James Hardiman (Westport 1782 – Galway 1855), son of a small landowner, grew up in Galway and (since the loss of an eye barred him from entering the priesthood) studied law in Dublin. His employment in the Public Record Office (1811-30) gave him access to, and familiarity with, archival documents which, combined with his native knowledge of Gaelic, gave him a rare qualification for historical studies, especially in the field of historical geography and the history of land ownership. He published a thoroughly source-documented city and county history of Galway in 1820 and edited a Gaelic chronicle, the Annals of Innisfallen, in 1822. An active member of the Royal Irish Academy, he was (with George Petrie) among the historians who in the 1820s made Irish antiquity and history (which had fallen under a political taboo following the rebellion of 1798) once again a legitimate topic of research in that association. His archival inventory of Gaelic topographical material in Trinity College Dublin appeared in the Academy’s Transactions in 1825.

In the late 1820s, Hardiman turned to the study of Gaelic written and oral literature, a topic which had begun to gain interest in the wake of Crofton Croker’s work and his contacts with the Grimm brothers. His bilingual collection of Irish Minstrelsy: or, Bardic remains of Ireland (2 vols, 1831) was epochal. It presented, in the manner of Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish poetry, Gaelic originals with English translations on the facing page and collected various corpuses, each of great historical value and national-political importance. One of the four parts gathered the extant verse of the early-18th-century harpist and songster Turlough O’Carolan, who by this time had become a canonical figure as the “last of the Irish bards”. The most explosive portion, however, dealt with Gaelic verse from the period of the “Penal Laws” (1690-1800), when severe anti-Catholic legislation deprived the majority population from legal standing and reduced them to the status of a colonized underclass. Catholic-Gaelic grievances were voiced in numerous 18th-century ballads and vision-poems yearning for the overthrow of the Hanover dynasty and of Protestant landlordism. It was this disaffection which had burst out in the notorious 1798 rebellion, still fresh in the memory; indeed, the Penal Laws themselves had only recently been relegated to the past, when in 1828 Catholic emancipation had been won after arduous campaigning by Daniel O’Connell. Hardiman showed himself sensitive to the explosive nature of this literary material; in his preface, he went so far as to present his collection as the Irish analogue to Claude Fauriel’s Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne of 1824, and extended the comparison to suggest that the English oppression of Ireland’s Gaelic-Catholic majority population had been no better than the oppression of Greece by the Ottoman Turks.

Appearing as it did when Daniel O’Connell was changing his political goals from Catholic emancipation to repeal of the Union, and when Greece had won independence from the Ottoman Empire after an armed insurrection, Hardiman’s instrumentalization of literary history and folklore marks a noticeable intensification of Romantic Nationalism in Ireland. As such, his Irish Minstrelsy is not only an important edition of Gaelic literary source material, and a transfer of these from the country’s pauperizing, largely oral, Gaelic-language culture into its urban-modern, English-speaking  print culture, but also a transition from Tom Moore’s Irish melodies of the 1810s to the separatist cultural activism of the Young Ireland group around Thomas Davis.

This explosive nature of the Irish Minstrelsy was acutely sensed by the emerging poet-antiquarian Samuel Ferguson, who denounced the book in a long, four-instalment review essay in the newly-founded Dublin University Magazine. Ferguson, a conservative and unionist Protestant with Gaelic cultural sympathies (largely in the mode of Walter Scott) denounced Hardiman’s historicist tendency to recall past grievances at a moment when their cause had been removed as politically pernicious, and instead called for a type of harmonious patriotism (under paternalist Anglo-Irish guidance) where Catholic and Protestant, Gael and Anglo-Irish could meet in shared love of the country’s native soil and a shared appreciation of Ireland’s native legends. Ferguson’s review went so far as to furnish poetic specimens of a patriotic celebration of one-nation Irishness as palliative rejoinders against the material collected by Hardiman.

Ferguson’s review marks one of the first Irish literary controversies of the post-Emancipation period; the episode thus testifies to the emergence of an Anglo-Irish literary system which in subsequent decades could become an important carrier of nationalist thought.

Hardiman later returned to his historical and historical-geographical work, editing a 17th-century Gaelic description of West Connacht for the Irish Archaeological Society, of which he had been a founding member in 1840. When a University College was founded in Galway as part of the Queen’s Colleges scheme (1849), Hardiman became its first librarian (having declined an offer of a professorship of Irish), and after his death in 1855 bequeathed his considerable personal library to it.