This is a rather lovely collection of folk tales and fairy stories, put together by W.B. Yeats. It’s organised into chapters by subject; we get chapters focusing on stories about giants, witches, banshees, etc. and even a slightly bizarre chapter on jackdaws of all things.Don’t make the mistake I did in thinking Yeats actually wrote these (I know, I should read the book description and not just buy the book because of the author’s name on the cover). Yeats does pen introductions to most of the c...

The fairy tales and folk tales of Ireland have had a vast cultural influence throughout the world. It is all the more fortunate, therefore, that Ireland’s greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, undertook in the late 19th century to collect those tales and present them in an accessible and engaging format. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland provides a splendid look at one of the great mythological and folkloric traditions of the world.This edition, as published by the Touchstone imprint of Sim...

Excellent collection of the various folk lore of Ireland.Yeats divides up the various types of folk tales from fairies (changlings, merrow, solitary fairies like the lepracaun, the pooka and banshee), to ghosts and also witches and fairy doctors.He also has a collection of stories about saints, priests, the devil, giants and the royal leaders and the fairy tales about them. My personal favorite is the Twelve Wild Geese, which is a variation of the Twelve Swan Brothers with the same plot. The one...

I am glad Years collected these, but his mastery of poetry did not extend to prose.

From Yeats' end notes [note Paracelsus' opinion of scientists]:"It has been held by many that somewhere out of the void there is a perpetual dribble of souls; that these souls pass through many shapes before they incarnate as men - hence the nature spirits. They are invisible - except at rare moments and times; they inhabit the interior elements, while we live upon the outer and the gross. Some float perpetually through space, and the motion of the planets drives them hither and thither in curre...

It's ok, not as many stories as I thought there would be. Basically too much intro to each section

What better way to celebrate St Patrick’s Day as a bibliophile than this? ☘️(I know I’m not going to be done within the day — it’s 400 pages long, but it has pictures, and the child in me is excited at that prospect!)

“Occultists from Paraclesus to Elephas Levi, divide the nature spirits into gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, undines; or earth, air, fire, and water spirits. Their emperors, according to Elephas, are named Cob, Paralda, Djin, Hicks respectively The gnomes are covetous and of the melancholic temperament. Their usual height is but two spans, though they can elongate themselves into giants. The sylphs are capricious and of bilious temperament. They are in size and strength much greater than men, as bec...

This surprised me – I was suspecting this to be very much like the Grimm or Calvino efforts. You know, lots of familiar fairy tales but told in a tippering way with a fetching Irish brogue. If you are after such then you’ll have to jump nearly to the very end of this collection. These stories would possibly come closer to ghost stories in a way. The relationship between the natural and supernatural is more dreamlike in these stories than in what I am used to in fairy tales. There is something mu...

If you think the Grimm brothers were macabre, wait till you get a load at these clever tales.

A rich collection of beguiling tales of encounters between Irish peasant-folk and the Daoine Sidhe, the Fairy People, or “fallen angels who are not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost” as quoted by Yeats in his commentary. Here you will find merrows, changelings, leprechauns, the Banshee, the Pukka, Tir na Nog…..The stories have been translated or transcribed, quite beautifully, from authentic oral sources by Gaelic specialists who have an imaginative sympathy with this world of m...

This collection of Irish lore by Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats is extremely thorough. What most intrigues me about folk and fairy tales is their role as modern-day fables, offering advice about life and how to live it. Great for people interested in the nuances of Irish culture.

I love how creepy and morbid so much of this stuff is. Mermen who keep people's souls in cages under the sea? Yes please! Heroic priests! Drunken escapades! Witches and swans! And the most sadistic fairies you'll ever know!

This is one of my favorite folktale books. This work bring alive the legends and ghost tales of the people of Ireland in the 1900th century and back. My favorite being the Tale of ' Teig O'Kane and the Corpse.'Some of the best ghost stories can be found in these Irish legends and folk tale books.

TO SOME I HAVE TALKED WITH BY THE FIRE"WHILE I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,My heart would brim with dreams about the timesWhen we bent down above the fading coalsAnd talked of the dark folk who live in soulsOf passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;… A rapturous music, till the morning break And the white hush end all but the loud beat Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet." They’re prevalent in the Irish poetry and music; I mean, the ghosts and the fairies [“

I read this as part of my research for a short story I was writing, and it ended up taking up taking longer to read than the story did to write! That doesn't necessarily reflect poorly on the book, though, as I found it quite interesting. Engrossing in parts, even.Here, Yeats gathers and edits stories and myths from Ireland, largely from the translations and collections of other folklorists. It focuses mainly on the faeries, though it also includes water creatures (i.e. the merrow), witches, gho...

Not what I expected. Many of the stories are legends with no moral and some are completely opaque. Sometimes it was fun, other times dull, but almost always interesting in some way. My favorite was "The Soul Cages" in which a man meets a merman and learns that he's been keeping the souls of drowned sailors in jars in his home under the sea. The man tricks the merman into getting drunk on poitín and then sneaks into his house to free the souls. There is a German version of this story collected by...

I read this collection on a holiday in Ireland and the tales completely matched Ireland's mystical, mysty landscapes. Highlight of which was camping in a field of a farmer, who told us not to get too close to the middle, so as not to disturb the fairy fort.I loved the stories in the beginning, but towards the end begun to grow tired of some of them. Didn't like most of the witches' tales, because of the superstituous/Christian morale. Some of the tales are written in dialect, which makes for a c...

I don’t read short fiction and poetry very fast. Where I often devour novels in a day, an anthology of short stories may take months. After receiving W. B. Yeats’ Irish Folk and Fairy Tales for Christmas, I read a story or two per night over almost two months. Although some of the stories, being folktales, seemed very familiar as I read, there was often a brutal, Celtic twist to the “happily ever after” of the fairy tales of my youth. In one story, a useless protagonist continually thwarts commo...