'The Lore of the People' was first used by William John Thomas in The Athenaeum on August 22, 1846. Before that the stories, tales, fables of the people, as opposed to literary fictional writings, were usually known as popular antiquities or popular literature. It's collection and discussion grew quickly and the Folklore Society was founded in 1878 and is still active.

Folklore can cover a vast range of subjects and are composed, told and retold for many reasons. It is often hard to tell how old a particular tale is. Few have probably survived in anything like their original form, but there is evidence, or sometimes just a hope, that they may contain very early elements of the popular beliefs that have always existed.

Folklore includes narratives, songs, beliefs and customs and may be quite different than mythology, which in most cases includes the tales of ancient 'Irish' gods and heroes or contain elements of these retold. Myths have often survived to become popular tales, though sometimes in a very altered form. Technically, myths are often defined as a 'sacred narrative' that focuses on the interaction of the divine worlds and that of humans. Usually set in the distant past and often considered 'true' by the people to whom it belonged. Perhaps not literally true, but certainly to contain a truth to which they could relate.

From the time of the Grimm brothers onwards compilers of folktales have freely mixed different types of tales together. Märchen tales derive from oral sources that use fantasy that is removed from the constraints of everyday reality. These are escapist tales that can be just for entertainment (especially the humorous ones) or may contain a kernel of truth or point to a moral that the teller wished to get over to their audience.

Fairy folklore fits in with medievalism, in the middle to late 19th century, when many types of art, such as the works of the Pre-Raphaelite's, were developed. For the Victorians it goes back to a more certain, uncorrupted time, before the Industrial Revolution swept throughout England. The concept of chivalry was important, Ruskin noted, "Fairy tales involve the rescue of the weak by the strong and noble, and fairy mythology is full of acts performed in secrecy to reclaim the fortunes of the poor."

This perhaps is where we can start to draw the line between fairy folklore and fairy stories. Many of the stories as recorded by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Thomas Croker, show the fairies as an integral part of everyday life for the people who told these stories. Fairy doctors such as Biddy Early, though repeatedly condemned by the Church, were active and often highly respected (though with mixed feelings) by the local people.

The decline of the original type of folk tale was noted very early on. Kevin Crossley-Holland (Folk-Tales of the British Isles) quotes a passage from John Aubrey's Remaines of Judaisme and Gentilisme: (slightly altered).

"Before printing, Old-wives Tales were ingenious and when printing came in fashion, a little before the Civil Wars, the ordinary sort of People were not taught to read. Now a days books are common, and most of the poor people understand letters and the many good books have put all the old Fables out of doors and the divine art of printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin and the Fairies."

Fairy stories had, in the 18th century, been largely drawn from French originals, but by the 19th century, under the influence of the Brother's Grimm, had switched to a much more central European model.

During middle to late Victorian period, the influence, especially on Yeats of Spiritualism and the occult in general, were also reflected in the country at large. Yeats was also influenced by Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, members of this society were involved with the later Cottingley fairy photographs along with Arthur Conan Doyle, who was an ardent Spiritualist. As in many Irish folklore tales, belief in the survival of the dead went hand in hand with a belief in Tir Na Nog (Fairyland, Summerland).

There was also a recognition by the so called 'educated' classes that there might be something in these stories that were told by the 'simple' people around them. Ireland, in the 18th and 19th centuries, was dominated politically by the Protestant landlords. Although many of these, such as Lady Gregory, had (or came to have) sympathy with the peasants and the quest for a self-governing Ireland, it was still possible for an intelligent, artistic Irish landlord like George Moore, at one point he changed some of his views, to describe them like this:

"Never was an Irish peasant known to spend a penny of his newly-acquired fortune in improving his house and relegating the pig to a sty. The planting of a few flowers would relieve the intolerable bleakness of his cottage. He spends his share of the money in the public house ..." and so on ...
from his Parnell and His Island (1886)

...and no doubt his view was typical of many landlords of the times who hated the idea of land reform.

At about the same time, others such as Douglas Hyde were rediscovering the fantastically rich vein of folklore and ancient legends that were the heritage of Ireland. Douglas Hyde had the advantage of actually learning Gaelic, an uncommon achievement amongst the upper classes of Ireland in the 19th century. He had a wonderful ear for language and seemed to have picked it up from the gillies and stable lads around him, writing it down phonetically and then using an Irish bible to learn it fully. He would listen to those around him in Northern Connacht and:

"... recognized that the people his class despised were in possession of a culture thousands of years old, which had survived in the oral tradition of the cottages despite many attempts to exterminate it."
Ulick O'Connor: Celtic Dawn

Douglas Hyde eventually wrote the massive Literary History of Ireland and was largely responsible for the founding of the Gaelic League which between 1893 and 1922 had a massive influence on Irish awareness of its own culture and identity. His famous prose translations of 'Love Songs of Connacht', 'Songs Ascribed to Raftery', and 'Religious Songs of Connacht' had a major influence on Yeats and Lady Gregory in showing them a path they could follow.

The collection of these stories, poems and tales also had a political element to it as Ireland began to struggle seriously to shake off it's English 'masters' and re-establish itself as a nation. As the folklore collectors began to seriously tour and record many versions of the same tale were discovered. The story teller's might embellish a good tale both as part of their art and to fit in with their audience. Memories might be faulty, the recorder, especially in the days before tape recorders, at fault. As Henry Glassie puts it, in Irish Folktales:

"All printed texts of folktales are compromises between the written and the spoken word between writers and storytellers. To understand the Irish folktales that we read let us consider together two relationships and the questions they entail. First, is the relationship of the narrator and the source, the connection of tradition in which the question is: How do we approach and treat seriously the art of another? Second, is the relationship of the narrator and the audience, the connection of communication in which the question is: Why has the tale been preserved and told again?"

Many collectors also began to speculate on the origin of these tales and what they once meant. The 19th century was the time for collection and synthesis in so many areas of what we would now call sociology and anthropology.

What they found represents a deeper strand of what may be called philosophical thought concerning the fairies and nature spirits that can be traced back to Roman and Greek mythology (and even further back to Shamanism) through the writings of Paracelsus and Hermetic and Neo-platonic thought, strands of which also influenced visionaries such as William Blake.

The Grimm Brothers connected their village tales to an elaborate mythological system of origins, outlined in Deutsche Mythologie. This was first issued in 1835 and by its fourth edition was translated into English (3 volumes, 1883-88) under the title Teutonic Mythology. They postulated a highly developed religious pantheon of pre-Roman times suppressed by the medieval church and surviving only in broken fragments of peasant beliefs and stories. The Märchen, or tales, were the remnants of old myths.

Another strand is a widespread belief in a race of small people who had been in hiding, notable in the ancient barrows and mounds, since they had been driven out by the early Celts. It is impossible to ignore an underlying sexual, or perhaps it would be better to call it erotic theme, to many stories and especially Victorian fairy paintings. The fairies were outside normal conventions and could break the taboos with which normal people were surrounded. Painters, such as Noel Paton, highlighted these themes of sexual encounter often reflecting the more ancient mythological patterns of Nymphs, and Satyr's and the God of the Wild (Pan).

Many of fairies are shown as young, pre-pubescent males and females, a strong theme in Victorian art. The fairies could represent a kind of erotic innocence, and the power of female enchantment, that appealed to the Victorian sensibilities along with the similar Orientalism (with its suggestions of the harem) which was also popular at the time. These were generally unspoken themes. The paintings of Paton, and others like Simmons, were displayed to great popular acclaim, "... the exotic setting exonerating the viewer from voyeurism." [Charlotte Gere: In Fairyland].