Belief and Interpretation in T. Crofton Croker's Legends of the Lakes

Abstract

THOMAS Crofton Croker (1798-1854) gained a modicum of fame through his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,' one of the earliest collections of British folktales.2 The previous year, 1824, his Researches in the South of Ireland earned the respect of antiquaries, 3 but his third book, in 1829, Legends of the Lakes; or, Sayings and Doings at Killarney: Chiefly from the Manuscripts of R. Adolophus Lynch, Esq. achieved neither the popularity of the former nor the scientific approval of the latter. Recent critics pointing to the commonplace quality of the lore, but most of all to the novelistic apparatus of a fictional tour of the Lakes through which the lore is revealed, have largely ignored the book. The characters who appear in it are historical, well-known to nineteenth-century visitors to the lakes, and frequently mentioned in local guidebooks and histories. Croker invented the excursions, though they are to the usual sites, and joined them to local legends for a tour which would leave even a modern tourist breathless. Irish critics, sensitive to the use of dialect and to comic protrayals of Irish peasantry, have accused Croker of an indifference typical of the 'Ascendancy' who ruled the country. Alienated by the book's personal and eccentric nature-the first edition is filled with 'newly-created' sketches to which the narrator calls our attention, as well as with musical notation and a 'preface' which appears at the end of the work readers have overlooked its concern with the nature of belief and interpretation in folklore. Many of Croker's contemporaries were offended by his disregard for what they assumed to be an incompatibility between the sublimity of the Killarney landscape and the vulgarity of market-place and peasant cabin. John Wilson Croker, a distant relative and Crofton Croker's superior in the Admiralty, expressed this reservation in a personal letter: