On October 31, 1891, Violet Martin — who wrote under the pen name Martin Ross, collaborating with her cousin Edith Somerville — was sitting in a Kerry farmhouse in the west of Ireland, listening to stories in Irish from an old man who spoke no English. She was taking notes. The stories were about a world that was ending.

The partnership of Somerville and Ross is the frame, but the more directly relevant figure is Máire MacNeill, born in 1904, who spent her career documenting Irish folklore and produced The Festival of Lughnasa (1962) — a scholarly study of the Irish harvest festival Lúnasa, tracking its survival in oral tradition across every county in Ireland through interviews with people who still practiced or remembered it. It was among the most comprehensive ethnographic studies of Irish folk tradition produced in the twentieth century.

MacNeill worked at the Irish Folklore Commission from 1935, one of the few women in a staff of largely male collectors. The Commission's archive — hundreds of thousands of pages of oral tradition collected from Irish speakers who were, in many cases, among the last fluent speakers of regional dialects — is the most important repository of Irish intangible cultural heritage in existence. The women who worked as collectors and archivists are documented in the Commission's records and mentioned less frequently in its public history.

Halloween as practiced in North America derives substantially from Irish Samhain traditions carried by emigrants in the nineteenth century. The oral tradition that documented those practices was preserved by people like MacNeill, working in conditions of urgency — interviewing elderly speakers before they died — throughout the mid-twentieth century.