[Edit: Originally published on April 18, 2018]
Originally published in 1888, this book is a primary source text of stories from Ireland. The stories are told in a combination of exposition text for the stories and then dialogue of the people who are telling the stories. The dialogue is written in what’s supposed to be a very heavy colloquial dialect complete with accent. I’ll leave it to an actual Irish person to determine if it’s in any way a fair portrayal.
The stories are a combination of the early Pagan mythologies as well as Christian mythologies. You have fairies and leprchawns and other creatures (Pookas for example) attached to the devil, to go along with the stories of Saints and the Devil himself. Fairies, it’s said, are low ranking angels who went with the Devil but were not sent to hell with him. Giants we learn in the story about them, appear to follow the Bible. The one story in the book that didn’t really have any Christian mythologies added to it was the one about the Banshee. The final story in the book, “The Defeat of the Widows” was as well more about traditions continued from the “pagan” mythologies as opposed to having much Christian mythology added to it, though there are notes of it present.
Three stories, “About the Fairies”, “The Banshee”, and “The Henpecked Giant” all included sheet music within the stories.
In total there are fourteen stories that make up the book.
It’s a bit of a difficult book to read on a very technical level. I found my eyes straining if I read to long.
It should be noted that is not a reprint of a book published in 1888, it’s a preservation of an original text. The book is essentially a scanned copy of the original manuscript. The text, as you will see in the snapchats, is not the easiest on the eyes. There are also small parts of the text that are missing, either too damaged to reproduce or had gotten torn out of the original copy, which I believe is the case in at least one of the missing areas. They aren’t particularly large areas though so nothing drastic is lost. You can still make coherent sense of what is going on even with the missing bits.
The original manuscript copied here belongs to Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington and was originally published by The Riverside Press at Cambridge.
I think if you’re interested it might be worth it to take a look, I found it very interesting for the historical value and how different some of the stories were to the ones I already knew. The stories while interesting do have a very Christian tone, so if you’re looking for a book of Irish mythologies prior to the introduction of Christianity to Ireland, I would recommend another book.
For those who are interested, the book can be purchased here.
The Snapchats:
Snap Book Reviews 