P.J. Lynch - Fairy Tales of Ireland

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in 1990

This edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019

Published in this ebook edition in 2019

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

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This selection and layout copyright © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2019

Introduction and Notes copyright © Neil Philip 1990

Illustrations copyright © Patrick James Lynch 1990

All rights reserved.

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Patrick James Lynch and Neil Philip assert the moral rights to be identified as the illustrator of the work and the author of the introduction and notes respectively.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008253042

Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008190095

Version: 2018-11-27

For Roisín

NP

For Katrina

PJL

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in 1990 This edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019 Published in this ebook edition in 2019 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF The HarperCollins website address is www.harpercollins.co.uk This selection and layout copyright © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2019 Introduction and Notes copyright © Neil Philip 1990 Illustrations copyright © Patrick James Lynch 1990 All rights reserved. Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019 Patrick James Lynch and Neil Philip assert the moral rights to be identified as the illustrator of the work and the author of the introduction and notes respectively. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008253042 Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008190095 Version: 2018-11-27

Dedication For Roisín NP For Katrina PJL

Introduction

1. The Stolen Child

2. The Priest’s Supper

3. The Legend of Knockgrafton

4. A Donegal Fairy

5. Jamie Freel and the Young Lady

6. A Legend of Knockmany

7. The Twelve Wild Geese

8. The Lazy Beauty and her Aunts

9. The Haughty Princess

10. Far Darrig in Donegal

11. Donald and his Neighbours

12. Master and Man

13. The Witches’ Excursion

14. The Man Who Never Knew Fear

15. The Horned Women

16. Daniel O’Rourke

17. The Soul Cages

18. The Giant’s Stairs

19. The Enchantment of Earl Gerald

20. The Story of the Little Bird

Notes on the Stories

Footnotes

About the Publisher

The Irish are a nation of talkers, and over the years their talk has run richly and naturally into story. Folk and fairy tales of all kinds abound, from long sagas of legendary heroes to personal accounts of dealings with the fairies, from wonder tales full of magic and transformation to comic anecdotes about local characters, from legends of saints or popular history to shivering ghost stories.

The Irish fairy tales in this book are chosen from two volumes edited by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats when he was a young man: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892). They offer examples of various kinds of story, and various ways of writing down stories which were meant to be heard, not read. But most of all they concentrate on the fairies themselves, creatures which fascinated Yeats, who all his life was entranced by the otherworld. He yearned to know more about these “Nations of gay creatures, having no souls; nothing in their bright bodies but a mouthful of sweet air.”

On the fourteenth of October, 1892, he was rewarded with a strange experience, which he described in his book The Celtic Twilight . Here is his account from a letter written the very next day:

I went to a great fairy locality – a cave by the Rosses sands – with an uncle & a cousin who is believed by the neighbours & herself to have narrowly escaped capture by that dim kingdom once. I made a magical circle & invoked the fairies. My uncle – a hard headed man of about 47 – heard presently voices like those of boys shouting & distant music but saw nothing. My cousin however saw a bright light & multitudes of little forms clad in crimson as well as hearing the music & then the far voices. Once there was a great sound as of little people cheering & stamping with their feet away in the heart of the rock. The queen of the troop came then – I could see her – & held a long conversation with us & finally wrote in the sand “be careful & do not seek to know too much about us”.

Others have received much the same warning. Old Biddy Hart told Yeats much about the fairies, but for long she turned his questions aside with, “I always mind my own affairs, and they always mind theirs.” Another informant, “Paddy Flynn, a little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare” answered Yeats’s query as to whether he had ever seen the fairies with the long-suffering, “Am I not annoyed with them?” Yet another, an old Galway countryman renowned as a seer and healer whom Yeats calls Kirwan, told him, “I see them in all places, and there’s no man mowing a meadow that doesn’t see them at some time or other.” Yeats’s home district in County Sligo was full of such beliefs.