Celtic Fairy Tales

Celtic Fairy Tales

Project Gutenberg's Celtic Fairy Tales, by Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
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Title: Celtic Fairy Tales
Author: Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7885] [Yes, we are more than one

year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 30, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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FAIRY TALES ***

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CELTIC FAIRY TALES

SELECTED AND EDITED BY JOSEPH JACOBS

_SAY THIS
Three times, with your eyes shut_
Mothuighim boladh an Éireannaigh bhinn bhreugaigh faoi m'fhóidín
dúthaigh.
And you will see
What you will see
TO ALFRED NUTT
PREFACE
Last year, in giving the young ones a volume of English Fairy Tales,

my difficulty was one of collection. This time, in offering them
specimens of the rich folk-fancy of the Celts of these islands, my
trouble has rather been one of selection. Ireland began to collect her
folk-tales almost as early as any country in Europe, and Croker has
found a whole school of successors in Carleton, Griffin, Kennedy,
Curtin, and Douglas Hyde. Scotland had the great name of Campbell,
and has still efficient followers in MacDougall, MacInnes, Carmichael,
Macleod, and Campbell of Tiree. Gallant little Wales has no name to
rank alongside these; in this department the Cymru have shown less
vigour than the Gaedhel. Perhaps the Eisteddfod, by offering prizes for
the collection of Welsh folk-tales, may remove this inferiority.
Meanwhile Wales must be content to be somewhat scantily represented
among the Fairy Tales of the Celts, while the extinct Cornish tongue
has only contributed one tale.
In making my selection I have chiefly tried to make the stories
characteristic. It would have been easy, especially from Kennedy, to
have made up a volume entirely filled with "Grimm's Goblins" _à la
Celtique_. But one can have too much even of that very good thing,
and I have therefore avoided as far as possible the more familiar
"formulae" of folk-tale literature. To do this I had to withdraw from the
English-speaking Pale both in Scotland and Ireland, and I laid down the
rule to include only tales that have been taken down from Celtic
peasants ignorant of English.
Having laid down the rule, I immediately proceeded to break it. The
success of a fairy book, I am convinced, depends on the due admixture
of the comic and the romantic: Grimm and Asbjörnsen knew this secret,
and they alone. But the Celtic peasant who speaks Gaelic takes the
pleasure of telling tales somewhat sadly: so far as he has been printed
and translated, I found him, to my surprise, conspicuously lacking in
humour. For the comic relief of this volume I have therefore had to turn
mainly to the Irish peasant of the Pale; and what richer source could I
draw from?
For the more romantic tales I have depended on the Gaelic, and, as I
know about as much of Gaelic as an Irish Nationalist M. P., I have had

to depend on translators. But I have felt myself more at liberty than the
translators themselves, who have generally been over- literal, in
changing, excising, or modifying the original. I have even gone further.
In order that the tales should be characteristically Celtic, I have paid
more particular attention to tales that are to be found on both sides of
the North Channel.
In re-telling them I have had no scruple in interpolating now and then a
Scotch incident into an Irish variant of the same story, or vice versa.
Where the translators appealed to English folklorists and scholars, I am
trying to attract English children. They translated; I endeavoured to
transfer. In short, I have tried to put myself into the position of an
ollamh or sheenachie familiar with both forms of Gaelic, and anxious
to put his stories in the best way to attract