline, while the effects of urbanisation and industrialisation had not yet eroded older cultural patterns and practices. Because the material with which the Commission was concerned was part of an oral tradition, it had to be documented through extensive fieldwork collections. In practical terms, this involved a network of folklore collectors travelling townlands the country over and collecting material for the Commission. There was a pressing concern at the time that our folk customs were in danger of passing into oblivion and slipping away without a trace, and so the remaining ‘fragments’ had to be collected as a matter of urgency.
In order to coherently arrange material received from the field, Seán O Súilleabháin (Archivist to the Irish Folklore Commission) travelled in 1935 to the Dialect and Folklore Archive at Uppsala, Sweden. Over a three-month period, he made a detailed study of the archival system in use there, familiarising himself with the methods employed to arrange, classify and catalogue fieldwork collections of folklore. The system he adapted for use in the Irish context laid the foundation for approaches to archival arrangement and description still employed at the National Folklore Collection today.
The Archival Collections
Our archival collections are broken into several series. The Main Manuscript Collection comprises more than 2,400 bound volumes of interviews in both Irish and English from all thirty-two counties in Ireland. Our Photographic Collection consists of more than 80,000 photographs, encompassing glass plates, prints and film negatives. The Sound Archive features approximately 12,000 hours of audio on early formats such as wax cylinder, wire-tape, magnetic-tape and acetate disc (along with more recent formats).
The Schools’ Collection consists of over 1,200 manuscript volumes containing material collected by senior primary school pupils over the period 1937-1939. Under this scheme, the collecting of folklore was made part of the school curriculum by the Department of Education, and every Friday senior pupils would ask their grandparents and parents questions on items of folklore which were covered in a booklet compiled by the Commission.
We also house a specialist reference library with over 50,000 titles, along with a considerable art collection. In 1970 the staff and holdings of the Irish Folklore Commission were transferred to University College Dublin. Now the National Folklore Collection, we ensure safeguarding, preservation and access to these historic collections, and oversee the implementation of new collection projects. Further, students can now study folklore from BA to PhD level, while utilising the collections at our disposal.
How do you operate and structure your work?
It’s very varied. We always have a very broad array of people looking to consult our collections; academics, students, genealogists, historians, writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, singers, film and documentary makers, radio producers, school children, elderly people, relatives of those recorded in our collections, others with a local interest they want to explore – the list goes on. As a result, you have to be able to shift your focus constantly to best suit the requirements of those you meet in the course of your work.
Some who visit may never have set foot in an archive and can be daunted by the enormous card indices and manuscript tomes (not to mention the considerable scope of the material). Our job is to guide, assist, advise, contextualise, explain and provide access as best we can. It’s a very rewarding process, though not without its own challenges.
Challenges
There are many challenges – time management is one. We are a small team, and meeting the volume of interest generated by these collections can be demanding. Digitisation poses challenges too – traditional archival materials can withstand a certain degree of benign neglect. That is to say, you can close the door on a manuscript and come back in 50 years, and if the conditions are okay, it should still be there on the shelf in decent order. Not so with digital material; once an item has been digitised you need to keep it constantly fed and watered, juggling from platform to platform or format to format. With these challenges though come enormous opportunities; new ways to conceive of and present the collection, along with new entry points and approaches to analysis.
In the context of digitisation, ethical considerations also play a very important role. We maintain a keen awareness of the sensitivities of the archival material and its context. These aren’t just pie charts or numbers on a screen, these records deal with real people, with local communities, with people’s parents and grandparents.
As such, we always need to remember our duty of care to those people who are represented in the records, and to the communities from which they were collected.
The Instagram account
If not for COVID-19, I don’t think I would have set the account up. I saw it as a way to reach out to people throughout the lockdown. Personally, I take somewhat of a mixed view of social media, but this experience has actually been really positive, and the material seems to resonate with a broad reach of people. I’ve had people contact me because pictures I’ve put up have shown their late father or grandfather.
Others have found something positive or meaningful in some of the excerpts from our early literature I’ve posted on there. Something as simple as a poem matched with an image, or the description of some event or calendar custom with which people can relate – all of these things can have a positive impact on someone’s day. I think that’s important, especially nowadays.
