The Irish Fairy Book

The Irish Fairy Book

Irish Fairy Lore has well been called by Mr. Alfred Nutt, one of the leading authorities on the subject, As fair and bounteous a harvest of myth and romance as ever flourished among any race, and Dr. Joyce, the well-known Irish scholar and historian, states: that it is very probable that the belief in the existence of fairies came in with the earliest colonists that entered Ireland, and that this belief is recorded in the oldest of native Irish writings in a way that proves it to have been, at the time treated of, long established and universally received. Colgan himself supplies us with the name and derivation of the Irish word for fairy, Sidh (shee), still used throughout the country. Fantastical spirits, he writes, are by the Irish called men of the Sidh, because they are seen, as it were, to come out of the beautiful hills to infest men, and hence the vulgar belief that they reside in certain subterranean habitations; and sometimes the hills themselves are called by the Irish Sidhe or Siodha. In Colgans time, then, the fairy superstition had passed from the upper classes, gradually disenthralled of it by the influence of Christianity to the common people, among whom it is still rife. But it is clear that in the time of St. Patrick a belief in a world of fairies existed even in the Kings household, for it is recorded that when the two daughters of King Leary of Ireland, Ethnea the fair and Fedelma the ruddy, came early one morning to the well of Clebach to wash, they found there a synod of holy bishops with Patrick. And they knew not whence they came, or in what form, or from what people, or from what country; but they supposed[Pg x] them to be Duine Sidh, or gods of the earth, or a phantasm. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 32202
Author: Graves, Alfred Perceval
Release Date: May 1, 2010
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Graves, Alfred Perceval, 1846-1931
Illustrator: Denham, George