It’s nice to have a collection of tales you don’t get to read that often. There are forty-six tales divided into four different categories: Romance & Tragedy, Heroes & Giants, Fairies & Sea-Folk, and Supernatural Forces. These cover four of the six main genres of Irish Folk Tales: Myths, Legends, Magic Tales, and Literary Fairy Tales. They say Magic Tales instead of Fairy Tales, because not every story that has magic in it also includes a fairy which I think is a bit hoity-toity, but to each his own.
The stories are of varying enjoyability. Several of them are written in what I suppose is meant to be colloquial Irish, one sample sentence (from “The White Trout”) being
Well, sir, in coorse o’time, the White Throut, God bless it, was seen in the sthrame beyant, and sure the people didn’t know what to think av the crathur, seein’ as how a white throut was never heard av afor, nor since; and years upon years the throut was there, just where you seen it this blessed minit, longer nor I can tell-aye throth, and beyant the memory o’ th’ ouldest in the village.
Now imagine entire stories written like that; it gets a little much. While “The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge” is quite obviously a Bard’s tale: the cadence it is written down in is very disjointed; it screams out to be chanted, or put to some kind of music.
Some of the stories will also be very familiar to anyone who knows Fairy Tales on the whole. “Fair, Brown, and Trembling” and “Smallhead and the King’s Son” are two variations of the Cinderella story, while “The Haughty Princess” is similar to the Brothers Grimm’s “King Thrushbeard”, which shares heavy influence with The Taming of the Shrew. And of course, what book of Ireland would be complete without the story of Deidre and the Seven Sorrows; it’s ubiquitous.
One of the strangest stories is “The Pudding Bewitched”, which is about a bewitched pudding (gee, you couldn’t tell that from the title, could you?) and the havoc it causes throughout a village on a couple’s wedding day.
You get a healthy dose of Irish supernatural entities; your leprechauns and your selkies, your pookas and your banshees. I personally love banshees; you see them so rarely in literature and I think that is just a shame. And of course what book of Irish stories would be complete without a healthy dose of fiddles, pipes, drink, dancing, and long-suffering husbandly sexism towards their wives. Unfortunately, they’re all Irish literary staples.
The illustrations add to the stories. Arthur Rackham, as usual, is fantastic, and the other illustrators (which other than John D. Batten are not named) all contribute other wonderful drawings.
I really enjoyed reading it.