Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is a book by William Butler Yeats, first published in 1888. This evocative anthology gathers rural Irish folktales, fairy-lore and legend collected and selected by Yeats from older sources and oral tradition.

Poised between antiquarian collecting and the literary imagination, the book showcases trickster pookas, lonely banshees, leprechauns and otherworldly trooping fairies alongside tales of heroes and household spirits, all given a lyrical framing that helped introduce English-speaking readers to the textures of Irish popular belief.

More than a simple compilation, the collection fed directly into Yeats’s lifelong engagement with Irish myth and the cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its careful curation and Yeats’s sympathetic, often melancholic introductions helped preserve and popularise material that informed his poetry, drama and the wider movement to reclaim a national literary identity.