First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in 1990
This edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019
Published in this ebook edition in 2019
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Introduction and Notes copyright © Neil Philip 1990
Illustrations copyright © Patrick James Lynch 1990
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Source ISBN: 9780008253042
Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008190095
Version: 2018-11-27
For Roisín
NP
For Katrina
PJL
Contents
5. Jamie Freel and the Young Lady
8. The Lazy Beauty and her Aunts
14. The Man Who Never Knew Fear
19. The Enchantment of Earl Gerald
20. The Story of the Little Bird
The Irish are a nation of talkers, and over the years their talk has run richly and naturally into story. Folk and fairy tales of all kinds abound, from long sagas of legendary heroes to personal accounts of dealings with the fairies, from wonder tales full of magic and transformation to comic anecdotes about local characters, from legends of saints or popular history to shivering ghost stories.
The Irish fairy tales in this book are chosen from two volumes edited by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats when he was a young man: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892). They offer examples of various kinds of story, and various ways of writing down stories which were meant to be heard, not read. But most of all they concentrate on the fairies themselves, creatures which fascinated Yeats, who all his life was entranced by the otherworld. He yearned to know more about these “Nations of gay creatures, having no souls; nothing in their bright bodies but a mouthful of sweet air.”
On