Alfred Perceval Graves was a poet, folklorist, and the father of Robert Graves. He spent his career documenting and translating the songs, legends, and stories of Ireland, and The Irish Fairy Book - published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1909 - represents the fullest expression of that work. It is a collection of forty-three stories drawn from across the Irish tradition: the Tuatha de Danaan, the Sidhe, the banshee, the puca, the fairy hills, and the countless tales of mortals who crossed paths with the otherworld and came back changed.
This is not a children's anthology. The stories in this collection are drawn from the full breadth of Irish folklore: tragic, comic, strange, and occasionally brutal. They include contributions from major figures in the Irish literary tradition - Standish O'Grady, Lady Wilde, William Allingham, Samuel Lover, and others - alongside translations of older Irish-language material. Graves understood that these stories were not curiosities. They were the living imagination of a people, preserved in written form at a moment when that imagination was in danger of being lost.
The Irish fairy tradition differs from its English or continental equivalents in significant ways. The fairies of Irish legend - the Sidhe - are not charming or benevolent by default. They are powerful, unpredictable, and indifferent to human convenience. The stories in this collection reflect that. They are worth reading not as nostalgia but as literature: precise, strange, and rooted in a worldview that takes the invisible seriously.
This edition is published by Rosmerta Publishing as part of the Irish Culture Project - a series dedicated to recovering public domain works of Irish literary and cultural significance and returning them to print. The text has been freshly formatted for modern print standards, with each of the forty-three stories individually headed and attributed. The work is exactly as Graves edited it.
