Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts. E-book. Formato PDF Patrick Kennedy   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

Though the subject of this volume seems light and frivolous enough, it might be preceded, and accompanied, and concluded by grave and tiresome dissertations; and if our hopes were limited to its perusal by readers of an archaeological turn, we would freely exhaust all the philosophy of fiction in our possession upon them. But from our early youth we have felt the deepest interest in the stories and legends which are peculiar to the Irish, or which they possess in common with all the Indo-European races, and our dearest wish is that their memory should not fade from the minds of the people. They have existed in one form or other from long before the Christian era, and have been mainly preserved by oral tradition among the unlettered.Taking into consideration the diminishing of our population by want and emigration, and the general diffusion of book-learning, such as it is, and the growing taste for the rubbishy tales of the penny and halfpenny journals, we have in these latter times been haunted with the horrid thought that the memory of the tales heard in boyhood would be irrecoverably lost.

The Fireside Stories of Ireland. E-book. Formato PDF Patrick Kennedy   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

Beings of superhuman power, both in human and bestial forms, abound, some good and others evil in their nature, thus testifying to the worship of inferior divinities and of animals. Morality was not an essential feature of the original narratives, but it is as curious as agreeable to mark the tri?ing extent of the evil element throughout. Perhaps some improvement was effected in the tales as they passed from the pagan to the christian story tellers. Some indeed of an unedifying character have remained even to our own times, but such as these will not be found in our collection.