Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs

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Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs

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Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs

Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. One characteristic of the Celtic folk-lore I have endeavoured to represent in my selection, because it is nearly unique at the present day in Europe. Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels. Only the byline, or hero-songs of Russia, equal in extent the amount of knowledge about the heroes of the past that still exists among the Gaelic-speaking peasantry of Scotland and Ireland. And the Irish tales and ballads have this peculiarity, that some of them have been extant, and can be traced, for well nigh a thousand years. I have selected as a specimen of this class the Story of Deirdre, collected among the Scotch peasantry a few years ago, into which I have been able to insert a passage taken from an Irish vellum of the twelfth century. I could have more than filled this volume with similar oral traditions about Finn (the Fingal of Macpherson's Ossian). But the story of Finn, as told by the Gaelic peasantry of to-day, deserves a volume by itself, while the adventures of the Ultonian hero, Cuchulain, could easily fill another.
Born in Australia in 1854, Joseph Jacobs spent most of his adult life in England where he became, with Andrew Lang, a prominent member of the English Folk Lore Society founded in 1878. He spent ten years collecting from storytellers or printed sources the fairy tales that were first published in two volumes in 1890 and 1894 and now appear here in one Everyman's Library volume. Jacobs was a cheerful man, with a down-to-earth attitude towards fairy tales, which he regarded as essentially colloquial rather than romantic. Though his approach to collecting and recording material was scholarly, his telling of the tales was deliberately directed at young listeners, and he tried them out on his own three children. He died in 1916.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780486218267
ISBN 10 0486218260
Title Celtic Fairy Tales
Author Joseph Jacobs
Series Dover Children's Classics
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Dover Publications Inc.
Year published 2000-02-01
Number of pages 267
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.