This collection brings together all of W. B. Yeats’s published prose writings on Irish folklore, legend and myth, with pieces on subjects including ghosts, kidnappers, fairies, ancient tribes, precious stones and Gaelic love songs. Through his researches on Irish folklore, Yeats attempted to create a movement in literature that was enriched by and rooted in a vital native tradition. In this volume Yeats’s essays, introductions and sketches are presented chronologically, giving a clear picture of how his analysis developed, increasing in its depth and complexity in his quest to create an Ireland of the imagination.

This lively introduction to the poems of W. B. Yeats, first published in 1988, provides a series of intriguing new readings of his work in relation to his profound involvement with occultism and folklore. During Yeats’s formative years as an artist, two compelling movements were emerging: the revivals of interest in Irish folklore and in the mag

Here are 125 magnificent folktales collected from anthologies and journals published from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with tales of the ancient times and continuing through the arrival of the saints in Ireland in the fifth century, the periods of war and family, the Literary Revival championed by William Butler Yeats, and the contemporary era, these robust and funny, sorrowful and heroic stories of kings, ghosts, fairies, treasures, enchanted nature, and witchcraft are set in cities, villages, fields, and forests from the wild western coast to the modern streets of Dublin and Belfast. Edited by Henry Glassie With black-and-white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

Containing more that two thousand supersitions of Britain ranging over the past six hundred years, and extending down to the present day,this book demonstrates that superstitions are world-wide and inherent in all peoples of the world in exactly identical forms of fear and avoidance.