Best Irish Fairy Books: the Nineteenth Century January 14, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
So you have decided to become an expert on fairies. Your eyes wander over the map of western Europe and after some consideration of the different regional varieties you settle on Ireland: English fairies too pompous; Dutch fey MIA; Icelandic elves aloof; Scandinavian trolls stupid… But where do you begin? There follows a list of the most important Irish fairy books from the nineteenth century. There are not actually that many good ones so the list will be short. If Beach has missed something… drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Note that it really is better to download these as most modern editions are useless reproductions: exceptions Yeats and Le Fanu.
1) 1825-8: Thomas Crofton Croker published The Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland in three volumes. You can ignore the third though as it is about Wales and mostly copied from other works… Confusing right? Croker is often criticized and he and his friends did make up some of the stories but his tales give you a real feel for pre-Victorian Irish fairy belief. Note that there are several different editions. Here are acceptable copies of the first and second volumes. Croker trivia: the man was little more than four feet high and was often compared to a leprechaun by his friends in London – he worked in the admiralty there.
2) 1841-3: Mr. and Mrs S.C. Hall published a multi-volume set of Ireland: its Scenery, Character and History (1841-3): different editions have different numbers of volumes. This was a guide book that you couldn’t carry around with you. It wouldn’t have fit easily in a camper van. But the earnest Victorian traveller would read it before heading out to Eire. In the millions of words here there are about 40,000 given over to fairy legends, some of which Mr and Mrs had themselves collected. The problem is that these tales are spread through the text. Good luck in finding them: play around with this page. Trivia about the Halls: she was a far better writer than he.
3) 1866: Patrick Kennedy, The Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts. In this work a devoutly Catholic Irish bookseller from Dublin gives about a hundred pages over to the Irish fairies based on his experiences growing up near Mount Leinster in the early nineteenth century. These are not tedious ‘There was once a king…’ tales. They are personal experiences of people that Kennedy had spoken to. Kennedy clearly believes what he is speaking about and at one point refuses to write out a spell in case readers might accidentally conjure a fairy! Trivia: Kennedy dedicated The Legendary Fictions to the extraordinary Sheridan Le Fanu (see below) who had been his editor for his first magazine publications. A good copy here.
4) 1870-2: In the early 1870s, just before his death in 1873, Sheridan Le Fanu wrote a series of stories based on traditional Irish lore. Three stand out for those interested in Ireland and fairies: ‘The Child that Went with the Fairies’; ‘The White Cat of Drumgunniol’; ‘Stories of Loch Guir’. Note that these were not collected in a book in the nineteenth century: today buy a collection of Le Fanu’s prose and you will probably find all of them. Trivia: one of the most remarkable of Le Fanu’s tales is ‘Laura Silver Bell‘ but awkwardly for us that is set in England.
5) 1887: in this year a histrionic Irish nationalist named Lady Wilde published Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland in two volumes (1 and 2). Lady Wilde (aka Speranza) had used her husband’s folklore notes for Ancient Legends and the result is a chaotic pot pouri of Irish fairylore from the west. In fact, William R. Wilde (obit 1876), who had died in 1876, had published Irish Popular Superstitions in 1852. That book is short and has some fairylore in the opening chapters. But the real interest is in the final chapter: ‘Fairy Archaeology and Medico-Religious Ceremonies’. So here we have a package deal… Trivia, you probably saw this coming but Speranza and William sired Oscar.
6) 1888: W. B. Yeats, Irish poet (‘mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’) and Nobel prize winner had a thing for fairies. As a young man he published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry and he followed that up four years later with Irish Fairy Tales. These are story collections, borrowing from the some of the authors above, but also from other now forgotten Irish writers, e.g. Lover. Yeats’ introductions and notes are also interesting. Trivia: Yeats once met a fairy queen in a cave with his cousin and spoke to her in Latin. Another post, another day.
7) 1894: in this year, a second generation Irishman living in the United States, Jeremiah Curtin, brought out Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World Collected From Oral Tradition in South-West Munster a series of ghost and fairy accounts from Ireland. Curtin and his wife had lived in Ireland for almost two years and had learnt Gaelic to put the collection together: it is again full of ‘memorates’, personal experiences rather than formulaic tales (well, there are some of those too). Trivia. Curtin translated Quo Vadis into English and made a fortune. He also spoke seventy languages… Or so they say.
Twentieth-century Irish fairy books tomorrow.
For the best every fairy books, meanwhile…
29 Jan 2017, Leif: In discussing Patrick Kennedy’s 1866 book, Dr Beachcombing states: ‘These are not tedious ‘There was once a king…’ tales. They are personal experiences of people that Kennedy had spoken to. ‘ It is understandable for a historian to distinguish between folk beliefs and fairytales and to prefer the former– even if the distinction is ambiguous at times. But might we give fairytales their due? In his essay, ‘On fairy stories’, JRR Tolkien makes a better case than ever I could: ‘…I will say no more than to quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as ‘lies’; though to do him justice he was kind enough and confused enough to call fairy-story-making “Breathing a lie through Silver.” ‘
Dear Sir, I said—Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.’
