Myths and Folk Tales of Ireland

These are the stories the Irish told each other around hearth fires before electricity, before cinema, before the world forgot how to believe in enchantment. Jeremiah Curtin gathered them from the last generation who had drunk at the wells of pure oral tradition, and what emerges from these pages is a world where every loch hides a lord, every hill has its queen, and a young prince can wager his head in a game of cards with a giant and lose. The tales pulse with raw magic: enchanted hogs that lead heroes through the wilderness, old women in the woods who grant impossible gifts, shape-shifters and scholars and terrible beautiful monsters. But beneath the wonder runs something fiercer: a meditation on fate, on the cost of pride, on what it means to walk into the dark and keep walking. This is not a museum piece. These stories still breathe. They are for anyone who has ever needed to believe that the world is larger and stranger and more wonderful than the one they were taught.