Fans pick 100 books like Tales of the Elders of Ireland

There are more accurate translations and better selections, but I love this collection for two reasons. First, Stephens was a Dublin-born, Irish-speaking novelist, poet, and eyewitness to the Easter Rising of 1916. His stories of ancient heroes and Otherworldly folk salute a proudly Celtic past. Stephens was part of the nationalist literary revival that harnessed Irish myths to an independent future. A friend to politicians and intellectuals, he claimed (untruthfully) to have the same birthday as his friend James Joyce. Stephens cleaned up the old stories for tender ears, but his early 20th-century language casts an antiquarian sheen on his fairytales. 

So do the enchanting illustrations by Arthur Rackham, one of the most skillful depicters of fairies (second only to Harry Clarke)—my second reason for loving this book. 

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 that this book is a treasure chest of ancient stories passed down by word of mouth for countless generations. The Irish were originally a separate nation of Celts, with their own set of gods and heroes and warriors, their own idiosyncratic characters like shape-shifters, fairies, and leprechauns. I love that Lady Gregory spent years collecting these stories from the locals on her native West Coast, starting with her own nanny.

What I love most about this book is that it was a best seller when the rebels of 1916 were young and that they were raised on some of these same stories of courage, fortitude and yes, trickery. These wild characters were the role models of young developing Irish rebels at the turn of the century.

In the summer of 1968, I was 20 and spent the summer pretty much banally in Israel and Europe. Around me, the world was on fire, but I was inside my own head.

Eventually, I washed up in Dublin, where I walked in a cold rain to Dorset Street, there to recreate Leopold Bloom’s pork kidney purchase from Dlugacz, the butcher. There was no Dlugacz on Dorset, but there was another butcher who stuffed into stiff pink butcher paper something that glistened and oozed. My plan was to fry it up, as Leopold had, on the hotplate in my rented room. It did not go well. I was felled intestinally in dramatic fashion; pity there was no one to observe. 

Somehow, in my travels, I had obtained a copy of At Swim Two-Birds, and now, my insides recreating The Troubles, I wanly reached for it and read the first paragraph:… show more.

This is a fascinating look at the perceptions of Irish mythology at different points throughout our history. There’s always a lot of fuss on the internet about fantasy writers who get our mythology “wrong”, but Mark Williams shows that the legends themselves and their themes have evolved constantly to reflect the concerns and mores of the times and of the storytellers themselves. Ireland’s Immortals is almost an academic proof of the thesis laid out in Robert Holdstock’s brilliant novel, Mythago Wood, which -- it goes without saying -- I also highly recommend.

To comprehend the present, one must examine the past and observe the undercurrents that forge a people and their nation. 

Rutherfurd’s Rebels of Ireland succeeds brilliantly in this endeavor. The families in this novel deal with the real historical events that shaped Irish destiny. They drew me into their lives and swept me along on a journey through time. When I finally emerged, I felt as if I had witnessed history, and lived it alongside them!

This marvelous novel allowed me to travel to the remote southwest coast of Ireland, on the Beara peninsula.

The landscape is so evocatively and vividly described that I felt as if I were hiking along with the appealing protagonist, Annie Crowe. Like me, Annie turns to walking and nature when she is depressed or needs thinking time, and boy does Annie have demons to battle! She’s a great character - both tough and fragile, a recovering alcoholic. 

On a job assignment as a public relations expert in support of a copper mine, she finds herself thrust into controversy with the local community. It opposes the mine because it would despoil this wild landscape and also endanger the nesting Red-billed Chough. I loved every detail of the walks and the cliffs and the ocean that Johnson describes.

And running throughout is a spicy thread of ancient mythology and Gaelic mysticism, which… show more.

So how does one interpret early Celtic literature?

Here is a prime example of how it's done, and done right. This anthology contains some of Emeritus Professor Tomás Ó Cathasaigh's most important studies and essays about early Irish literature, including mythic literature... and shows how much training, knowledge, and insight a person needs to not only to make sense of early Irish literature, but to really illuminate and understand it.

Tomás was my Old Irish teacher at Harvard, and it was truly an honour and blessing to sit at the knee of a master, as they say. He would blush to read such a gushing statement, as he was always so humble about his work, and understated in regards to his incredible knowledge and achievements.

His dry wit was unparalleled, as were his classes, which were intense to say the least. We were held to very high standards, and because… show more.