Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs
I’ve recently been reading a small book of selected fairy tales from a much larger two volume collection by Joseph Jacobs, ‘Celtic Fairy Tales’ and ‘More Celtic Fairy Tales, published 1892 and 1894. The stories include a spectrum of tales, are imaginative, colorful, whimsical and magical. Titles include ‘Connla and the Fairy Maiden’ (illustration below), ‘The Story of Diedre’, ‘Smallhead and the King’s Son’ and similar such. As example, ”The Storyteller at Fault’ is about a storyteller who is supposed to tell the king a new story every night so he can sleep, but runs out of stories. Another story ‘Munachar and Munachar’ is a whimsical tale of how to everything in the story wants something to do something else, so Muncher – ‘…gave the whip of straw to the cow, and the cow gave him milk, the milk he gave to the cat, the cat scraped the butter, the butter went into the claw of the hound, the hound hunted the deer…’ and so on until Munachar got done what he needed to do. The stories are short, colorful, and fun to read. Copies of this small collection can easily be found on Amazon and used bookstores. The full, original 1892-4 volumes require more research and funds.
About fairy tales in general, Albert Einstein is credited with saying, ‘If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales, If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales’. These types of fairy tales stretch the imagination which in turn stimulates one’s mind and acumen. The larger collection of fairy tales from the volumes pictured below, are the collection of stories of generations of oral tradition, repeated thousands of times over time. Many of them are a hundred’s if not thousands of years old, rooted deeply in oral storytelling tradition and only recently written down on the last century or two.
Otherwise, I’ve written about fairy tales in general, what they are and how they differ from stories, fables, myths and legends in the article ‘What is a Fairy Tale‘ for more reading. I’ve also expanded on two other fairy tales I continually run across due to their popularity, ‘The Goose Girl‘, and ‘The Frog Prince‘. As with many things, there is much more to fairy tales than stories for children, just as there is much more to fairies than the imaginings of children. Fairy tales carry age old descriptions and definitions of morals, culture, wisdoms and possibilities.
Joseph Jacob’s classic two-volume collection
Celtic Fairy Tales (1891-2) and More Celtic Fairy Tales (1894)
