Donn Byrne was born in New York in 1889 and raised in Ulster. He wrote Ireland the way a man remembers a first language, which is to say without effort and without decoration.
In his lifetime he was widely read. Then the market moved on and he went out of print, which happens to better writers than most people assume. Changeling and Other Stories, first published by The Century Co. in 1923, is back as part of the Irish Culture Project.
Who was Donn Byrne?
Trinity College Dublin, then the Sorbonne. On paper that is an academic. On the page he is nothing of the sort.
Byrne wrote in the tradition of the oral storyteller. Economical, fast, and built on the rhythms of Irish speech rather than English prose. His stories keep the pace of the seanchaí at the fireside. A sentence does its work and gets out of the way.
He is not writing tourist Ireland. There is no charm being sold here. The Ulster in these stories has weather in it, and the people have the hardness that comes of living in it.
What is in Changeling and Other Stories?
Twelve stories. The title piece follows a changeling child who moves between the fairy world and the human one and treats the crossing as unremarkable, because to the child it is.
Elsewhere a wild goose keeps a strange faith. The keeper of a bridge holds his post against travellers who are not entirely mortal. The collection runs on that register throughout, and it never once winks at the reader.
The otherworld is structural, not decorative
This is the thing that makes Byrne worth reading now.
In a great deal of Irish writing the supernatural is atmosphere. Something to set a mood, gesture at, then move past on the way to the real subject. Byrne does not use it that way. In his work the otherworld is load-bearing. It is as near and as ordinary as the sea off an Antrim shore, and the characters treat it accordingly, because that is how the people he grew up among actually treated it.
A changeling in Byrne is not a metaphor for alienation. It is a changeling. The story proceeds from there.
Readers who came to The Irish Fairy Book for the older folk material will recognise the attitude immediately. Byrne is a twentieth-century literary writer working with the same assumptions the nineteenth-century collectors were writing down, which is why Irish fairy material never softened the way the continental tradition did.
What we restored
Our source was the Project Gutenberg text of the 1923 edition. Byrne’s prose needed almost nothing. The extraction did.
We made three targeted fixes to the text itself:
- One mismatched pair of opening and closing quotation marks
- One missing closing quotation mark
- One double comma
That is the entire list. Three characters across twelve stories.
The rest of the work was structural damage from digitising. A duplicate table of contents page, an artefact of the extraction. Stray tags left behind in the markup. A glossary stylesheet class that was throwing off the page headers.
We added a table of contents, an about-this-edition page, and a glossary of twelve Irish terms drawn from our gazetteer, covering the mythological figures and Irish phrases that run through the collection without explanation. Byrne assumed his readers knew them. Most modern readers will not.
One point of honesty. This book was restored in April 2026, in an early pass, before we adopted the current five-stage editorial process. Its record is shorter than the record for the titles we have restored since. We have not gone back and dressed it up, and our editorial standards set out how the method works and how it gets checked.
Watch the trailer
Where to buy
Changeling and Other Stories by Donn Byrne. Paperback, 6×9. ISBN 9798330638819.
- Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops.
- Direct from the publisher, printed and shipped by IngramSpark.
The Bookshop.org link is an affiliate link. We earn a commission if you buy through it, at no extra cost to you. It does not change what we choose to publish or what we say about it.