Legends of Saints and Sinners

A window into a vanished Ireland where saints walked among faeries and ancient Celtic otherworldliness found new expression in Christian form. Hyde collected these tales from the mouths of native speakers in the late 19th century, preserving stories that had survived through oral tradition for centuries, tales of Saint Patrick confronting druids, of holy men wrestling with demons in the shape of blackbirds, of miraculous escapes and uncanny punishments that feel less like biblical miracle than like the old gods wearing new masks. This is Christian folk-lore in its purest sense: stories that could only have been born in Ireland, where Christianity arrived not to erase the old imagination but to inhabit it. What emerges is a world stranger and more wonderful than any Sunday school painting, where the sacred and the uncanny are still wrestling for possession of the landscape.