Irish Fairy Tales

The old Ireland was not a place you could leave easily. In these ten tales, the boundary between mortal and magical thins to nothing: a warrior sleeps for three centuries and wakes speaking a dead language; a king trades his shape for a fish and loses himself in the transformation; gods and Fianna heroes stride through forests where every hollow holds a curse or a gift. James Stephens retells these ancient stories with a poet's ear and a storyteller's instinct. The book opens with the priest Finnian marching to confront an old man who worships forgotten gods, and becomes something else entirely. There is Tuan mac Cairill, who remembers Ireland before the Flood and survives by changing form, from man to hawk to salmon to stag, a living archive of a world that refuses to die. There is Fionn, the great captain of the Fianna, hunting in the woods of Allen with hounds that were once princes. These are not gentle tales. Magic in Stephens' Ireland is dangerous, erotic, often cruel. Arthur Rackham's illustrations catch exactly that quality: the uncanny light in a forest clearing, the too-long fingers of a fairy, the hounds running silent through mist.