Wonder-Smith and His Son: A Tale from the Golden Childhood of the World

These are the tales that Ireland has carried in its memory for fifteen hundred years. The Wonder-Smith, or Gubbaun Saor, was a master builder and smith who walked through a world where the hills were alive with magic and the boundary between the human and the otherworld was thin as morning mist. Ella Young gathered these fourteen stories from the oral tradition of rural Ireland, and what she captured was not mere legend but something living and breathing: tales of impossible buildings raised by a craftsman's will, of journeys into the land of the fair folk, of a father and son moving through a landscape where every stone had a story and every wind carried a whisper from the old times. The golden childhood of the world she invokes is both historical and mythic, a 6th-century Ireland where Christian monks were building their stone churches alongside the old powers, and where a single man could be both saint and sorcerer, both human and more than human. These are stories to be read aloud in the dark, to be told around fires, to live in the imagination long after the last page is turned.