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Celtic Fairy Tales

Name: Celtic Fairy Tales
Author: Joseph Jacobs
ISBN: 9781420946376

by Joseph Jacobs

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Overview

26 enchanting stories assembled from Welsh, Scottish and Irish sources, including 'King O'Toole and His Goose,' 'The Lad with the Goat Skin, 'The Sea Maiden,' more with illustrations from their original editions. 37 drawings.

Synopsis

The 1892 collection "Celtic Fairy Tales" is a beautiful anthology which highlights Celtic children's literature. Folklorist Joseph Jacobs spent his entire career gathering a host of fairy tales known in the English language and compiling them into a number of anthologies. "Celtic Fairy Tales" includes popular stories such as "Conall Yellowclaw," "The Sea-Maiden," and "Battle of the Birds," all of which were gathered straight from oral tradition by Jacobs to be preserved forever in text. Like the famous German fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, not every story in "Celtic Fairy Tales" ends happily for all the characters. For example, in "Fair, Brown, and Trembling," the oldest sister tried to kill the youngest, so she was banished to the ocean in a barrel with only a small amount of provisions for food. Modern readers will also recognize parallels between well-known fairy tales and the stories in Jacobs' anthology. "Jack and his Comrades" is similar to "Town Musicians of Bremen," a story about a group of farm animals who fight four robbers away from their home. "Celtic Fairy Tales" is not only a solid collection of stories for young children, but adults will understand the significance of Joseph Jacob's work to preserve the legacy of Celtic folklore forever.

About the Author, Joseph Jacobs

Joseph Jacobs was a Jewish historian and leading folklorist whose special passion was fairy tales. He was born in Australia and attended the University of Sydney where he won a scholarship for classics, mathematics, and chemistry. He completed his studies at St. John's College, Cambridge. He eventually came to prominence as the writer of a series of articles in The Times on the persecution of Jews in Russia. Between 1882 and 1900 he gave much time to anthropological studies in connection with the Jewish race, and became an authority on the subject. But his interests were varied. From 1899 to 1900 he edited the journal Folklore, and from 1890 to 1912 he edited five collections of fairy tales. In 1906 he moved to New York and became registrar and professor of English at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He died in January 1916.