MYTHOLOGICAL TALES | FAIRY TALES | FOLKTALES

"County Limerick from Heaven" © Barrie Maguire.

Folktales, the third leg in our triad of folklore types, are essentially a boundless, informal collection of simple short stories, riddles, rhymes, anecdotes and genealogical lore of a more local flavor that has circulated throughout Ireland since her beginning. These are the types of stories that lay storytellers still tell today in their ceili houses and pubs, where the local wise man, or “historian”, has taken up the responsibility of upholding the local stories and traditions. And though no folklore or mythology is outside the bounds of the storyteller, including the epic tales of the Fianna and the Tuatha dé Danann, more likely than not their stories will be about more mundane, scary or humorous topics such as “The Lawyer and the Devil”, “The Banshee Calls for the O’Briens”, “Never Ask a Cat a Question”, or a very simple, but entertaining story about “A Big Potato”. And though the storyteller’s stories may seem frivolous, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, he once filled a real need in the hearts and minds of the ancient Irish for something more than the daily grind.

The “tales around the turf-fire” once held the pride of place in the hearts and minds of the ancient Irish, a place that needed to be entertained with stories about daily life that was something more than mundane, told by a real human being who had experienced both the joys and sorrows of life. Today, the television set has all but erased the ancient seat of the storyteller, its pixels of red, green and blue now replacing the rolling red, green and blue flames of the turf fire — entertaining our minds, but not feeding our souls.

To the end of reviving the lost art of storytelling, every quarter we will be publishing, along with various mythological and fairy tales, a collection of folktales that will warm your heart and feed your soul. Like the fairy tales, folktales are usually divided into various categories that sometimes overlap with that of fairy tales, but the simple character of these more lay-oriented stories distinguishes them from the more poetic and fanciful fairy tales. But don't be misled — the pithy simplicity of these folktales belies an underlying insightfulness on the human condition bourne out of thousands of years of ancient folk wisdom, as you will soon discover.

Faith

Saints

Saint Patrick

Wit

The Wise and the Foolish

The First Mirror

The sheer number of fairy tales available prevented us from publishing them in our book, Mysterious World: Ireland, so have decided to publish the complete texts here instead for your enjoyment. These categories will be filled out with a wide variety of fairy tales over time, so please visit us frequently to see the latest. To be alerted when the next fairy tale becomes available, click here to sign up for our email newsletter, which will be published quarterly.

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