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6 August 1998 Edition

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New in print: Long, long ago...

Folk tales from the Irish Countryside
By Kevin Danaher
Published by Mercier Press
Price £5.99

Danahar retells the stories which were told to him as a child in a book which sails perilously close to cringe-making Oirishry at times, but which is saved by its author's obvious enthusiasm for his subject.

Many of the stories invoke similar themes as traditional European folktales - the beggar at the door who turns out to be an angel/saint/enchantress/sorceress/witch in disguise (it occurred to me that the further east across Europe one goes with this one, the more sinister the stranger becomes), children stolen away by unknown spirits, strange metamorphoses, kings and queens, wicked stepmothers, and so on. And like many of their central European counterparts these tales, whilst seeming almost child-like in their simplicity also offer a much darker reading, operating on different levels from straightforward tales of strange events to expressing the Jungian notion of shared memory through a series of recognisable archetypes.

Chronological settings too are disturbing; stories are often located in time as being ``when the English were paying five pounds to anyone that brought them the head of a priest or a monk'' or when ``there were hundreds of poor people travelling the roads'', or when people lived ``on a hungry patch of the mountain'', but these are always throwaway little lines buried deep within the tale.

Danaher does his best to capture the linguistic individuality and regional particularity of the original storytellers but, like other literature which has its roots in an oral tradition, much of the effect is lost in the transition to the written word. Listening to these tales on a dark night gathered together around a fire is, I would imagine, not the same as reading them whilst perched in front of a computer screen.


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