In approaching Castle Rackrent as a folklorist, one is impressed by the authenticity, accuracy, and originality of Maria Edgeworth's observations of the life of the common people of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century. In these respects, since the interest in folk customs and beliefs had not yet developed as a discipline, the author of Castle Rackrent is ahead of her time. Moreover, as an accomplished maker of fiction, she invests these cultural circumstances with persuasive character and social elements to render a powerful portrayal of Irish country life before the Union.

Maria Edgeworth made a courageous decision in choosing to tell the history of the Rackrent family through the mouth of the faithful old retainer, Thady Quirk, as a specimen of a social class other than her own. In eighteenth-century Ireland, this meant creating a credible representative of the Gaelic culture of the ordinary Irish man and woman. There can be little doubt that in Thady we find many characteristics of a person in his position in the Ireland of the Big House. It may have been easy for readers of the novel to regard all those not of the landlord or merchant class in rural Ireland as types, and thus to see Thady as a representative of the faceless mass of peasants. For Maria Edgeworth's artistic purpose, therefore, it is enough that Thady should represent only the servant of the Big House in close contact with its occupiers; but he is also a subtly portrayed character revealing the keen psychological insight of his creator.

Although Thady Quirk has an individual fascination, he also has a distinctively native Irish cultural background. His chronicle contains a good deal of folklore—especially folk-beliefs and folk-customs—and Maria Edgeworth is anxious that her readers should not miss the significance of these elements. She frequently takes care to comment on them in the Glossary. The Glossary also includes much social detail and explanations of linguistic and other data, all of which she saw as further necessary information for the reader and are developments on her skilled attempts at providing the narrative with a particular, observed cultural setting. In view of all this, Castle Rackrent well deserves to be taken seriously, not only by the literary scholar, but by the social historian and the folklorist.

"The family of the Rackrents," says Thady, "is, I am proud to say, one of the most ancient in the kingdom—Everybody knows this is not the old family name, which was O'Shaughlin, related to the Kings of Ireland." The reference here seems to be to the name of the famous High King of Ireland at the turn of the eleventh century, Maoilsheachlainn, and we doubtless have an instance of the folk tendency to assume proof from facile etymological evidence. What is much more basic to Thady's attitude, however, is that the Rackrents are seen to derive their moral authority from their Gaelic ancestry. There is ample evidence to show that the tests applied by the native Irish in determining the moral right of landlords were those of nobility of descent, particularly if it were Gaelic. The objections voiced by seventeenth-century Gaelic poets to the Cromwellians, for example, was that these settlers were not of noble ancestry even in England. An extension of this logic was that highest respect was due to those nobility who were Gaelic, or had at least some Gaelic blood, a point which is clear from the works of eighteenth-century Gaelic poets who objected to the Williamite settlers on these criteria. Apart from the social reality of oppression, these attitudes find their basis in the very great importance attributed to genealogy by the Irish from time immemorial. It is also striking that Thady shows that his own ancestors have been servants to the Rackrent family for generations, thus again underlining genealogy as a factor which qualifies social relationships. Because of this, one notices running throughout Thady's narrative, not the servile attitude which the Big House might have expected from a servant, but a feeling of identity and pride which springs from a mutually respected tradition. The strains which the irresponsibility of various members of the Rackrent family put on the relationship account for much of the dramatic tension of the novel, and the eventual destruction of this relationship is heralded by the emergence of the upstart Jason Quirk. Thady's reluctant acceptance of his son's conduct can be explained by his awareness that traditional standards of behaviour no longer hold for either family.

