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Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
Edited and Selected by William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats selected the best tales from the work of many
expert writers and from his own research, and he also enriched the
collection immeasurably with his music prose, full of wit, sly irony,
and warmth for the Irish people and their tales. He has grouped
these stories of supernatural beings by category - trooping, fairies,
solitary fairies, changelings, ghosts, witches, fairy doctors, the
Devil and giants -and describes their attributes, habits, and customs
in wonderful introductory passages to each section.
These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences,
for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in
the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death has cropped up unchanged
for centuries: who have steeped everything in the heart: to whom
everything is a symbol. They have the spade over which man has leant
from the beginning.
Ghosts
Gods of the Earth
Saints, Priests
Solitary Fairies
Trooping Fairies
Tyeer-Na-n-Oge
Witch Trial
Witches, Fairy
Doctors
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