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widescholarly movement within which the international comparative perspective was dominant.
    Folklore’s comparative method was achieving its first mature formulation in Finland while Douglas Hyde was at work on the first scientific collections of Irish tale. In 1890, in the preface to
Beside the Fire
, Hyde grouped the stories of Ireland into two classes. One contained the wonder tales that folklorists, in homage to the Grimms, term
Märchen
, and it contained fairy legends. The other consisted of the poetic and marvelous adventures of Finn and the Fianna. The tales of the first class, Irish by adoption, deserved study for what they told about “our old Aryan heritage.” The tales of the second class, the Fenian tales, were shared with Scotland as a result of ancient Irish colonization, but they were Irish distinctly and profoundly. They were important for the Gaelic language in which they were spoken and for the old culture of which they were part, the culture that was not English and could provide inspiration for the formation of a new Irish nation.
    Add the idea of the Gaelic League to the idea of the historic-geographic school of folklore study, add nationalism to internationalism, and you have the twin motives that powered the great work of the Irish Folklore Commission. As the Commission’s archivist, Sean O’Sullivan struggled manfully and successfully to bring the massive collection into usable order. In his guide for fieldworkers,
A Handbook of Irish Folklore
, he listed the tales of Ireland in accordance with the international index developed by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, and he added a typology of the Fenian tale. Then, working with Reidar Christiansen of Norway, he classified 43,000 tales into the Aarne-Thompson system, so you can find, for instance, that over 650 versions have been reported from Ireland of type 300, in which a hero slays three giants and then a sea monster to win the hand of a princess. When Sean O’Sullivan mobilized his unrivaled knowledge of the Irish folktale to pull from the archive his collection
Folktales of Ireland
, published in 1966, he emphasized the same classes of story that Hyde did: tales that connected Ireland to the world and tales in which Ireland’s most ancient tradition glistens. But those are not the only tales told in Ireland, so at the end of his book O’Sullivan adds others, and in two other collections he stresses stories that are not to be found in the indexes or in the Fenian tradition, tales of kinds that claimed the attention of Hyde’s friend Lady Gregory.
    Lady Gregory was recently widowed and teaching herself Irish when she encountered two new books on Irish folklore, one by W. B. Yeats, the other by Douglas Hyde. Suddenly an old interest of hers took form and purpose. She invited them to her home, Coole in Galway; the collaboration that would produce the Abbey Theatre was about to begin. Yeats came first.It was the same year in which Yeats met John Synge and sent him to the Arans. Soon after, Lady Gregory was out in the field “collecting fairy lore.” In the next year, 1897, she was distracting Yeats from work he could not do by taking him from house to house to record old stories. They went together and both wore black, but their motives were not the same.
    Yeats, inspired by William Morris, was full of hatred for the cheap materialistic side of the modern age, and he sought the fairy faith as part of his diverse, desperate quest for the spiritual. He called in the countryside for witnesses to the reality of the other world. Lady Gregory joined him and when her “big book of folklore,”
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
, was at last published in 1920 with essays by Yeats at the back, it stood, as it continues to stand, as the greatest work produced out of the Irish interest in mystery that began in Croker’s
Researches in the South of Ireland
, that embraced Oscar’s parents, Sir William and Lady Wilde, in the days before Yeats,