The Irish Fairy Book

Irish Fairy Lore has well been called by Mr. Alfred Nutt, one of the leading authorities on the subject, ÒAs fair and bounteous a harvest of myth and romance as ever flourished among any race,Ó and Dr. Joyce, the well-known Irish scholar and historian, states: Òthat it is very probable that the belief in the existence of fairies came in with the earliest colonists that entered Ireland, and that this belief is recorded in the oldest of native Irish writings in a way that proves it to have been, at the time treated of, long established and universally received.Ó Colgan himself supplies us with the name and derivation of the Irish word for fairy, Sidh (shee), still used throughout the country. ÒFantastical spirits,Ó he writes, Òare by the Irish called men of the Sidh, because they are seen, as it were, to come out of the beautiful hills to infest men, and hence the vulgar belief that they reside in certain subterranean habitations; and sometimes the hills themselves are called by the Irish Sidhe or Siodha.Ó In ColganÕs time, then, the fairy superstition had passed from the upper classes, gradually disenthralled of it by the influence of Christianity to the common people, among whom it is still rife. But it is clear that in the time of St. Patrick a belief in a world of fairies existed even in the KingÕs household, for it is recorded that Òwhen the two daughters of King Leary of Ireland, Ethnea the fair and Fedelma the ruddy, came early one morning to the well of Clebach to wash, they found there a synod of holy bishops with Patrick. And they knew not whence they came, or in what form, or from what people, or from what country; but they supposedÊthem to be Duine Sidh, or gods of the earth, or a phantasm.Ó As suggested, the belief of the Princesses obtains to this very day amongst the peasantry of remote districts in Ireland, who still maintain that the fairies inhabit the Sidhe, or hills, and record instances of relations and friends being transported into their underground palaces. The truth is that the Gaelic peasant, Scotch and Irish, is a mystic, and believes not only in this world, and the world to come, but in that other world which is the world of Faery, and which exercises an extraordinary influence upon many actions of his life.