The Herder-to-Hyde Sweep

In late eighteenth century Germany, while living under French occupation, Johann Herder, the Grimm brothers, Johann Goethe and later the composer Wagner consciously sparked a movement to unite the ten mythological Germanic tribes into one nation state by promoting the collection and publication of folklore-laden stories. Ninety years later the work programme that Herder had launched in 1777 resulted in the first unified German state. In Ireland, similarly under occupation, awareness of Ireland’s distinct Celtic linguistic and mythological past was catapulted into public consciousness by its folklore collecting first president Douglas Hyde (among others). Without this Celtic Twilight (as the Irish cultural revival became known), Ireland’s emergence into statehood as a distinct culture from that of its occupier England would have been harder to imagine.

Source: Book Proposal (May 2025)

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