LITMIR.BIZ

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in 1990

      This edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019

      Published in this ebook edition in 2019

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      This selection and layout copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2019

      Introduction and Notes copyright © Neil Philip 1990

      Illustrations copyright © Patrick James Lynch 1990

      All rights reserved.

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Patrick James Lynch and Neil Philip assert the moral rights to be identified as the illustrator of the work and the author of the introduction and notes respectively.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008253042

      Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008190095

      Version: 2018-11-27

       For Roisín

      NP

       For Katrina

      PJL

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

Introduction

1. The Stolen Child

2. The Priest’s Supper

3. The Legend of Knockgrafton

4. A Donegal Fairy

5. Jamie Freel and the Young Lady

6. A Legend of Knockmany

       7. The Twelve Wild Geese

       8. The Lazy Beauty and her Aunts

       9. The Haughty Princess

       10. Far Darrig in Donegal

       11. Donald and his Neighbours

       12. Master and Man

       13. The Witches’ Excursion

       14. The Man Who Never Knew Fear

       15. The Horned Women

       16. Daniel O’Rourke

       17. The Soul Cages

       18. The Giant’s Stairs

       19. The Enchantment of Earl Gerald

       20. The Story of the Little Bird

       Notes on the Stories

       Footnotes

       About the Publisher

      

      The Irish are a nation of talkers, and over the years their talk has run richly and naturally into story. Folk and fairy tales of all kinds abound, from long sagas of legendary heroes to personal accounts of dealings with the fairies, from wonder tales full of magic and transformation to comic anecdotes about local characters, from legends of saints or popular history to shivering ghost stories.

      The Irish fairy tales in this book are chosen from two volumes edited by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats when he was a young man: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892). They offer examples of various kinds of story, and various ways of writing down stories which were meant to be heard, not read. But most of all they concentrate on the fairies themselves, creatures which fascinated Yeats, who all his life was entranced by the otherworld. He yearned to know more about these “Nations of gay creatures, having no souls; nothing in their bright bodies but a mouthful of sweet air.”

      On

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