Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry

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William Butler Yeats
Courier Corporation, 1991 M01 1 - 326 páginas

"Even a newspaper man, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celts is a visionary without scratching." -- from the Introduction
In this charming collection, readers will find themselves transported to the shadowy, twilit world of Celtic myth and legend -- where the deenee shee (fairy people) work their mischief, where priests and the devil wage an endless struggle for the souls of humankind, where clever wives outwit murderous giants and druids cast geise (spells).
The majority of the tales presented here were collected in the nineteenth century by such folklorists as William Allingham, T. Crofton Croker, Douglas Hyde, and Lady Wilde (Oscar Wilde's mother). From this rich legacy, William Butler Yeats, who drew upon Irish fairy lore for his own poetry and plays, chose an especially interesting and representative selection: "The White Trout; A Legend of Cong," "The Brewery of Egg-shells," "The Soul Cages," "The Kildare Pooka," "The Black Lamb," "The Horned Women," "The Phantom Isle," "King O'Toole and his Goose," "The Demon Cat," "The Giant's Stairs," "The Twelve Wild Geese," and many more -- 64 in all.
Now lovers of myth and legend can immerse themselves in this treasury of time-honored tales brimming with the warmth, charm, and age-old peasant lore of rural Ireland. An Introduction and Notes by W. B. Yeats help elucidate the background of the stories and their meaning and role in Irish life and culture.

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Contenido

THE TROOPING FAIRIES
1
The Legend of Knockgrafton
40
A Donegal Fairy
46
THE MERROW
61
THE SOLITARY FAIRIES
80
Daniel ORourke
97
The Kildare Pooka
105
A Lamentation for the Death of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald
112
WITCHES FAIRY DOCTORS PAGE
146
TYEERNANOGE
200
SAINTS PRIESTS
214
THE DEVIL
227
GIANTS
260
KINGS QUEENS PRINCESSES EARLS ROBBERS
280
NOTES
319
Derechos de autor

GHOSTS
128

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Acerca del autor (1991)

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. Yeats' plays included The Countess Cathleen, The Land of Heart's Desire, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The King's Threshold, and Deirdre. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He is one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. His poetry collections include The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, and Last Poems and Plays. He died on January 28, 1939 at the age of 73.

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