Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
The version of Ireland that existed before electricity, before modernity, before the twentieth century's upheavals. These are the stories that Irish peasants told each other by firelight, tales where the boundaries between our world and the otherworld were thin as gossamer. W.B. Yeats, still young and already obsessed with preserving what was vanishing, gathered these tales from oral tradition in the 1880s, creating a document that is part literature, part anthropology, part dream. The fairies here are not the tamed creatures of children's books. They are the Sí, the Good People, the fallen angels who live in raths and ancient burial mounds. They steal children, seduce mortals, curse the proud and reward the humble. Ghosts walk. Pookas shape-shift. A banshee wails before death. These are stories where the supernatural was not fiction but lived reality, where peasant people genuinely believed and acted accordingly. For readers who want folklore that feels ancient and strange, not sanitized. For those who loved The Witchery or Angela Carter's fairy tale reworkings. For anyone who understands that the best fairy tales were never meant for children.
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“On November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After November Eve the blackberries are no longer wholesome, for the pooka has spoiled them.””
— Unknown
“Come away, O, human child! To the woods and waters wild, With a fairy hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.””
— Unknown
“it's a long lane that has no turning.””
— Unknown
“Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun”
— Unknown
“every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching.””
— Unknown
“With us nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.””
— Unknown
“I don't think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens go about imitating Anty in her laziness, you'll find it won't thrive with you as it did with her. She was beautiful beyond compare, which none of you are, and she had three powerful fairies to help her besides.””
— Unknown
“On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the fairies are at their gayest, and sometime steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides.””
— Unknown
“Red is the color of magic in every country, and has been so from the very earliest times. The caps of fairies and magicians are well-nigh always red.””
— Unknown
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