Patrick Kennedy (folklorist)

Patrick Kennedy (early 1801 – 29 March 1873) was a folklorist from Co. Wexford, Ireland. A bookseller by trade, he is known for his collections of Irish (Leinster) folktales. The tales are told in rusticated English of the Irish peasantry who had established roots in The Pale, the anglicized part of Ireland. He is "widely credited with preserving irish idioms in the turn of phrase, sentence structure, Irish words".

Kennedy was born in the early part of 1801 in Kilmyshal beyond the outskirts of Bunclody, County Wexford, Ireland, in a financially well-off family of peasant stock. Mount Leinster, which loomed tall over his hometown served as a backdrop of his first book. His schooling at Cloughbawn was interrupted in 1819 when he filled a teacher's post vacated by a friend. In 1820 or 21, he left for Dublin and enrolled in a teacher-training program at the Kildare Place Society (officially called the "Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor of Ireland"), and in 1822 or 1823, was appointed as a teacher there.

He abandoned the teaching profession at some time uncertain, and established a lending-library and bookseller shop on Anglesea Street (not a full stretch of street but the corner of Cope Street) in Dublin. Edward Dowden remembered the proprietor "with round, bald head, grizzled beard, and a smile and twinkle over all his face."

Alfred Webb's A Compendium of Irish Biography (1878) writes that his home often played host to the "Hibernian Temperance Association,", though possibly this is a result of confusion with Dr. Patrick Kennedy, Bishop of Killaloe, associated with Father Mathew's temperance movement.

Some of his stories which he sent to Sheridan Le Fanu in 1862, appeared as "Leinster Folk Lore" in the Dublin University Magazine from 1861 till 1869. This was followed by pieces such as "Legends of Mount Leinster," published in the Irish Quarterly Review. Later a full collection was published by Macmillan and Company in 1866 as Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866). The first included tale is "Jack and His Comrades," later reprinted by Joseph Jacobs.

The collected stories were interleaved with a considerable amount of his own narrative: his "stories link by running commentary and characterized by often ponderous moralizing"

Patrick Kennedy was one of the pioneers in uncovering Irish folkloric material, with a lasting impact on William Butler Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement.