Celtic Fairy Tales
Jan 2009 · Abela Publishing Ltd
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About this ebook
Celtic folklore overflows with vivid stories that fire the imagination. At the end of his highly successful English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs compiled Celtic Fairy Tales, a book of 26 stories from around Wales and Ireland. While some of the themes found in Celtic folklore are similar to those of contemporary fairy tales, other stories in this collection are infused with a flavour that is uniquely Celtic. In Jacobs' own words, "The Celts went forth to battle, but they always fell. Yet the captive Celt has enslaved his captor in the realm of imagination." Celtic Fairy Tales tells of horned women, breweries of eggshells, sprightly tailors, gold and silver trees, King o' Toole's goose, sea maidens, and more. Of particular interest is the 13th century legend of Beth Gellert, wherein the dog of Llewelyn (I) the Great, Prince of Wales, protected the prince's infant son from a wolf attack. A memorial to the dog still stands today in the village of Beddgelert, near Snowdon, Wales. In an attempt to give a library of the Celts' wealthy imagination to his readers, Jacobs has attempted to begin the readers' captivity with the earliest recordings of these tales. And captivate he does-Celtic Fairy Tales not only preserves a cultural history, but also is richly entertaining. We invite you to curl up with this unique sliver of Celtic folklore not seen in print for over a century; immerse yourself in the tales and fables of yesteryear. A percentage of the profit from the sale of this book will be donated to the Prince's Trust for education scholarships for underprivileged individuals.
About the author
Joseph Jacobs (29 August 1854 - 30 January 1916) was an Australian literary and Jewish historian. He was a writer for the Jewish Encyclopaedia and a notable folklorist, creating several noteworthy collections of fairy tales.Jacobs was born in Australia, sixth surviving son of John Jacobs, a publican who had emigrated from London c.1837, and his wife Sarah, née Myers.[1] Jacobs was educated at Sydney Grammar School and at the University of Sydney, where he won a scholarship for classics, mathematics and chemistry. He did not complete his studies in Sydney, but left for England at the age of 18 and entered St John's College, Cambridge.[2] He graduated B.A. in 1876, and in 1877 studied at the University of Berlin. He was secretary of the Society of Hebrew Literature from 1878 to 1884, and in 1882 came into prominence as the writer of a series of articles in The Times on the persecution of Jews in Russia. This led to the formation of the mansion house fund and committee, of which Jacobs was secretary from 1882 to 1900. During these years he gave much time to anthropological studies in connection with the Jewish race, and became an authority on the question.From 1899-1900 he edited the journal Folklore, and from 1890 to 1912 he edited five collections of fairy tales: English Fairy Tales, More English Fairy Tales, Celtic Fairy Tales, More Celtic Fairy Tales, and European Folk and Fairy Tales, which were published with distinguished illustrations by John Dickson Batten. He was inspired in this by the Brothers Grimm and the romantic nationalism common in folklorists of his age; he wished English children to have access to English fairy tales, whereas they were chiefly reading French and German tales[3]; in his own words, "What Perrault began, the Grimms completed."Although he collected many tales under the name of fairy tales, many of them are unusual sorts of tales. Binnorie and Tamlane are prose versions of ballads, The Old Woman and Her Pig is a nursery rhyme, Henny-Penny is a fable, and The Buried Moon has mythic overtones to an extent unusual in fairy tales. According to his own analysis of English Fairy Tales, "Of the eighty-seven tales contained in my two volumes, thirty-eight are Märchen proper, ten sagas or legends, nineteen drolls, four cumulative stories, six beast tales, and ten nonsense stories."[4]Jacobs settled permanently in the United States. He wrote many articles for the Jewish Encyclopaedia, and was generally responsible for the style of the whole publication. It was completed in 1906, and he then became registrar and professor of English at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America at New York. In 1908 he was appointed a member of the board of seven, which made a new English translation of the Bible for the Jewish Publication Society of America. In 1913 he resigned his positions at the seminary to become editor of the American Hebrew. He died on 30 January 1916. He married Georgina Horne and fathered two sons and a daughter. In 1920, Book I of his Jewish Contributions to Civilization, which was practically finished at the time of his death, was published at Philadelphia.
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