Irish Fairy Tales

Ten stories from the Fenian cycle told by an Irish poet: Fionn's boyhood, the salmon of knowledge, Tuan mac Cairill who lived as a stag and a salmon and remembered it, and the long argument between Ireland and its own gods. Stephens wrote them in 1920, out of the Middle Irish, in a prose that keeps the jokes the manuscripts contain. His Fionn is young, greedy and easily bored, which is closer to the sources than the noble version. Twenty-eight plates by painters including Francis Danby and John MacWhirter carry the Irish landscape of glen, woodland and sea that these tales grew from.