In support of his testimony to the former social distinction of the Rackrents, Thady draws on one famous Irish belief. Before Sir Murtagh Rackrent's death, Thady remarks: "I warned him that I heard the very Banshee that my grandfather heard, before I was born long, under Sir Patrick's window a few days before his death." Maria Edgeworth footnotes this in the following way: "The Banshee is a species of aristocratic fairy, who in the shape of a little hideous old woman has been known to appear, and heard to sing in a mournful supernatural voice under the windows of great houses, to warn the family that some of them are soon to die." She then refers to the belief that in the preceding century, "every great family in Ireland had a Banshee." Very few folk beliefs have survived in Ireland with the same tenacity as has that of the banshee. The belief appears to be a purely Gaelic development: the banshee is a female preternatural being whose lamentation is heard announcing the approaching death of a native Irish person, the image being based on that of the ordinary women of this world who keen the dead through the usual "mirror" transmissions of the natural into the extranatural. The intense psychological concentration involved in the communal mind at the crisis time of death provides the functional context for the belief. The banshee is generally not described very minutely—in fact Maria Edgeworth's account is probably touched up to some extent; but the important point here is that the banshee's lamentation is believed to presage the death of native Irish people only, thus firmly situating the Rackrents both genealogically and communally among the native Irish.

The last sentence of this footnote on the banshee is particularly interesting because the seventeenth century was indeed a milestone in the development of much of the traditional folklore surviving into the Ireland of today. There can be little doubt also that it was in that century that the banshee tradition as we have it today reached its final development. The Cromwellian plantation not only shook Irish tradition to its roots, but it also created a new departure by placing a merchant class in the position of aristocracy. It is interesting that seventeenth-century references to the banshee place her in direct opposition to the Cromwellian planters. Dáibhí O Bruadair, the most famous of the century's poets, mocks the Cromwellians for the cacophony of their names by comparing them to the—to him—melodious names of famous otherworld women such as Aoibheall. The nobleman-poet Piaras Feiritéar, in a lament for a Norman-Gaelic nobleman about the year 1640, writes this (I translate): "In Dingle the melodious crying was not spared, so that the merchants of the coastland got frightened. They need not fear for themselves, since banshees do not lament their sort." Thady Quirk would not be a true Irish countryman unless he believed in the fairies. Although there is but one reference to them in the main body of the text of the novel (concerning Sir Murtagh who "dug up a fairy-mount against my advice, and had no luck afterwards," Maria Edgeworth adds a lengthy footnote here, and appends a long description of the fairy faith in her Glossary. The belief that misfortune or even death will befall a person who digs up or defaces a mound or rath believed to be a fairy abode is familiar all over Ireland, and examples can still be found today of public authority employees who refuse to interfere with such objects even when instructed to do so.

It was commonly believed that the fairies travelled in a whirlwind, an idea probably born of a folk etymology of the Irish term for the phenomenon "sígaoithe". The word sí here means "thrust" and has a different derivation from the sí designating mound or mound-dwellers. The folk made such a connection, however, and thus sí gaoithe (meaning "thrust-wind") was taken to be sí gaoithe ("windfairy") or perhaps more appropriately sí-ghaoith ("fairy wind"). Maria Edgeworth refers in her Glossary quite accurately to the custom of saying "God speed ye," or words to that effect, when such a whirlwind rose. The purpose of this was to protect people from the dangers of being struck by the fairies, and such a belief is still quite strong in Ireland. Similarly (as Maria Edgeworth rightly states), the fairies are called the good people not out of respect or affection; rather is attention deflected from the feelings of fear. The good people is simply one of the most common of many euphemistic or flattering terms for the fairies, including "the gentry," "the people of the hills," "the mysterious people" (i.e. an slua aerach), "the wee folk," and "the little people."

The Glossary refers to a couple of popular legends about the fairies. Here Maria Edgeworth claims to have heard of these from "an elderly man." It is obvious that she had made an effort to reproduce faithfully the style and words of her informant. Thus she uses, and glosses, dialect words and expressions such as air and easy (quietly), beast (horse), lit (alighted), mind (recollect or know), and mote (barrow). The first legend concerns a man who was coming back from a fair late at night. He met a man in the dark who invited him to his house, a fine place, where he received food and drink. He fell asleep, but in the morning he found himself lying not in bed but in the angle of the road where he had first met the strange man. "And I asked him what he thought of it, and from first to last he could think of nothing but for certain sure it must have been the fairies that entertained him so well. For there was no house to see any where nigh hand, or any building, or barn, or place at all, but only the church and the mote (barrow)." There is no doubt here that what we are dealing with is a migratory legend which can be traced quite far back. It is well known, for instance, in Scandinavia and Germany, and is found in Scandinavian medieval literary sources. Saxo Grammaticus records it in his Gesta Danorum (c. 1200). Versions of it have been collected in Irish folklore in the last two centuries, notably that published by Patrick Kennedy in his Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866). Similar legends of people brought into the other-world dwellings were very popular in Ireland and can be traced to late mediaeval tradition on the Continent. It is to Maria Edgeworth's credit that this is the earliest known recorded version of this particular legend in Ireland. And an accurate piece of collecting it seems to be.

In the same note Maria Edgeworth recounts another story associated with the fairies. She tells of how corpses that "had not a right to be buried in (a certain) church-yard" could not be interred there, because as the funeral procession would try to enter, everybody's feet would seem to be going backwards instead of forwards. It is evident from Irish folklore generally that people attached tremendous importance to their communal graveyard. Since it is so important for people to rest in their own graveyard, it is understandable that a hostility to the burial of strangers there should arise. One story from County Louth, for example, tells of a man who fell asleep and dreamt that he met three men with a coffin. They made him help them carry it to a graveyard, but they were not allowed to go in because nobody with the same family name as the corpse was resting there. This is repeated in the case of other graveyards, until eventually they come to one where the dead man's family is resting. The three coffin-bearers then release the man from his duties, and he wakes up in the same place as he had fallen asleep. Therefore, though we have as yet found no exact parallel from oral tradition to the story of Maria Edgeworth's informant, there is hardly any doubt but that what she has put before us is a piece of genuine folklore.

Maria Edgeworth also describes one custom of lamenting the dead, which is known in many other civilizations, but was especially strong in Irish tradition up to the last century. Thady's description of Sir Patrick's funeral includes the observation: "Then such a fine whillaluh! You might have heard it to the farthest end of the county, and happy the man who could get but a sight of the hearse!" In her Glossary note on this passage, Maria Edgeworth indicates that the source of her information on the custom of keening the dead lies in the Transcriptions of the Royal Irish Academy, but from the details she supplies to Thady's account, it is clear that she also witnessed the custom herself. Three types of lamentation of the dead would have been current in eighteenth-century Gaelic Ireland. First, the spontaneous lamenting of the immediate family and close associates of the dead person.

Second, a conventional type of verse-lament, with improvisation, to suit the context, voiced by semi-professional women keeners. Thirdly, a poetic lament composed in strict metre by a literary man for the dead if such were a person of note. The first two types match Maria Edgeworth's description. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a large proportion of the inhabitants of County Longford were still Irish-speaking, and the custom of keening in all its types was closely associated with the use of the native language and did not survive long in English.

Maria Edgeworth has a good deal to say about death-customs apart from keening, and the details she gives here are accurate. Indeed, her notes comprise a valuable contribution to a study of the custom of waking the dead. Wakes as gay social functions, with merriment and games, consumption of tobacco and drink, were until recently, very much part of the Irish way of life. The only suspensions of the rule of liberty would be in the case of the death of a young person, a death in tragic circumstances, or some other public loss, with an exceptional degree of shock or sorrow. The Irish wake tradition may have its roots in ritual placating the dead person and assuring him/her that the living still rejoiced in his/her company. The grotesque account of how Sir Condy pretended to be dead so that he could witness his own funeral can be paralleled by many joke-stories and pranks associated with wakes, such as the tricksters taking the place of the corpse and propping it up so as to make it move. Another parallel is offered by the popular legend of the man who pretended to be dead so as to test his faithless wife (the basis of John Millington Synge's The Shadow of the Glen).

