Irish Folk and Fairy Tales
SynopsisPlot
In this volume, extraordinary Irish characters are brought to life through the incandescent poetic voice of W.B. Yeats, who as the first Irish writer to be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1923. Born and educated in Dublin, from an early age Yeats was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult, which are brilliantly visited in Irish Folk and Fairy Tales. These legendary stories include Trooping Fairies, a Banshee, Kings and Queens, Giants, Devils and the enigmatic Irish Leprechaun that will delight and entertain readers of all ages. Poets, readers, children and adults will all fall in love with these classic Irish Folk and Fairy Tales from one of the world’s greatest poets, W. B. Yeats.
Story
About this book
W.B. Yeats, born and educated in Dublin, held a lifelong interest in Irish legends and the supernatural. Irish Folk and Fairy Tales is his gathering of traditional stories, songs, and poems drawn from Ireland's oral and literary heritage. The collection covers a wide range of figures from Irish folklore, including Trooping Fairies, Banshees, kings and queens, giants, devils, and the Leprechaun. Each piece reflects the particular landscape and belief systems of rural and ancient Ireland, where the boundary between the everyday world and the otherworld was treated as thin and permeable.
Yeats arranged these tales not as a scholarly archive but as living literature, giving shape to material that had circulated for generations in spoken form. His own voice as a poet colors the selection and framing, though many of the stories originated with anonymous storytellers and earlier collectors. The volume sits alongside his broader work in recovering and presenting Irish cultural traditions during a period when Ireland's distinct identity was a subject of intense public attention.
Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, becoming the first Irish writer to receive that honor. This collection remains one of the more accessible entry points into the folklore he spent decades studying and reshaping.
