Life
1789-1872; collaborated with T. C. Croker on Fairy Legends; works incl. Fairy Mythology (1828), and Tales and Popular Fictions,
their resemblance and transmission from country to country (1834); also books on Rome, Greece, India, the Crusades, and England. CAB RAF
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Commentary
C. L. Falkiner (‘Spenser in Ireland,’ in Papers Relating to Ireland, 1909), remarks: ‘[T.] Keightley, in Notes & Queries, Ser. 4., Vol. ii, p. 317, argues that Spenser was in a special sense an Irish poet.’
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Quotations
The Fair Mythology (1828): ‘It cannot be expected that our classifications shoud view in accuracy and determinateness with those of natural science.’ (London: Thomas Davison 1828, p.20; quoted in Edward Hirsch, ‘“Contention Is Better Than Loneliness”: The Poet as Folklorist’, in Ronald Schleifer, ed., The Genres of Irish Literary Revival, Wolfhound 1980, p.14.)
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Notes
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; this ed. 1984), WH Brooke illustrated popular book on Greek and Roman mythology by T Keightley. [125] Further: ‘Thomas Keightley rivalled Goldsmith for a while with his popular histories of ancient Greece (1835) and the Roman Empire (1840); Mythology of Greece and Rome (1831) reached four eds.; he also edited parts of Virgil, Horace, and Sallust, and produced a post-haste history of the Greek war of independence of 1830.’ [157]
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