In this connection, Sir Condy's trick to secure voting rights for his supporters is of some interest: "Some of our friends were dumb-founded, by the lawyers asking them—had they ever been upon the ground where their freeholds lay?—Now Sir Condy being tender of the consciences of them that had not been on the ground, and so could not swear to a freehold when cross-examined by them lawyers, sent out for a couple of cleaves-full of the sods of his farm of Gulteeshinnagh: and as soon as the sods came into town he set each man upon his sod, and so then ever after, you know, they could fairly swear they had been upon the ground—We gained the day by his piece of honesty." This anecdote is a version of an international folktale, listed as Type No. 1590 in the Aarne-Thompson index, where it is thus summarized: "With earth from his own property in his shoes, the man swears when he is on his neighbour's land, that he is on his own." The footnote report that "This was actually done at an election in Ireland," shows that Maria Edgeworth had heard it herself. The folktale is known throughout much of Europe, but this is one of the earliest examples of it recorded in Ireland, a fact which puts Irish folklorists in debt to the author of Castle Rackrent. In her second edition of the Glossary in 1810, she quotes two other stories of like type from Ireland concerning trick-swearing. Both seem to be offshoots from the Irish version of the same international folktale. By thus quoting parallels to her material, Maria Edgeworth shows herself to be following procedures of which a modern folklorist would approve. It is clear that she approaches these materials with honesty and a fair amount of objectivity.

Besides these, the novel exhibits a miscellany of folkways. The author's first Glossary note informs us that it is not by chance that Thady starts his memoirs on a Monday. We are referred to the belief that "no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but Monday morning," and a number of sayings are quoted in support of the point. The selection of Monday is open to various interpretations. But most simply, as the first workday in the week, the folk mind endows it with special superstitious moment. Since these superstitions have ambivalent implications, we find that side by side with the belief in Monday as a lucky day to undertake some occupation, the belief that Monday is illfated. It is not considered lucky, for instance, to shave, to slaughter animals, or to dig a grave on a Monday. It is clear, however, that the positive attitude to Monday prevailed among Maria Edgeworth's sources.

In conclusion, a word about Maria Edgeworth's claim that the culture of Castle Rackrent is a thing of the past, a claim which is documented by many explicit details. For instance, the usage "childer" receives the note: "this is the manner in which many of "Thady's rank, and others in Ireland, formerly pronounced the word children." Again, a subsequent note states that "It was the custom in Ireland for those who could not write, to make a cross to stand for their signature." Regarding field forts, her Glossary reports that "Some years ago, the common people believed that these Barrows were inhabited by fairies" and further, that "The country people in Ireland certainly had great admiration mixed with reverence, if not dread of fairies." Again, referring to banshees, she notes that "latterly their visits and songs have been discontinued." We know very well from modern Irish folk tradition that all these statements are false, and that each of these phenomena is very much alive in Ireland today. Why, then does she mislead her readers? We can essay an explanation of this if we consider how she makes the same claim in the more politically sensitive areas of the conduct of the gentry. Colonel M'Guire's mistreatment of his wife and the various misdeeds of the Rackrents, we are assured, are "no more to be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England." This claim that "the manners depicted .. . are not those of the present age" is advanced as an illustration of the social and political observation that "Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity." When we consider that during the writing of Castle Rackrent, the great political event of the times, the passage of the Act of Union, constitutionally dissolved Ireland's identity, and that Richard Lovell Edgeworth, M.P. favoured the Act, we can perhaps understand something of his daughter's motives. Was it the emotional conflict engendered by such issues that caused her to shift the action of Castle Rackrent to times past? It is clear that Castle Rackrent is written "for the information of the ignorant English reader," and the distancing of the action seems to have come from a conflict between her affection for the "other times," despite their shortcomings, and the new—and promising—world opening up with the Union. Maria Edgeworth wishes to be loyal to both the former "Irish Nation," and the newly defined United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The folklorist can rejoice, however, that she kept her colonial sentiments in abeyance and did not allow them to disfigure the oral material she so skilfully presents in Castle Rackrent.