★★★☆☆ Irish Fairy Tales and Folklore, edited by WB Yeats
Fairies in authentic Irish folklore
Irish Fairy Tales and Folklore
Edited by WB Yeats
Fairies in authentic Irish folklore
I need to bone up on Irish folklore for a thing I’m working on. When I saw W.B. Yeats‘s name on this collection, it seemed an obvious choice. Alas, it was a less good choice than I thought, because very little of the contents were written by Yeats. It’s a compilation of stories and a few poems by other Irish authors. Yeats himself supplied an Introduction and two poems, as well as short introductions to each of the main sections.
The stories are different from the Irish folklore I was most familiar with. The stories I know best are what might be called the Epic Irish stories: stories of the Fianna and what I might call the High Fae, like Niamh and the Tuatha Dé Danann. There is very little of that -- one story of Fionn mac Cumhaill and Cú Chulainn.
Aside from that, the stories are mostly of the sidhe, the little people of the hills, the good people or the gentry. They are the kind of fairies spoken of in the famous song “The Fairies,” by William Allngham
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
That song is included in full. If you have read Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, think of the Nac Mac Feegle.
These stories struck me as (and probably are) more authentic Irish folklore than the epics, which come to us distorted by the Christian priests who wrote them down.
Some of the stories are entertaining -- some are not. Many are tedious Shaggy Dog Stories that go on and on and never arrive anywhere. (That’s the joke -- these are stories that make fun of the reader.)