Fairy tales, or rather fairy stories, if that's a distinction meaningful outside of my own head, about sons and daughters and Fionn, who is a son, and the things they do, fighting giants, playing games of chance and always losing the third, stealing clothes from magician's daughters who change into swans, fighting the armies of the king of Spain, outwitting hags, getting a hell of a lot of wise and/or magical help to see them through their adventures, marrying up and making out like bandits. The repetitions and similarities grate at first, but soon the tales work their magic and you feel the rhythm and the cadences, the comfort of the familiar patterns and things that aren't so much repeated as shared. Alien to a modern audience, not really prose and certainly not poetry, artifacts of a different time and yet the very stuff our dreams are made of. ( )

The particular ebook I have is very badly OCR'd, which makes the names even harder to parse than usual. The first half of this book is mostly fairy tales in the traditional sense, albeit with more single combat and cutting off of heads than you're used to from Grimm; the second half is Fin MacCumhail stories (topped off with Oisin, of course), which I enjoyed much more. ( )

Abridged rpt. of Myths and folk-lore of Ireland (Boston : Little, Brown, 1890) ( )

GB/UK/Ireland - Folklore/Mythology, Irish