Folklore Studies at the Celtic Dawn: The Role of Alfred Nutt as Publisher and Scholar

Folklore, Annual, 1999 by Juliette Wood

The present study concentrates on Nutt's Celtic and folklore theories, but he wrote on a wide range of subjects including the Kalevala (Nutt 1899c, 141-7), ballads (1888b, 144), Native American parallels to Celtic tales (1891d, 130-1), and his publishing ventures attest to his highly catholic interests. The output of the David Nutt firm from the last two decades of the nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth century contains an astonishing amount of folklore and folklore-related material. He published the Archaeological Review during its brief history and the new journal Folk-Lore which superseded it. The first dozen or so volumes of the Irish Text Society were published by him, as was the series Popular Studies in Mythology Romance and Folklore which was aimed at the general public. The Grimm Library was another of his ventures; this series included an influential collaboration between Nutt and Kuno Meyer on an edition and commentary of Imrainn Brain (Meyer and Nutt 1895-7) as well as translations and studies by Jessie Weston (Weston 1897; 1901b; 1902; 1906-9) and Eleanor Hull (Hull 1898). The Northern Library focused on saga material; the Tudor Library concentrated on Shakespeare and his contemporaries; and there was a separate series of Arthurian Romances not represented in Malory primarily translated by Jessie Weston (Weston 1899; 1900; 1901a; 1904). In addition he published a series of books for young people with suitably broad and mainstream selections to improve young minds, and there were a large number of single publications. According to Clodd, not all of these publishing ventures were a financial success (Clodd 1910, 21 and 335). However, Kuno Meyer lamented the lack of publishing opportunities in Germany as compared to Britain (O Luing 1991, 110 and 111).

Viewed from the perspectives of folklore history and the history of Celtic studies, Nutt as scholar and publisher was in a position to influence the direction of research and to encourage the kind of scholarship which he himself favoured. His interests centred on Celtic tradition and literature (Nutt 1891; 1892; 1899a; 1900), especially the Holy Grail material (Nutt 1888a; 1889c; 1891e; 1902a); Gaelic literature (Nutt 1890a; 1891a&c; 1900a; 1910b), in particular the tales of the fianna (Nutt 1891b; 1899b); fairy traditions (Nutt 1897; 1900b); classification and collecting (Nutt 1881b; 1883a&b; 1890; 1893a); and folklore theory (Nutt 1881a; 1884; 1891; 1892a&b; 1898; 1901-2; 1910a). These are still important areas of enquiry and the influence of the evolutionary and diffusionist arguments of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries still exert an influence in the more populist areas of folklore and Celtic writing.

Nutt's first substantial article on the Aryan Expulsion and Return formula in tales gave clear indication of his attitude to folklore and his area of interest. In this article he criticised the then-popular theory of a proto-ethnic pan-Aryan mythology of which the folklore of Europe was the last faded remnant (Nutt 1881a, 1-44), and adopted a position more in line with the increasingly influential ideas of evolutionary biology. At this period many folklorists were adapting the discourse of evolutionary theory, as used in scientific disciplines such as geology and biology, to the study of folklore and Nutt made important contributions to the development of that debate. In a review of current literature published several years later in the Archaeological Review, he gave an admirable summary of the arguments for the evolutionary approach and pleaded for a new and more scientific classification of material so that folklore could take its place with disciplines like geology and archaeology which depended on accurate classification of data. In a review of 1889, he summarised the transition from the "older synthesis" which had dominated the period from 1859-70 and had concentrated on Indo-European matters based on the work of philologists. This he contrasted with E.B. Tylor's view which established "beyond doubt the substantial unity of mythic conception and rite among all the races of mankind" (Nutt 1889a, 79-82). The principle which guided Nutt and his contemporaries combined the techniques of the geologist in using fossils with those of the archaeologist in using material culture. An important consequence of this method was that early man could be compared to modern primitives with the result that "the occurrence of forms among the uncultured races is evidence that the latter were once in a psychical and social condition similar to that of the former" (Nutt 1889a, 79). Evolution and progress, not philological corruption and dispersion, were the underlying principles in the development of culture, he argued: "Human conscience and intellect have never broken wholly with the past but in their upward progress have ever retained distinct marks of the ruder simpler stage out of which they have emerged" (ibid., 88).