The fairies of Ireland are not gentle. They are old, proud, and quick to take offence. The mortals who meet them are seldom the same afterwards, and a good number of them do not come back at all.
That is the first thing to understand about The Irish Fairy Book. It is why the collection still unsettles people who arrive expecting something closer to the Grimm tradition, with a moral at the end and everyone home by supper.
In 1909 the poet and folklorist Alfred Perceval Graves gathered forty-three of these stories into one volume, published by T. Fisher Unwin in London. We have put it back into print as part of the Irish Culture Project.
What is The Irish Fairy Book?
It is an anthology, and that is the point of it.
Graves did not write these tales. He collected the collectors. By 1909 the work of gathering Irish folklore had been going on for eighty years, scattered across dozens of volumes, most of them out of print or hard to find. Graves pulled the best of it into one book.
He spent his career documenting the songs and legends of Ireland. He was also the father of Robert Graves, which is the least interesting thing about him.
Who collected these Irish fairy tales
The contents page reads like a roll call of nineteenth-century Irish folklore:
- W. B. Yeats, who contributes The Stolen Child
- Lady Wilde and Douglas Hyde, both central to the revival
- Standish James O’Grady, on the coming of Finn and the boyhood of Cuchulain
- T. Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Samuel Lover and Patrick Kennedy, the men who sat down and wrote out what people actually said
Lady Gregory is here. So are Sir Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham and P. W. Joyce. Several of these figures also run through the older manuscript tradition, which we wrote about in the four manuscripts that saved Irish mythology.
What the Sidhe actually are
Start with the word. In Old Irish, síd meant a hill or a mound. The Sidhe are the mounds and the people of the mounds at once. The Irish did not separate the place from the population, and that tells you something about how the whole business was understood.
They are not small. They are not winged. They do not grant wishes.
They are an older race who were here first, who went under the hills when the Gaels came, and who have not forgotten it. They are dangerous the way a landlord is dangerous. They have a claim and they will press it.
Time runs differently underneath. A night of dancing can cost a hundred years above ground. That detail turns up again and again across these tales, and it is the closest thing Irish folklore has to a law of physics.
Changelings, púcas and the Land of Youth
Three figures run through the collection more than any others.
A changeling is what gets left behind when the Sidhe take a child. Something is put in the cradle in its place, wearing the child’s face, and the mother knows and cannot prove it. The stories are careful about the detail that gives the thing away. It speaks when a baby could not, or shows knowledge it has no business having. These are not comfortable tales. They were told in houses where infants died and nobody could say why.
The púca is the shape-changer, the one who meets you on the road at night. Sometimes a horse. Sometimes worse. Daniel O’Rourke’s ride is the best known version of it here.
The Land of Youth, Tír na nÓg, is where Oisín goes on the white steed and stays three hundred years thinking it is three. He comes back. He should not have.
There is also the leprechaun guarding his gold, the horned women, and the demon cat. Cuchulain appears in his boyhood strength, long before the events of the Táin.
This is not a children’s book. It was never sold as one.
Four of the forty-three
The range is wider than people expect. Some of these stories are terrifying and some are broad comedy, and they sit a few pages apart.
- The Stolen Child, Yeats. The poem that put the phrase into the language, and a warning dressed as an invitation.
- Daniel O’Rourke, Crofton Croker. A drunk man, an eagle, and the moon. Played entirely for laughs.
- The Land of Youth, Bryan O’Looney. Oisín in Tír na nÓg, and the price of touching the ground again.
- A Legend of Knockmany, William Carleton. Finn MacCool hides in a cradle and his wife does the actual work.
Graves put them in that order on purpose. The book does not build to anything. It moves the way an evening of storytelling moves, which is to say unpredictably.
What we restored, and what we left alone
Our source was the Project Gutenberg text. Digitising an old book breaks it in predictable ways. The work is to repair the damage and leave the writing alone.
The dialogue we did not fix
This was the important decision, and it went against the obvious one.
Many of these tales are transcribed oral storytelling. In that style several speakers share a single paragraph, running into each other the way people talk over a fire. To a modern eye it reads like a mistake. It is not a mistake. It is the signature of the form.
Our editorial rules classify this as dialect mode. The tool that would normally split dialogue into separate paragraphs is switched off for this book, deliberately, and the fact that it was switched off is recorded. The Hiberno-English stays too. “Says he.” “Amn’t I.” “I do be.” So does each collector’s own spelling, even where they disagree with one another.
Standardising that would have produced a cleaner book and a false one.
What we repaired
Everything we changed was mechanical:
- 81 missing opening quotation marks, a routine casualty of digital extraction. The 1909 print had them.
- 50 paragraph breaks put back inside long single-narrator passages that extraction had collapsed into walls of text. None of them split a multi-speaker exchange.
- Verse section markers restored where extraction had run them inline.
- Broken tags repaired, and one author’s name corrected. The source read Le Fann for Sheridan Le Fanu.
We added a table of contents, an about-this-edition page, and a glossary of more than thirty Irish terms. That last one earns its place. It covers the Hiberno-English a reader will hit and not know, including acushla, boreen, gossoon, musha and pishogue. Every story keeps its own heading and its attribution to the collector who recorded it.
One point of honesty. This book was restored in April 2026, before we adopted our current five-stage editorial process, so its record is shorter than the record for our newer titles. We have not gone back and rewritten it to look tidier. Our editorial standards explain how the method works and how it gets checked.
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Where to buy
The Irish Fairy Book: Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Legends of Ireland, edited by Alfred Perceval Graves. Paperback, 6×9. ISBN 9798295762604.
- Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops.
- Direct from the publisher, printed and shipped by IngramSpark.
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