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Kavanagh, hilariously in Flann O’Brien, sublimely in the verse of the major poetic school of our day, that of Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Murphy, the Irish land and its people and their art have continued to prove inspiring and worthy of defeat. But the work of preserving folklore has been taken up by others, committed first to science.
    Three years after the rebels put down their guns and Ireland won a moment of peace, the Folklore of Ireland Society was founded and James Delargy, once assistant to Douglas Hyde, became editor of its journal,
Béaloideas
. Delargy argued that the preservation of folklore served more than the scientist’s curiosity and did more than supply raw materials to artists. It was essential to the maintenance of a distinct national culture. He appealed for state support, and when funds were granted to establish the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935, he was named director. Delargy brought to Dublin a schoolteacher from Kerry named Sean O’Sullivan, then sent him for training to Sweden so that he could become the Commission’s archivist, charged with the organization of the materials gathered by the Commission’s full-time collectors. None of the collectors were university men. They came out of the country, received Ediphone recorders and instruction in verbatim transcription, and returned into the countryside. New men were in command of the Irish tradition. They were not outsiders but people of the people. I have listened to Sean O’Sullivan tell the old story of the man who had no story, and I have caroused around Dublin with Michael J. Murphy, then followed him across Ulster by reading the superb diaries that he, like the other collectors, has deposited in the archive. Michael J. Murphy returned from the place of his birth, Liverpool, to the place of his people, south Armagh, where he invented the idea of folklore for himself and composed a fine book,
At Slieve Gullion’s Foot
. Immediately afterward, in 1941, Delargy invited him to become the Commission’s collector for Ulster east of Donegal. Murphy is a playwright and a novelist, but he shines most brightly in his account of his adventures in the field,
Tyrone Folk Quest
, and in his book of Northern folktales,
Now You’re Talking
 …, published in 1975. Men like Murphy, working and reworking their territories, havemade the Irish Folklore Commission—since 1971 the Department of Irish Folklore of the University of Dublin College at Belfield, and now headed by Bo Almqvist—the greatest repository of folklore in the world. From its million and a half pages, its archivists, Sean O’Sullivan and Séamas Ó Catháin, have extracted and published rich collections of folktale.
    From Douglas Hyde to the present, from written dictation to the tape recorder, the progress of Irish folklore has been marked by steady improvement in the accuracy with which the words of the speakers of story have been preserved. Today, listening to the tale on tape over and over again, we can get all the words exactly right—and more. Listening again, while trying to capture on paper the stories I recorded during a decade in a small hilly place in County Fermanagh, in the southwestern corner of Northern Ireland, it became plain to me that transcriptions rendered as though they were prose distorted and muted the storyteller’s art. Using italics and capital letters to signal loudness helped some, and reading the new scholarship on American Indian myths helped more. Dell Hymes argues convincingly that Indian narratives are structured poetically. Now, the stories I have recorded in Ireland are not poetry, but they are not prose either. So, I have struggled to jettison literary conventions and learned to follow subtle signs in the teller’s presentation—repetitive words that start sections and sharp silences that close them—to produce transcriptions that not only include all the teller’s words but also indicate something about the