THE FOLIO SOCIETY

There are few traditions of storytelling and folklore as colourful as the Irish. It is a proud inheritance, one which has inspired and enriched the work of countless writers, artists and poets, from Keats to Joyce. When W. B. Yeats collected these 65 tales and poems, he was paying homage to stories which had enchanted him as a child. This was, however, more than a nostalgic record of old stories and beliefs. Yeats was convinced that these figures of the imagination were the source of both life and art.

Gathered from notable folklore collectors including Lady Wilde, Douglas Hyde and William Carleton, Yeats divided the tales into ‘fairy doctors’, ‘saints and priests’ or ‘changelings’. He even added helpful charms, including one that can prevent witches stealing your milk and another that uses eggshells to detect and overcome a changeling baby. Yeats relished the fact that people still believed in fairies, talked about them and practiced age-old superstitions to placate them. Paul Muldoon, whose introduction is included here, remembers that, even in the 1950s, people believed in fairies, and not only in Ireland. Immigrants had brought their beliefs to America, he claims, citing several authorities referring to sightings of banshees in Maine.

In these funny, moving and mysterious stories and poems, familiar characters of Irish myth come to life: the mercurial trooping fairies, as ready to make mischief as to do good; the solitary and industrious Leprachaun and his dissipated cousin, the Clurichaun; the fearsome Pooka, who lives among ruins and has ‘grown monstrous with much solitude’ and, of course, the fearsome Banshee, whose eerie wailing warns of death.