A worthy collection of tales, short stories, snippets, and even a few poems covering all manner of magickal types from Ireland: Trooping Fairies and Solitary Fairies, Ghosts, Tir n'an Og, and Saints and Priests. Some are told in the Irish dialect, others in a more straightforward language, and all have a different flavor to them. They're not so much morality tales, unless the moral is "Do good unto the faeries, for they will know if you wish them ill. And by all the saints, keep your wits about you when you encounter them!" ( )

The book is fine. It's all readings from their time. A great snap shot.

As someone who studies mythology as well as folk stories I can see the bulk of them were degrading the old religious beliefs and new church being elevated.

Not my cup of tea, but that's okay. It's stories as they were. ( )

Considering how many times I stalled while trying to read this book, I wasn’t sure that I was going to actually finish the whole thing, but I stuck it out and soldiered on, and I’m glad that I did. Yeats is obviously one of the foremost authorities and collectors of Irish folk and fairytales of the modern era, and did much in attempt to document a largely oral tradition, and I would say that his efforts paid off - even if some of the stories are a bit rough about the edges. Collected seemingly at random from personally conducted interviews and borrowed from other Irish writers of his time, Yeats groups these two collections of stories into rough groups based on the type of fairy or supernatural being they are about, ranging in topic from tales of the trouping fairies (the fairy courts, if you will) to stories in which the great Irish heroes battle the largest of supernatural beings: giants. I personally prefer the stories which Yeats retells himself, as some of the verbatim copied stories lack his writerly talents and the Irish jargon can be a bit much without a decent translator. Overall, a decent collection of tales, and a good addition to my traditional fairytale collection. ( )

The works were all post-Christian. I was hoping for mythology but these were ghost and saint stories. ( )

It’s certainly of very diverse authorship, more like a radio station or something if that sort, than an ordinary book.

Some of the stories seem very moral, like “Teig O’Kane and the Corpse”, which seem more true than any merely realistic story about working as a newspaper boy or whatever.

Occasionally they make me wonder about where the magic turns into something more like mental illness, like “The Breweey of Eggshells”. I suppose that most people wouldn’t bother to think in this way because most modern fantasy stories are pretty secular, you know. “I got a great job working for the wizard king: now I can go on vacation!” In other words, you’re in information technology. But some stories are more like getting delusional, especially if you can’t figure out what in the name of God and Mary the story is trying to say.

Maybe the question is whether the fairies are “the good people” exclusively, or, you know, the baby-snatchers, sometimes, too. A fairy who assigns you tasks to work off your bad deeds is clearly doing good. (Jack Lewis liked to say that Aslan was “not a tame lion”.) A fairy that steals your child and lies about it is not really good, however.

The one shaman type book I read so far that I liked, Harner’s “The Way of the Shaman”, talks about how some animal spirits are noble and so on— your typical lion king— but others look at you like food. So maybe that’s the issue at work here.

But as troubling as that can be, the farther you go from nature and reality, the further you go into addiction, I think. That’s ultimately more important, I think, than certain nebulous ideas of culture. “This video game reminds me of the peasants from County Cork who were my ancestors.” “The countryside around Vivec City is much nicer than this suburban nonsense.”

So.... I don’t know. Sometimes I just look at things and I say, “That’s very different from my experience.”

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But I liked the one about the priest.

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It’s hard not to see the pagans as being like moral children: “Woman’s fraud, and Man’s force— O what marvelous power!”

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Some of them were very light; I feel if I were part of the culture they would be very entertaining. Not that they’re boring.

I used to think that people were stupid for just re-reading “Harry Potter”, you know.

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Although the treatment given to the devil is beautiful.