Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, Language Sciences, the Language Institute, and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+.
In 1937, the Irish Folklore Commission embarked on a grand experiment: to enlist middle-school students in rural Irish schools in interviewing their parents, relatives, and neighbors about various folklore topics. With the help of their teachers, students would learn about Irish folktales, legends, customs, food traditions, etc. and produce hand-written records of what they found out from local adults. Over the course of the years 1937-39, some 5000 rural Irish schools participated in the project, with some 50,000 students producing records that totaled a phenomenal 740,000+ pages of folklore notations. The “Schools Collection” is an unmatched source of information about Irish folklore of the 1930s, but for a long time it was largely inaccessible to the general public. In 2013, all of that changed when the Irish government began a digitization project with crowd-sourced transcription known as Meitheal Dúchas. In this presentation we’ll look at the Schools Collection, the Meitheal Dúchas site, and the many things we can learn about the Irish Free State of the 1930s by exploring the digitized records of Irish school children/folklorists.
Thomas Dubois is the Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore, Folklore, and Religious Studies in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic. His research focuses on the ways in which people think about and use the idea of tradition in their lives, with particular attention to Finnish, Sámi, and medieval Nordic cultures, as well as Indigenous Wisconsin communities and communities of people descended from Nordic settlers in North America and the British Isles. His various books look at the Finnish national Epic Kalevala, Viking Age religion, medieval saints’ lives, medieval sagas, lyric and narrative song, shamanism, literature, wood carving, sacral landscapes, and the workings of social media.
This event is free and open to the public. In person, in 2335 Sterling Hall, and online (advanced registration required for online attendance). Visit HERE to register.
This event is part of the UW-Milwaukee/UW-Madison Bi-campus Irish Culture Week.