Legends of Saints & Sinners. Collected and Translated from the Irish

Before Ireland was Christian, it was ruled by gods and demons. Then the saints arrived, and something strange happened: the old powers didn't disappear. They were remade. These twenty-odd legends, collected and translated by Douglas Hyde at the turn of the twentieth century, capture a Ireland where holy men wrestle with druids, where miraculous cures come wrapped in pagan spells, and where the line between saint and sinner blurs into something far more interesting than simple morality. The opening tale, 'St. Patrick and Crom Dubh,' sets the pattern: a dark chieftain who demands human sacrifice, a saint who counters with something older and stranger than any bishop's blessing. Hyde was preservationist enough to know he was capturing something vanishing, and scholar enough to recognize it had never been simply Christian. These are stories from the in-between times, where Ireland's ancient mythological world collided with the new faith and neither quite won.