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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Tales from the Irish

Tales from the Irish

There are many children’s books on sale today, good of their kind and profusely illustrated, about ‘The Little Engine Who was Tired’ or ‘How Bill and Patsy Built Their Trolley’. These are part of the imaginative world of the modern child; yet at times they seem also too efficiently extroverted, too consciously a stage in the education of Healthy Citizens. Children themselves will still listen hungrily to the story of the Snow Queen or sad Pinocchio; for folk tales and fairy stories are unexpurgated fantasy, the coil of dream knowledge, the delusive third road seen five centuries ago by Thomas the Rhymer, which leads neither to Heaven nor Hell, nor for that matter to the Welfare State.

In praising almost without reservation these tales from the Irish, I am aware of deep prejudice rising from a childhood saturation in myth and folk-tale. Fergus Oisin and the Children of Lir were known to me also, as intimately as the face of the New Zealand night sky. Eileen O’Faolain has not avoided entirely the Irish trick of prettification. But no one (barring St Patrick) can make the Irish heroes into Christian gentlemen. They are incurably gluttonous, arrogant, quarrelsome, and bloodthirsty – in a word, heroic:

And the tumult of noise, said Fergus, was the crashing of shields, the jangle of javelins, the ringing of helmets and the clangour of breastplates, the straining of ropes, the whirr of wheels, the tramping of horses and the creaking of chariots and the great battle-cry of the fierce and terrible, bloodthirsty Warriors of the Red Branch hastening to the cleaving and the carving the hewing and the hacking of the Men of Erin.

I look forward to the time when I will have the opportunity of reading the book aloud to my own children; and I am grateful to the translator. The seven particularly lovely illustrations in colour, black, white and green, are entirely suited to the contents of the tales, and perfect in their kind.

1954 (103)