His retellings are marked by a rare combination of humour and lyricism, stemming from his own successful literary career.” James Stephens (1880 – 1950), was an Irish novelist and poet, who produced many retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales. It contains ‘The Story of Tuan Mac Cairill’, ‘The Boyhood of Fionn’, ‘The Birth of Bran’, ‘The Wooing of Becfola’, ‘Oisin’s Mother’, ‘The Little Brawl at Allen’, ‘The Carl of the Drab Coat’, and more.

Per the publisher: “‘Irish Fairy Tales’ is a collection of stories originally edited by James Stephens, and accompanied by the illustrations of Arthur Rackham. Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens & illustrated by Arthur Rackham “When the pagan gods of Ireland–the Tuath-De-Danān–robbed of worship and offerings, grew smaller and smaller in the popular imagination, until they turned into the fairies, the pagan heroes grew bigger and bigger, until they turned into the giants.” Yeats says in his famous work Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, I’ve studied them all, and they each offer something different.Ī huge thanks to Amazon for the publisher information, and these books are in no particular order.Īs the famous poet and writer W.B. But that doesn’t take away from the sheer pleasure of reading about leprechauns, banshees, and the famous Fenian warrior Fionn MacCumhaill. Now we’re left with a huge amount of mythical stories that contradict each other.

Then, as time went one, the stories kept changing and distorting and evolving. Many of the academic books about these cycles can be hard to understand which is probably the reason for the proliferation of easier fairy tale and folktale books. (Although not everyone believes that these warriors really existed.) The Fenian Cycles are a combination of poetry and prose, written between the 7th and 14th centuries in an older form of Gaelic. Each of these cycles follows the lives and histories of Ireland’s most famous warriors and kings. To make things even more complicated, there are four cycles of Fenian Poetry (Mythological, Ulster, Fenian, Kings’s cycles). Except, because the Irish can be contrary (I can say this since all of my grandparents and great-grandparents came from Ireland), the stories changed and were reorganized and then distorted until there was so much contradictory lore, that it became impossible for historians to develop a mythic Celtic Canon. It wasn’t until Christian monks arrived on the scene that these stories were recorded and cataloged. Celtic myths and Irish legends were, until not too long ago, told in the oral tradition.

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by Various