The Myth Atlas

 Just picked this up at the bookstore.  It's amazing!  The gods and myths of twelve major regions are illustrated and explained.  I found it fascinating, and I really liked the style of the illustrations too.  Each region has it's mythological world and inhabitants showcased and identified.  A couple main myths are retold as well as some extra tidbits of information.  And there's a handy pronunciation guide in the back (especially helpful for those Celtic names!). I've been pouring over this one for two days!

The Myth Atlas

Thiago de Moraes 2019

Kate Culhane A Ghost Story

Sometimes when we get new books I might skim them but then read them for the first time with the kids.  Thank goodness I didn't do that with this one!  I brought it up to bed with Charlotte and read it to myself quickly while she was looking at other books.  I really liked it (and so did my teenager) but it's definitely not for my four year old! 

Kate Culhane

A Ghost Story

Michael Hague 2001

The illustrations are wonderfully creepy, and the story is quite gruesome. It's an Irish legend that was copied down in the 1800's. 

Kate's mother dies and then her luck gets worse as her farm starts to fail and she accidentally steps on a freshly dug grave. The dead man inside that grave forces Kate to dig him up and carry him on her back into town. He can only enter a house that does not have holy water protecting it. When they find such a house he has Kate make him a ghoulish meal of oatmeal made with the blood of the house's inhabitants.

As the tale closes, Kate manages to outwit him in true folktale heroine fashion and all ends well.

The Wishing of Biddy Malone

My sister, Abigail, is an awesome Irish dancer.  Even when she was a baby we used to joke that she had "springs on her feet"!  She started dancing at Caitrin Academy when she was little and has competed all over the US and Ireland.   I bought this book for her years ago.  It's technically not on our bookshelf, but Abigail is letting me borrow it for this post.

The Wishing of Biddy Malone

It has fairies, Irish lore, a fiery determined girl, and a sweet love story.  Perfect for my sister! 

To be sure, Biddy Malone loved to sing and dance.  But her singing was like a rusty gate in a wild west wind, and when she danced, her great dundering feet fell over each other, which was terrible considering Biddy Malone always wanted the best for herself.  So whenever she made a mistake, she kicked and screamed something awful, her temper being a fine fierce thing.

One day Biddy stomps out of the house in a rage and finds herself in the woods at "the soft hour between day and night, when shadows played games with the eyes."  She's in a faerie village and she meets the faerie prince who gives her three wishes. 

Biddy's wishes are "to sing as sweetly as a thrush and dance as lightly as a deer" and to quell her temper with a "loving heart".

As she grows she works hard.  With no help at all from the wishes, Biddy went on singing and dancing. She made her own magic from the faerie music within her, until her voice was oh so pure and her feet oh so nimble that her performance was something to behold.

Later, as a young woman, she visits the faerie village again and learns the value of all her practicing. To be sure, if her talents had been given to her for nothing, they would have been worth just that. It was all her hard work that had made her singing and dancing her own. And she finds the love that had been planted in her heart all those years ago.

Irish Fairy Tales

We love fairy tales in this house (well, maybe not Henry so much).  So it should come as no surprise that we have a good collection of fairy tale books.  I even have them divided on the bookshelves based on region- French ones, English ones, Scandinavian, etc...  Here are our Irish ones, just in time for some Saint Patrick's day reading. 

Joseph Jacobs was a folklorist (among other things) who collected the folk and fairy stories of the British Isles in the late 1800's. We have two cheap Dover editions that share a couple of the same stories but the illustrations are different in each. 

More Celtic Fairy Tales

Joseph Jacobs

illustrated by John D. Batten 1968

Favorite Celtic Fiary Tales

Joseph Jacobs

illustrated by Thea Kliros 1994

The Irish Fairy Book contains stories and poems by the likes of W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kennedy, Alfred Tennyson, Douglas Hyde, and Samuel Lover.  In the preface Alfred Perceval Graves writes, "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."

The Irish Fairy Book

Alfred Perceval Graves

illustrated by George Denham

Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland was first published in the late 1800's as two books and is a collection of stories sought out by W.B. Yeats.

These folktales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain and death has cropped up unchanged for centuries:  who have steeped everything in the heart; to whom everything is a symbol.

Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland

W.B. Yeats

Away with us, he's going,

The solemn-eyed;

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hill-side.

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast;

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal chest.

For he comes, the human child,

To the woods and waters wild,

With a fairy hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than

he can understand.

Across A Dark And Wild Sea

Across a Dark and Wild Sea (Single Titles)

Don Brown 2002

The true story of Columcille, a pagan born in Ireland who converted to Christianity and founded monastaries throughout Ireland and Scotland.  He worked as a scribe, creating a copy of the psalms that caused a fight among the clans.  But he promoted learning and "through his efforts the embers of literature and scholarship, nearly extinguished during the Dark Ages were re-ignited." 

 

A revered figure in Celtic history, Columcille left a legacy of learning that illuminated a corner of the Dark Ages.   

The process of writing using the tools and materials of that time period is described. Also in the back is more biographical information. A nice compliment to this book is the movie The Secret of Kells. The artwork is incredible. The kids and I loved it (there were a few scary parts for Charlotte). We ended up looking up photographs of the real Book of Kells (which I didn't know anything about before.)  

Books were made and dispatched, like small boats on a a dark and wild sea, to places where reading and writing had been forgotten or ignored.  The books made colonies of learning and people's minds, once dark with ignorance, were brightened.