Migratory Legends

Lore & Background

Christiansen conducted comparative research in fairy tales, particularly between Scandinavian and Irish folklore traditions. In his 1958 work *The Migratory Legends*, he proposed a type catalogue for classifying 'migratory legends' by motif, using examples from Norwegian folklore. He became full professor of folkloristics at Oslo University in 1952, received an honorary doctorate from University College Dublin in 1954, and retired in 1956. After retirement, he spent a semester at Indiana University Bloomington at the invitation of Stith Thompson, and in 1957/59 returned to Dublin to work with Seán Ó Súilleabháin. In 1958, he became chairman of the Commission Internationale des Arts et Traditions Populaires (CIAP).

Reader's Guide

Christiansen's *Migratory Legends* (1958) introduced a systematic classification for migratory legends—folk-tales transmitted via cross-cultural diffusion—organized into eight major categories with subtypes, such as 'The Black Book of Magic,' 'Witches and Witchcraft,' 'Legends of the Human Soul, of Ghosts and Revenants,' and 'Trolls and Giants.' This catalogue provided a framework for comparing folklore motifs across traditions, particularly between Scandinavian and Irish narratives. His work complemented the Aarne–Thompson classification systems and remains a reference for folklorists studying legend types. Christiansen's broader comparative research, including his studies on Irish and Scandinavian folktales and European folklore in America, helped establish folkloristics as a scholarly discipline in Norway and internationally. His role as archivist of the Norwegian Folklore Collection and his UNESCO chairmanship further solidified his influence in preserving and analyzing oral traditions.

Did You Know?

• Christiansen studied theology from 1904 to 1909 but was never ordained as a priest.
• He learned Irish in Ballyferriter, County Kerry, at the suggestion of Carl Marstrander.
• He proposed eight major categories for migratory legends in his 1958 work, including 'Domestic Spirits' and 'Local Legends of Places, Events and Persons.'

The Living Tradition of Oral Storytelling

Irish folklore was never a static archive locked in books; it breathed through the daily rhythms of small communities. Stories, songs, and dances moved from one generation to the next through spoken word, performed around firesides in gatherings that some scholars label the cèilidh—a term actually borrowed from Scottish Gaelic. These were not mere entertainments but the very fabric of communal life. A wedding, a wake, Christmas, the eve of Samhain (Halloween), Bealtaine on the first of May, or St. Patrick's Day all called for the pipe, the fiddle, and the telling of tales that explained what reason could not. One striking example of this oral inheritance is the keening poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, composed by Eileen Dubh Ní Chonaill at her husband's funeral and preserved purely through folk tradition. Beyond narrative, the tradition also encompassed memorates, belief statements, and the practical observances that marked a community's identity. In this sense, folklore was less a subject of study than a way of living.

The Fairy World and Its Inhabitants

The supernatural landscape of Irish folklore is populated by a rich taxonomy of beings. At the top stands the Aos Sí, the collective fairy race believed to descend from the Tuatha Dé Danann, a godlike people who once conquered the island's original inhabitants. Described as human-sized, strikingly beautiful, and deeply attuned to the natural world, they resemble what later fantasy traditions would call elves. Below them, or rather apart from them, dwell the solitary fairies—secretive, nocturnal figures who keep their distance from human settlements. Among these are the banshee, a female death-messenger whose wailing keening announces an impending death; the leprechaun, widely identified as a shoemaker; the cluricaune and the far darrig (literally 'red man'), whose relationship to one another has puzzled commentators like W. B. Yeats. Yeats also listed the Dullahan, a headless horseman, and the Púca. The changeling, a child supposedly swapped by fairies, carries its own migratory legend classification (ML 5085). All of these beings are anchored to the Otherworld, An Saol Eile, and to physical sites like fairy forts and the sacred hawthorn tree, where worn patches of grass are said to mark their dancing.

Defining the Indefinable

Pinpointing exactly what counts as Irish folklore has proven notoriously difficult. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin acknowledged that the subject resists clean definition, and the very word 'folklore' did not exist until 1846, when the English writer William Thoms coined it to capture the everyday customs, superstitious beliefs, songs, and sayings of past eras. The Irish equivalent, béaloideas—literally 'oral instruction'—was not established until 1927. In the interim, scholars like Bo Almqvist offered sweeping definitions around 1977, describing folklore as encompassing the full span of folk culture in its spiritual and material dimensions, including everything catalogued in Seán Ó Súilleabháin's 1942 handbook. The boundaries blur further when one considers the 'Pre-Croker period,' a term Almqvist used to tentatively include medieval written texts—the heroic tales of the Ulster Cycle, the Finn Cycle, the Cycle of the Kings, and the hagiographies of St. Patrick and other saints—as potential folklore material. This ambiguity means Irish folklore sits at the intersection of oral tradition, literary heritage, and living practice, resisting any single disciplinary frame.

Craft, Remedy, and Everyday Wisdom

Irish folklore extends well beyond ghost stories and fairy tales into the realm of practical, hands-on knowledge passed through generations. Handcraft skills such as basket-weaving and the making of Brigid's crosses on the feast day of St. Bridget (1 February) form a tangible layer of this tradition. In County Wexford, the nineteenth-century collector Patrick Kennedy recorded a shallow wicker basket called a skeeoge, used as a strainer to drain boiled potatoes from hot water. Its name is thought to derive from the Irish word sciath, meaning 'shield.' A later fieldworker in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, could not confirm whether the practice still survived locally. The Irish Folklore Commission has amassed a collection of such crosses and various plaited-straw craft objects gathered from across the county. Equally important is what might be called applied folklore: the accumulated knowledge of how to build a house or how to treat an illness using local herbs. This herb lore, alongside the craft traditions, shows that folklore was as much a technology of survival as it was a repository of wonder.