page_title: Thomas Crofton Croker
section_title: Collaboration controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Crofton Croker / Life and works / Fairy Legends / Collaboration controversy
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of T. Crofton Croker seated
context_page_description: Thomas Crofton Croker was an Irish antiquary, best known for his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, and who also showed considerable interest in Irish song and music.
  Although Fairy Legends purported to be an anthology of tales Croker had collected on his field trips, he had lost his manuscript notes and the work had to be reconstructed with the help of friends. He did not acknowledge his debt satisfactorily in the estimation of Thomas Keightley, who voiced his complaint publicly, and soon published his own rival work. The other collaborators generally allowed Croker to take credit, notably William Maginn, though after his death his kinsmen insisted Maginn had written four or more of the tales. Croker retracted ten tales in his third edition of, and after his death, a fourth edition appeared which was prefaced with a memoir written by his son.
  William Butler Yeats, who appropriated a number of tales for his anthology, characterised Croker as belonging to the class of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, and criticised him for comic distortions of the Irish tradition, an assessment echoed by other Irish critics. Bridget G.
context_section_description: Because Croker had lost the manuscript after collecting it from the field, he had to reconstruct the anthology through help from other writers, such as William Maginn, David Richard Pigot, his friend Joseph Humphreys, Thomas Keightley, and R. Adolphus Lynch of Killarney. The first 1825 edition of Fairy Legends and Traditions did not even bear Croker's name, owing to this being a collaborative effort. Humphreys, a Quaker, was a companion during Croker's excursions into the south 1812–1815. Samuel Carter Hall named himself as the contributor of two tales, and Charles Dod of Parliamentary Companion as another collaborator.
  In Fairy Legends, the credit for the first piece "The Legend of Knocksheogowna" and three others were claimed by Maginn, including the prominent "Daniel O'Rourke". But according to Croker, the manuscript of "Daniel O'Rourke" was in the handwriting of Humphreys, touched up by Maginn, and further altered by Croker before going into print. Though such production that entails modification at multiple stages may be poorly countenanced by the modern folklorist, it is pointed out that such methodology is not so distant from the one practiced by the Grimms at the time.
  Croker eventually took sole credit, and kept all of the proceeds from the book's financial success, but of these collaborators, only Keightley publicly voiced protest, and Keightley went on to publish his own Fairy Mythology in 1828. In the wake of it, Croker published the 1834 third edition that eliminated portions of competing claims, reducing the number of tales from 50 down to 40, and purged of "most of the copious notes", of which the comparative notes Keightley claimed to have supplied. Literary scholar Bridget G. MacCarthy gave a modern-day view criticism of Croker's dodging his way out of attributing the effort of collaborators.
caption: Sitting portrait.—Dublin University Magazine (1849)
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