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St. Patrick’s Day
Irish Children’s Stories: Folk & Fairy Tales
Of Irish descent on my mother’s side and having lived for a time in Ireland, I can tell you that the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle don’t at all care for the impression left by the movie “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” — or advertisements for the cereal Lucky Charms — that they are a “fairy” people: a somehow daffy and inebriated race surrounded by green-clad leprechauns. Nonetheless, there is, in fact, something special about Irish storytelling in the way it readily embraces folkloric materials and its more matter-of-fact inclusion of fairies, Little People, and their kind. In that regard, scholar Declan Kiberd mentions the story of an American anthropologist who asked a Galway woman whether she believed in fairies and had this reply: “I do not, sir–but they’re there anyway.”
Unlike other countries, in Ireland, the appearance of folk tales in print has not spelled the end of the oral tradition. The Seanachie (pronounced shawn-a-key) or storyteller is still an honored profession these days, as it has been for centuries. The best contemporary one is Eddie Linehan, and those traveling to Ireland might do an Internet search on his name to see if they can take in a performance by this spellbinder from County Kerry.
