Celtic Folk and Fairy Tales

These are the stories that haunted the Celtic hillsides and floated up from the hearth-fires of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Joseph Jacobs gathered them in 1892, when the old ways were fading but not yet forgotten, and in doing so preserved something irretrievable: a world where the fairy folk walk among us, where curses can be broken by love, and where the boundary between the mortal realm and the Otherworld is thin as morning mist. Here you'll find Guleesh, the young man stolen away by fairies and given a choice that would test his heart forever. You'll meet the terrible Horned Women who punish broken promises, and the Sea-Maiden who trades her immortality for human grief. There are kings who lose everything to magic geese, and women whose beauty launches wars. Jacobs understood that Celtic tales aren't pretty, they're strange, often cruel, shot through with humor and longing and the particular melancholy of a people who believed the hills were alive. This is the book that introduced generations to the dark enchantment of the Celtic imagination. If you've ever felt the pull of the old stories, if you've ever wondered what the peasants' faith looked like before it was smoothed into religion, begin here.