The Irish Fairy And Folk Tales Of W.B. Yeats

In a used bookshop some years in the past, I chanced upon a small quantity known as “Irish Fairy and Folktales,” edited by none aside from W.B. Yeats (1865-1939). Revealed in 1888, this assortment, fastidiously chosen by the well-known poet, is alive with the wealthy, imaginative folklore solely peasants—this holds true for any nation—appear able to producing.

The preservation of those poems and tales had been, for Yeats, a type of civic responsibility. For in them, as in Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim,” is revealed the colourful soul of an ideal literary folks. And for Yeats, a minimum of Buber, conserving these tales alive was greater than only a passing side-project: their loss of life, or, extra seemingly, the sluggish passing of this literary custom meant the loss of life of Irish identification.

Heavy stuff, after all. However Yeats’ challenge is just not the substance of the ebook, which is at occasions full of life, hilarious, darkish, scary, however greater than something, mischievous. He divides his version into the next components: The Trooping Fairies, Changelings, The Merrow, The Solitary Fairies, Ghosts, Witches and Fairy Docs, T’yeer-na-oge, Saints and Clergymen, The Satan, Giants, and Kings, Queens, Princesses, Earls, Robbers.

There’s, as they are saying, one thing in right here for everybody. And whereas I’ve not studied the textual content sufficiently to offer an account of its construction—why start with trooping fairies and finish with robbers?—I do know sufficient (and this based mostly on bedtime tales to my kids) to say that dipping out and in of the ebook doesn’t hurt.

The extra one reads from the gathering the extra one will get the sense that Yeats is after larger recreation than the easy, albeit vital process of preserving nationwide literary patrimony. He’s right here, like in a few of his poetry, nervous in regards to the deleterious results trendy science has on the the Aristocracy of 1’s soul. “Irish Fairy and Folktales” is, then, a type of tonic to the Laputa of England:

“The world is, I imagine, extra stuffed with significance to the Irish peasant than to the English. The fairy populace of hill and lake and woodland have helped to maintain it so. It offers a whimsical life to the useless hillsides, and surrounds the peasant, as he ploughs and digs, with tender shadows of poetry. No marvel that he’s homosexual, and might take man and his future with out gloom and make up proverbs like this from the outdated Gaelic-‘The lake is just not burdened by its swan, the steed by its bridle, or a person by the bought that’s in him.’”

Now, this is likely to be laughable to trendy readers whose sensibilities have been so intruded upon by the most recent bits and bytes that they stopped feeling the land round them as alive. They will not, beneath the dizzying lights of our new science, imagine in otherworldly issues or that each every so often the supernatural finds a option to intrude in human affairs. Theirs—ours?—is a life devoid of magic. However not so the Irish peasant.

As Yeats places it:

“These folk-tales are stuffed with simplicity and musical occurrences, for they’re the literature of a category for whom each incident within the outdated rut of beginning, love, ache, and loss of life has cropped up unchanged for hundreds of years: who’ve steeped the whole lot within the coronary heart: to whom the whole lot is an emblem. They’ve the spade over which man has leant from the start. The folks of the cities have the machine, which is prose and a parvenu. They’ve few occasions. They will flip over the incidents of an extended life as they sit by the fireplace. With us nothing has time to collect that means, and too many issues are occurring for even an enormous coronary heart to carry.”

So, whether or not you first start with The Legend of Knockgrafton and The Piper and the Puca or want The Witches Tour and The Demon Cat, Yeats and the inexhaustible effectively of Irish folk-wisdom have one thing from which everybody can be taught…if solely we nonetheless have eyes to see and ears to pay attention.