Inventing Irish Folklore – Revivals, Survivals, and Superstitions

Ireland is a Gaelic Galápagos, there are few places in the world where the manifold roots of the scientific and cultural revolution go deeper. Folklore’s age of innocence, heralded by the conclusion of an extended period of centenaries, including those of the state (2022), the Folklore of Ireland Society (2027), and the Irish Folklore Commission (2035) is drawing to a close. A retrospect of the keywords and worlds of Irish folklore, béaloideas in Irish, is timely and, given their far-reaching ramifications, crucial.

The book moves from English to Irish, zero folklore to foklore, Anglophone folklore to béaloideas, back to no folklore again. The author argues that foklore is perhaps not best studied from its latest last chapter, from the remaining emplacements of vestigial and emperial sciences, or from its current place, but ab initio. To begin to separate the wheat from the chaff, imagine three things: first the Hibernophone seanchas, ancestral anamnesis of the autochtonous life-world; second Anglophone antiquarianism, foklore and anthropology; and third béaloideas, often, though by no means always, Anglophone folklore Gaelicised.