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.