Life
1854-1916; b. Australia; lived in England, as scholar; d. America; author of six volumes of English, Celtic, Indian, and European tales noted for fidelity to original oral versions; issued of Celtic Fairy Tales (1892).
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Works
Celtic Fairy Tales [1st edn.] (
London: David Nutt 1892), ill. by John D. Batten; and Do. [rep. edn.] (London: Bodley 1970), [infra; rep. incl. More Celtic Fairy Tales].
Celtic Fairy Tales (1st edn. 1892): Contents: Preface; Connla and the Fairy Maiden; Guleesh; The Field of Boliauns; The Horned Women; Conall Yellowclaw; Hudden and Dudden and Donald O’Neary; The Shepherd of Myddvai; The Sprightly Tailor; The Story of Deirdre; Munachar and Manachar; Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree; King O’Toole and His Goose; The Wooing of Olwen; Jack and His Comrades; The Shee an Gannon and the Gruagach Gaire; The Story-Teller at Fault; The Sea-Maiden; A Legend of Knockmany; Fair, Brown, and Trembling; Jack and His Master; Beth Gellert; The Tale of Ivan; Andrew Coffey; The Battle of the Birds; Brewery of Eggshells; The Lad with the Goat-Skin; Notes & References.
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Notes
Encyc. Britannica haas entry on Jacobs; see also “The Baldwin Project: Bringing Back Yesterday’s Classic to Today’s Children”, for electronic edition [online].
Celtic Fairy Tales (1892), Preface: ‘[...] Ireland began to collect her folk-tales almost as early as any country in Europe, and Croker has found a whole school of successors in Carleton, Griffin, Kennedy, Curtin, and Douglas Hyde. [...]
In making my selection I have chiefly tried to make the stories characteristic. It would have been easy, especially from Kennedy, to have made up a volume entirely filled with "Grimm’s Goblins" à la Celtique . But one can have too much even of that very good thing, and I have therefore avoided as far as possible the more familiar “formulæ” of folk-tale literature. To do this I had to withdraw from the English-speaking Pale both in Scotland and Ireland, and I laid down the rule to include only tales that have been taken down from Celtic peasants ignorant of English. [...] For the more romantic tales I have depended on the Gaelic, and, as I know about as much of Gaelic as an Irish Nationalist M.P., I have had to depend on translators. But I have felt myself more at liberty than the translators themselves, who have generally been over-literal, in changing, excising, or modifying the original. I have even gone further. In order that the tales should be characteristically [ix] Celtic, I have paid more particular attention to tales that are to be found on both sides of the North Channel.’ (See Baldwin Project, online.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)