Although Fairy Legends purported to be an anthology of tales Croker had collected on his field trips, he had lost his manuscript notes and the work had to be reconstructed with the help of friends.

He did not acknowledge his debt satisfactorily in the estimation of Thomas Keightley, who voiced his complaint publicly, and soon published his own rival work.

[2] Croker took one Irish coronach (keening) that he collected in Cork in 1813, and translated it into English prose, which was published in the Morning Post in 1815 and caught the attention of the poet George Crabbe in 1817, through the intermediary of the antiquary Richard Sainthill [la].

[3][4] Croker also showed talent as an artist, and his works were exhibited at Cork in 1817 ("pen-sketches of pilot-boats"), but he abandoned art in favour of literary pursuit.

[8][9][10] He was a man of short stature, measuring 4 feet 10½ inches tall,[a][11][12] and described by Sir Walter Scott as "Little as a dwarf, keen-eyed as a hawk and of very prepossessing manners—something like Tom Moore".

[20] It was instrumental in attracting a wider audience to traditional Irish tales, not just within the English-speaking world, but farther abroad.

[6] Because Croker had lost the manuscript after collecting it from the field, he had to reconstruct the anthology through help from other writers, such as William Maginn, David Richard Pigot, his friend Joseph Humphreys, Thomas Keightley, and R. Adolphus Lynch of Killarney.

[f][30][31] Though such production that entails modification at multiple stages may be poorly countenanced by the modern folklorist, it is pointed out that such methodology is not so distant from the one practised by the Grimms at the time.

[19] Literary scholar Bridget G. MacCarthy gave a modern-day view criticism of Croker's dodging his way out of attributing the effort of collaborators.

[3][31][36] Though it has been told anecdotally that it was Scott's idea to turn this into a play,[37] Croker had this notion earlier, as evidenced in his notes to Fairy Legends.

[9] He also featured discussions of the music of his friend the Irish piper James Gandsey, of some interest to bagpipe or uilleann pipe musicology.

Croker's translation of it into English got published in the Morning Post in 1815, as already noted above, and caught the notice of poet George Crabbe in 1817.

Yeats was not the only one to charge Croker with viewing the lore of the Irish peasantry in a tinted "humorised" light;[48] this gratuitous mockery was also noted, for example, by folklorist Seán Ó Súilleabháin.

[50][51][50] Hultin and Ober have suggested that Croker was trapped between two polar-opposite stereotypes of the Irish: both "intelligent, sensitive" and "headstrong, violent".

[50] Croker was contemptuous of Irish annals such as the Annals of the Four Masters, and manuscripts such as the Book of Ballymote which contained narratives and poetry, calling them "the monkish chronicles" or "relics", and stating in a cavalier manner that Irish history would not suffer at all at "the total loss of the legendary records of an age of ignorance and superstition".