Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland

by Eddie Lenihan, Carolyn Eve Green

Overview

"The Other Crowd," "The Good People," "The Wee Folk," and "Them" are a few of the names given to the fairies by the people of Ireland. Honored for their gifts and feared for their wrath, the fairies remind us to respect the world we live in and the forces we cannot see.

In these tales of fairy forts, fairy trees, ancient histories, and modern true-life encounters with The Other Crowd, Eddie Lenihan opens our eyes to this invisible world with the passion and bluntness of a seanchai, a true Irish storyteller.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781585423071
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/02/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.47(w) x 8.18(h) x 0.91(d)
Age Range:	18 - 13 Years

About the Author

Storyteller, teacher, folklorist, and author of numerous books and recordings, Eddie Lenihan has been collecting stories from the elders of Southern Ireland for twenty-seven years and sharing them with audiences around the world through radio, television, and live presentation. Lenihan lives in County Clare, Ireland.

Table of Contents

	Author's Note	xi
	Editor's Preface	xiii
	Introduction	1
Part 1	"The Queerest Thing I Ever Saw": Who They are and What They Want
	The Vicious Fairies	21
	The Fallen Angels	38
	A Fairy Funeral	49
	Refereeing a Fairy Hurling Match	55
	A Queer Walk	59
	A Skeptic's Story	60
	Man Carried to Play Football	62
	A Midnight Ride	65
	A Musician's Story	68
	A Fairy Request Thwarted	70
	Man Borrows a Fairy Horse	75
	A Fairy Cow	79
	An Old Woman Changes Shape	80
	The Rats from the Ashes	83
	A Strange Pig	86
	Meeting the Black Dog	88
	The Eel	91
	The Fairy Frog	102
Part 2	"There Since the Start o'the World": Fairy Places and Signs of Their Presence
	The Bush That Bled	115
	A Fairy Bush Moved	119
	Man Cuts Briars in a Fairy Fort	121
	Respecting the Ancient Forts	124
	A Sportsman Who Won't Interfere	126
	Let Very Well Alone!	129
	Mysterious Sounds from Two Forts	133
	A Pregnant Woman Goes into a Fort	136
	The Man in the Coffin	138
	A House Built Between Forts	146
	The Fairy House	149
	Planting on a Fairy Path	162
	Electricity Poles Moved from Fairy Path	164
	Fairies Violently Object to Their Path Being Blocked	166
	Man Gets Warning from the Fairy Wind	169
	Three Brief Stories of the Fairy Wind	172
	A Woman Gets Knocked with the Si-Gaoith	174
	Strange Gravity	180
	Man Prevented from Passing	182
	Latoon Dead Hunt	185
	A Fairy Mansion	188
	Meeting the Coiste Bodhar, the Fairies' Hearse	193
	A Personal Experience of the Banshee	195
	Banshee Comes for Dying Man	201
	Banshee Alerts Family	204
	Banshee Heard in Manhattan	206
	A Prankster	209
	The Barefield Banshee	211
Part 3	"Their Own Way of Collecting": Gifts, Punishment, and Other Outcomes of Fairy Encounters
	A Transaction with the Other Crowd	221
	The Fairies Repay a Favor	236
	Fairy Races Horse to Repay a Favor	239
	Mare Taken for Fairy Battle	245
	Hurler's Bravery Rewarded	248
	How the Sextons Got the Gift of Bonesetting	254
	Man "in the Fairies" Moves Hay	256
	Tom of the Fairies	259
	Hurler with a Humpback	262
	Biddy Early "Strange" as a Child	264
	Biddy Early Helps, but a Price Paid	266
	A Clash of Power: Biddy Early Versus the Clergy	268
	Three Stories of Priests Who Can See the Other Crowd	270
	Holy Water Given As Protection	274
	Girl Carried by the Fairies	276
	The Girl Saved from the Good People	278
	Woman Carried Asks for Rescue	287
	A Tragic Loss of Nerve	289
	A Woman Dies ... and Remarries	293
	Garret Barry and the Changeling	296
	Two Changeling Stories	297
	A Tailor Saves a Baby	300
	The Fairies Get Set on a Whole Family	303
	A Rash Intervention Condemns Woman	313
	Unbeliever Released from Fort ... Barely!	315
	The Shanaglish Weaver	318
	Acknowledgments	331

Editorial Reviews

During folklore's first and greatest period, the end of the nineteenthcentury, gifted writers like Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats wandered into the Irish countryside, gathering the oral vestiges of a great tradition. Publishing their gleanings later, sometimes altered in transcription, they garnered an audience eager for the tales of heroes, fairies, and gods. Such compilations as theirs remain major sources of Irish mythology. One of the best-known seanachies, or traditional tale-spinners, in Ireland today, Lenihan is an Irish-speaking schoolmaster in the very area where Gregory and Yeats gathered their tales. He discloses that, despite the arrival of fax, Internet, and cel phone, the old tales persist. His fresh collection includes some famous motifs, such as the "fairy blast" that steals away people and things, but also such regionally specific figures as Biddy Early, the White Witch of Clare-a historical figure around whom myths have accrued. Lenihan focuses on the "other crowd" of the title: the fairy people, who are the diminished remnants of old gods, still able to affect the world of humankind. This is not quaint fluff but the powerful, sometimes disturbing lore of a world parallel to and occasionally intersecting ours. A major contribution to its field, the book is also compulsively readable, not least because Green, an audio producer, has helped capture the torque of Irish speech in Lenihan's storytelling. —Booklist

Short tales, collected for an oral history project, relate Ireland’s traditional folklore of the fairies. For most, the fairies of Ireland are about as real as the little man on the Lucky Charms box. Our loss, for Lenihan not only believes the Wee Folk exist but that they wield tremendous power for good or ill over anyone foolish enough to trifle with them. A renowned folklorist and storyteller, Lenihan has spent 27 years collecting the lore here. Most of the tales are quite simple, if occasionally hair-raising. "The Vicious Fairies" is a sort of fairy Genesis explaining the malevolence of the fairies as a consequence of their envy and anger upon learning (from a village priest) that only humans will be saved. Similarly, in "The Fallen Angels," the fairies are presented as descendents of the fallen angels, who seek out priests to kill in revenge for their damnation. "The Bush That Bled" describes a fairy bush that indeed bled when a work crew tried to cut it down in the 1950s, while "The Fairy House" portrays the mayhem resulting when a man builds a wall astride the path between two fairy bushes (he later cuts a door in the wall for the convenience of the fairies and his own peace of mind). While many of the stories are so short as to be little more than sketches, some are rich and absorbing narratives told in a kind of homespun voice increasingly rare nowadays. The best of these is the last, "The Shanaglish Weaver," the unhappy story of a weaver who did not believe in fairies and planted a garden in a fairy fort—only to suffer the most gruesome consequences. Thorough, nicely arranged, with a minimum of editorial intrusions (footnotes, annotations, etc.) and free of the New Age cantthat has infected so many contemporary accounts of traditional folklore.

Kirkus Reviews