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rhythms of narration. The result is a text composed of short paragraphs, often of only one sentence, that break up occasionally for dramatic effect. In the future, as we follow in the direction Douglas Hyde pointed, we will discover still better ways to get onto the page the purest representation of what the storyteller said.
    We writers of folktale have decided that our basic obligation is to our sources. Our goal is to free ourselves from our own tradition so that we can approach other traditions directly. Our science exists to honor the storyteller’s art.
COMMUNICATION
    Once we have determined that our duty is to record folktales exactly and lovingly in the words of their narrators, the question remains of which tales to record and present to the reader. Its answer depends upon our motives, and different motives have driven scholars out of the study and into the field and guided them while they wrote. Return again to the beginning, to T. Crofton Croker.
    Croker wished to amuse his readers, but sincere storytellers like CroftonCroker and Hugh Nolan enter the act of communication with motives deeper than amusement. Introducing the complete edition of the
Fairy Legends
that he compiled out of affection for his recently deceased friend, Thomas Wright wrote that “the real importance” of Croker’s stories lay in their “historical and ethnological” implications.
    With amazing speed during Croker’s era, scholars developed a theory encompassing history and ethnology that was to form the basis of folklore’s first major scheme for research, the historic-geographic method. The method’s goal is to read unwritten history out of spatial distributions. It commences in the recognition that stories told in distant places carry the same basic form. Comparison of these story types, alive in the minds of modern narrators, suggests connections between far-flung populations and leads toward the reconstruction of ancient histories.
    “It is curious to observe the similarity of legends, and of ideas concerning imaginary beings, among nations that for ages have had scarcely any communication,” Crofton Croker wrote, and in the notes that follow his tales, he not only connects new and old Irish stories and remarks similarities between Irish and Scottish, Welsh and English traditions, he ranges farther, finding parallels in Spain and Italy, in Germany and Denmark. At the end of one legend, in which a hill in Cork gains its name from a bottle out of which magical helpers popped, he calls attention to German and Eastern analogues and comments that “Mr. Pisani, formerly secretary to Lord Strangford and now in the embassy at Constantinople, relates a tale similar to the Legend of Bottle-hill, which was told him when a child by his nurse, who was a Greek woman.” Even Samuel Lover, who counseled serious persons—“your masters of art, your explorers of science, star-gazing philosophers, and moon-struck maidens”—to lay his book aside, for laughter was his purpose, still follows his sketch in which a man saves himself from his compact with the Devil with the note that the tale “is somewhat common to the legendary lore of other countries—at least, there is a German legend built on a similar foundation.” Despite his wish to amuse, Lover contributed to comparative study, and Croker was adamantly clear as to his purpose: “My aim has been to bring the twilight tales of the peasantry before the view of the philosopher.”
    The international nature of Croker’s stories immediately attracted the brothers Grimm, whose translation of his work appeared within a year of the publication of the first edition in 1825. A French translation followed, and when in 1828 Croker’s second series of Irish legends arrived, it came in company with a third volume containing Welsh legends and a lengthy essay by Wilhelm Grimm analyzing the Irish tales and setting them into a broad European context. Croker was no longer alone. He was part of a