Fans pick 81 books like Irish Fairy Tales

This tale of tales is like a 12th-century Irish Arabian Nights. It brings Saint Patrick, a 5th-century missionary, and his priests together with magically long-lived warriors from the fían bands of the giant hero Finn Mac Cumhaill (McCool). Finn’s beloved companions, Cailte and Oisín, recount their many adventures in times gone by with the Otherworldly Túatha Dé (Tribes of the Goddess). Patrick, fearing that their history will be lost when the men finally die, orders his monks to put their tales in writing. 

Patrick must have adored stories of battling kings and alluring princesses, treasure hidden under uncanny mounds, shapeshifters, murderous ravens, and lovers who cross worlds to be together, all presented as an interview between Patrick and pagan elders. One question runs through tales: Is the sí and the ancient indigenous past of Ireland compatible with the orderly future of psalm-singing Christians? So long as the Church is in… show more.

William Butler Yeats is one of my favorite poets as well as a playwright, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Early in his career, though, Yeats rewrote many venerable Irish stories in verse and drama.

For a while, he lived in a run-down 15th-century tower in Co. Galway near his friend Lady Gregory, a fellow folklorist. Yeats collected tales of fairies, púcai, and ghosts from friends and locals, added his own visionary musings on the ancient landscape of caves and mounds, and created Celtic Twilight. Yeats’s fairies lured innocents to midnight feasts, abducted new brides, switched babies with fairy “changelings,” and caused all sorts of mayhem for mortals.

Yeats was an occultist and theosophist, ready to believe in fairies. He had a knack for inspiring wonder. “There are doubters even in the western villages,” he admitted, but “when all is said and done,… show more.

I love that Walter Evans Wentz, a native of New Jersey, starts this book among the towering stones of Carnac, a neolithic site in Brittany. While young Wentz was studying at Stanford, he met both Yeats and William James, the famed psychologist and lecturer on the supernatural.

They inspired him to pursue a doctoral degree in Celtic mythology and folklore at Oxford, and this book is his dissertation. Around 1910, he wandered the highlands, islands, and villages of Ireland, Scotland, Man, and Brittany, gathering an archive of fascinating fairy folklore to support his dissertation on the origins of fairies.

Wentz joined a centuries-long debate. Scholars had already proposed that fairies were disembodied spirits, products of peasant imagination, fallen angels, or—my favorite—a prehistoric and almost extinct race of pygmies who dwelt in the ancient burial mounds of Ireland. Wentz decided they were a pagan religion. Later, at Oxford, Wentz met T.… show more.

The stories in this annotated selection come from the National Folklore Collection in Dublin. Beginning in the 1920s, the newly independent Irish government sent scholars and volunteers out to transcribe and record accounts of rural customs and local beliefs that were quickly disappearing. Picture these collectors pumping the pedals of a clunky bicycle loaded with recording machinery or lugging accordion cameras down muddy lanes to photograph shanachies (tale-tellers) and fairy trees. Everything went into the Folklore Collection.

This nostalgic selection of stories and songs about the sí comes with CDs (in Irish and English) that put you in the room with tellers of tales. The shanachies sing of processions on midnight roads, fairy gold buried in a field, and how to ward off the constant menace of the sí. FYI: Never pull down a fairy tree to build a house! And do not call them fairies; they prefer the Good… show more.

I love this story because it is a time portal that swiftly deposited me in the streets of Dublin just before the Easter Rising. I could see the dirty streets and poverty and feel the hunger for change, for freedom from occupation, that was palpable in the air. I watched the unbelievable and fantastic display of doomed, deadly belligerence against the British.

I love the intensity and rawness of the author’s changing outlook. From a disinterested privileged medical student to a hard-core rebel, abandoning his bright future, he leads men across the wilds of Ireland in tasks he would rather not undertake. I love that he tells this with such a poetic turn of phrase that I can feel the grass underfoot as the men walk and my stomach churning as they take aim.

I enjoy dipping in and out of books that bring to the fore, for the first time, collective stories of diverse Irish women. Two stand out for me in 2024. Angela Byrne’s very readable Anarchy and authority focuses on the Irish in Russia from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.

I love how she is so creative with seemingly mundane or silent sources, like a list of visitors to the mountain town of Spa (in modern-day Belgium), using it to illuminate relationships and weave together very different lives. But Byrne is also honest about the historian’s challenges and her frustrations when the archives refuse to confirm in writing her hunches about what happened.

I am currently fascinated by the extraordinary women’s histories in Clodagh Finn and John Morgan’s The Irish in the Resistance: The Untold Stories of the Ordinary Heroes who Resisted Hitler. Neither of these books… show more.

Set in the period 1914-1916, it follows the life of Kate Crilly, a young girl whose brother Liam has just been killed in the Great War. This loss binds Kate to Liam’s comrade in arms, Hubie Wilson. Meanwhile, the tensions of the Rising are at boiling point and Dublin is turning into a battleground as Kate doubles back and across the River Liffey checking on her family, her friends and her desperately ill sister. Mills excels at describing the nature of grief and how one lives with it, rather than dwelling on the immediate impact of the loss per se. Beautiful, limpid prose and imagery, really enjoyed.

This book is one of the best at capturing the impact of myth on history, culture, and politics. Thompson starts long before the Easter 1916 Rising, the book’s central event, and examines how Celticity became a focal point of reclaiming an Irish identity separate from the British. Just as Jack Zipes’ Grimm Legacies demonstrates how the collection of folklore developed a unified German cultural identity, Thompson illustrates how collecting (and in many cases updating) the myths of the land gave Ireland not only a new identity but also a new history. The heroes of those mythic stories would be used for the next three centuries as allegories for both Ireland and the Irish in art, literature, theatre, and political rhetoric. It is the blueprint of all my worldbuilding.

A comprehensive history of the IRA from the 1916 Easter Uprising to the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles in the 1970s.

Bell did extensive research, interviewing many IRA veterans, and he offers insights on the organization’s high points and low points, of which there were many. What I liked best, though, was Bell’s writing – his words bring these people and events to life.

As a student of history I am impressed with the research that underpins this series, and especially the life of ordinary people in Ireland following the  Easter 1916 uprising. The whole Bess Crawford series tells the story of Bess, a strong-willed, independent woman who serves as a battlefield nurse in World War One. She needs all her courage and intelligence to survive then and in all of her ventures. Society’s expectations of women and how they should behave were dramatically changed during and following the Great War. How was it possible to expect a woman who had nursed on battlefields or driven an ambulance through enemy territory to return to a life of ‘proper’ behaviour, of tea and cucumber sandwiches, and absolute obedience to her husband?

An Irish Hostage finds Bess in Ireland at the wedding of a friend, only to become embroiled in the trouble and treachery following the… show more.