Thomas Crofton Croker, The Fairy Legends, and the Arrival of the Illustrated Folk Legend in Northern Europe

This article focuses on the collaborative work between the early Irish collectors and artists, and particularly that between Crofton Croker and Keightley, and the artists Daniel Maclise and William Henry Brooke who produced the illustrations for Crofton Croker’s Fairy Tales and Legends of the South of Ireland (1825 and 1826) and Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1833). The images by Maclise and Brooke added a powerful new dimension to the ways in which the stories and the beliefs behind them were understood. These works (and Crofton Croker’s in particular) would go on to influence the presentation of Norwegian folk legends especially in the latter half of the century, and not least the careers of some of Norway’s most famous artists from the period.