Irish American Folklore in New England

American Folklore in New England. By E. Moore Quinn. (Bethesda, Dublin, and Palo Alto: Academia Press, 2009. Pp. x +430, acknowledgments, bibliography, index. $79.95 cloth.)In Quinn's account, the research for American Folklore in New England began with a question she was asked by an American man about the of the term Cruiscin lan [filled jug] , which the man had heard but never understood in a song that his father had sung to him as a child. This anecdote is, in many ways, an apt metaphor for Quinn's project: she seeks to bring her expertise as a scholar of language and culture to Americans, many of whom remembered certain words and phrases despite the fact that they had little or no idea as to what they meant (1).Thus, in her fifteen chapters, Quinn provides a general introduction to language, American social history with a particular emphasis on the major first waves of immigration in the nineteenth century, and a wide variety of American traditional materials. These traditional materials include: proverbs, idioms and customary sayings, foodways, naming traditions, children's lore, folk beliefs, calendar customs, music, rhyme, cursing traditions, and traditional recitations like blessings, toasts, and prayers.To some degree, Quinn's overarching methodology in this work follows the one laid out by Richard Dorson in his early writings on the historical study of folklore: to use folklore as a tool for determining attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes as well as for supplying information about national myths, images, and symbols (Dorson cited in Quinn 2009, 11). Her data was gathered through a mixture of mailed questionnaires to Americans, informal interviews with American seniors at various community centers, and the collection of a variety of press releases, community notices, and invitations for information sent to public communication oudets like radio stations and newspapers (2).Unfortunately, however, Quinn's work suffers from a number of methodological problems that compromise some of its value. For instance, beginning with her opening anecdote, it seems that Quinn's conception of American folklore largely consists of the vanishing remnants of pre-Famine, or at least pre-migration, traditional culture that has been preserved in fossilized form among an American population that she feels does not have an accurate understanding of its real (1-2). Thus, she often uses material collected from largely second or third generation Americans as a primary source for a reconstruction of die historical experience of first-generation, nineteenth-century immigrants and then simply corroborates their accounts with various collections of folklore from different periods. She argues, for example, that:The language itself functioned as a sort of entrance to another world for informants and interviewees. Like cruiscin lan, the placename acquired a sort of sacred also . . . although its true meaning may not have been preserved for immigrants' children, . . . some aspect of die of the place, what the call dinnsheanchas, remained, ultimately forming part of die lure of die past. . . . Remembrances of dinnsheanchas [place lore] and/or of die language provided groundings for immigrants. (8-9)In addition to Quinn's consistent use of romantic, value-laden terms such as ancient past, sacred, or mysterious to construct an ethereal quality for American identity, passages such as this actively collapse die sense of historicity in her discussion. While she begins with her contemporary informants, she slides quickly back to a discussion of Irish immigrants, drawing a fairly direct line between the fragments of place lore or language that her contemporary informants recalled and the grounding of the immigrants tiiemselves. …