Approaching a folklore archive: the Irish Folklore Commission and the memory of the Great Famine

Abstract

Using the Irish Folklore Commission's centenary survey of local accounts of the Great Famine (1845-50), this article posits a tripartite taxonomy of collective memory: the "global," the "popular" and the "local." Global memory was structured by meta-narratives, the explanatory accounts of the Famine derived from the Catholic Church and nationalist political organisations. Local memory dealt with named individuals and places. The intermediate level of popular memory drew on both the local and the global (although the Church's interpretation of the famine had proved more acceptable among the rural, landowning farmers who made up the majority of the Commission's informants), but also on folk narrative tradition to create a coherent system of representation in which motifs were replicated over a large area (and over time).

The Famine Survey in the Irish Folklore Commission

The archive of the former Irish Folklore Commission (1935-1971) in Dublin represents the result of one of the largest and most sustained projects of collection of oral narrative. It was initiated by The Folklore of Ireland Society, established in 1927. With modest state backing, the Irish Folklore Commission was founded in 1935. Over the next three-and-a-half decades, the Commission employed a number of permanent full-time and part-time collectors and amassed an enormous archive (Ui Ogain 1995, 3-9; O Giollain 2000). Much of the collecting concentrated on accomplished individual narrators, particularly of sage and marchen, but the Commission also conducted country-wide surveys. Its first project on these lines in 1937-8 used the primary school system, with teachers co-ordinating material collected by pupils at home. The contacts established during this project were later used to survey folk material on particular themes. One of these surveys, in 1945, collected material on the Great Famine of the 1840s, during which one million people died and another million emigrated, out of a pre-Famine population of almost nine million.

The concentration on individual narrators and their tales is reflected in the Commission's publications, with its classic productions devoted to the presentation and analysis of the repertoire of particular narrators (O Duilearga 1964; O Croinin 1971). The survey material has been less exploited, however, mainly due to its heterogeneity and that of its narrators. The Famine survey contains everything from standard legends set during the Famine and told by recognised narrators, to semi-academic prose accounts compiled by schoolteachers. It would be possible, of course, to concentrate on particular narrators and their Famine stories, but that would be to miss the unique wider view of the "collective memory" that the survey permits.

There is no recognised way of approaching this body of material, however. The classic categorisations of folklore scholarship, such as the Aarne-Thompson typologies, deal with more fictional or imaginative--and not with historical--narrative. The classifications proposed for Irish ethnography by O Suilleabhain in the Commission's own A Handbook of Irish Folklore are not satisfactory either. They derive from Scandinavian folk-life studies, and suppose a stable, organic, very "traditional" community. It is a model that does not really register the possibility of social crisis, catastrophe or rapid change. Famine is given only a glancing reference in the section on agriculture, and does not feature at all in a section on "hunger and thirst." Almost all the references to the Great Famine are contained in a separate section on national history, assuming it to be part of a standard political history (O Suilleabhain 1942; O Ciosain 1996).

The methods of oral history, as applied to the memory of historical events, are not entirely appropriate either (Joutard 1977; 1983; Thompson 1985). We cannot repeat interviews, for example, and in some cases know little about the actual circumstances of collection. Indeed, the Famine archive is perhaps better approached as a written and not an oral collection. The purpose of this paper is therefore to suggest an initial approach that will offer some ordering principles and categories for the material, while at the same time doing justice to its diversity. Broadly speaking, it will attempt to construct a simple classification of narrative types, and will suggest that different forms of memory or knowledge correspond to those types.

The Commission's survey of the oral history of the Famine was a way of commemorating the centenary of its outbreak in 1845-6. It circulated a short questionnaire to its full-time and part-time collectors, resulting in the collection of thousands of pages of material. The use of a questionnaire, of course, shapes the responses obtained and, consequently, the image of the Famine that emerges. In practice, its influence is much less than might have been expected. Many collectors followed it fairly loosely, and a good deal of the narrative is not in response to any particular question. There is a large amount of supernatural legend, for example, although the questionnaire takes a strictly factual academic approach and does not mention any such legends. In any case, the survey material can be checked to a certain extent against material relating to the Famine that was collected in a less structured way before and after the survey, during the Commission's longer term activities. (The 1945 questionnaire is reproduced in Poirteir [1995, 283; 1996, 315-6]. The Irish and English language versions are almost identical.)