I want people to know that we in this country are sitting on an enormous treasure trove of native literature and thought; of wisdom, wit and imaginative artistry. Something uplifting, humorous, poignant, sad, whatever – it’s all there.This material is rooted in the past but can help us to navigate the present in a way that is meaningful and uplifting.
Future for the National Folklore Collection – how will It evolve?
I think increased access via online platforms, and digitisation will continue to be of central importance to our work. Our online platform www.dúchas.ie is a collaborative project with our colleagues at Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, Dublin City University – they’ve done fantastic work in developing a technical infrastructure upon which our digitised collections can be hosted and navigated by the public. When this material was first collected in the 1930s there was a great sense of urgency to the overall project, and a fear that all of this material was in danger of being lost forever. Today we can really open up these collections to communities all over Ireland and further afield, allowing people to draw on them freely, to learn from them and use the material in a multitude of different ways. This opens the collection up to a much broader array of people beyond the confines of a University setting, and allows us to highlight the importance of traditional culture and inheritance in contemporary times.
Our modern lives are being documented on camera phones and Instagram, do we need collectors to preserve our history?
Folklore collections, in comparison with records generated on social media, tend to be wrought very slowly. Trust is an important part of the process of recording – these things take time, and when done well, offer insight into the lives and voices of individuals and communities who might not otherwise be heard. Personally, I feel that while social media can have a positive impact and allow for a broad reach, it also facilitates a certain communal loneliness or isolation. So, while it is certainly easier to reach out to like-minded souls online in a way that we couldn’t before, many of the records being generated today seem to me to encourage a sort of collective solitude, atomisation and passivity which has surface appearance as its ultimate concern.
I think the modern imagination has been stripped of many of the reference points which oriented our forebears and which provided meaning and cohesion to the world. It’s as though in modernity we have ‘liberated’ ourselves from all meaning, and, having heaved memory overboard like ballast now find ourselves lost in a world whose pace is increasingly frenetic and relativistic. Many nowadays are thirsty for meaning, and I think it is for this reason (among others) that folkloric material resonates with people. Our communal traditions, in all their multiplicity, are suggestive of a shared history, which likewise implies a shared destiny.
So, this Instagram account is intended as a vehicle to present the richness and variety of these customs to people. If it has a positive impact on someone’s day, I’m happy.
Visit duchas.ie for more information about the Collections, you can follow the incredible Instagram account here.
Some favourites from the Instagram account
I love this photograph. It shows James Hamilton Delargy (Director of the Irish Folklore Commission), Seosamh Ó Dálaigh and Micheál Ó Dónaill collecting from Seán Daltún at Cúl na Sméar, county Waterford in 1948.
Halloween observances will be known by many in Ireland and further afield. This striking photograph by Maurice Curtin shows a young boy playing a divination game, in which saucers containing clay, a ring or water foretell death, marriage or travel. The child is blindfolded and spun around before extending their hand over the saucer to divine the future.
I love this photograph by Tomás Ó Muircheartaigh, though we have very little by way of contextual detail regarding it. The beautiful poem is from the 7th century, and asks where is God to be found.
This is a favourite of mine. It shows the solemnity a funeral on Inis Mór, and I thought it fitting for the winter. The excerpted poetry is from Thomas Telynog Evans, and the opening line of the piece was rattling around my head all winter. I’d been reading the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke again at the time, and I included a quote of his in there. All three pieces seemed to ‘click’ at the time.
This shot from Ballycastle, county Mayo shows a bride dancing with Strawboys – uninvited male ‘guests’ who would appear at the wedding feast and ceremonially steal the bride for a dance before playing music and providing entertainment. The text reproduced from the manuscripts describes practices on ‘Chalk Sunday’, in which the unmarried were marked with chalk on their way to mass on the first Sunday in Lent.
This was a post I put up containing a few lines from a Kerry poet whose work I like, Micheál Ua Ciarmhaic. In these few lines, the river explains how it will be here forever, flowing slowly in a relaxed and unhurried way. I was delighted to receive a note from Micheál’s daughter, who was glad to see her father’s work on the page. The photograph shows a stream and some dwellings in Dún Chaoin county Kerry, and there’s an easy and relaxed air to the whole scene.