When a person falls asleep by the side of a stream, the Alp-luachra appears in the form of a newt and crawls down the person's mouth, feeding off the food that they had eaten. Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire tells of how a person got back at an Alp-luachra by eating large amounts of salted meat and sleeping near the stream. The Alp-luachra fed upon him, but jumped to the water in thirst." (Quote from wikipedia.org)Table of Contents: Publisher's Preface; Preface; Postscript By Alfred Nutt; Dedication; The Tailor And The Three Beasts; Bran; The King Of Ireland's Son; The Alp-luachra; Paudyeen O'kelly And The Weasel; Leam O'rooney's Burial; Guleesh Na Guss Dhu; The Well Of D'yerree-in-dowan; The Court Of Crinnawn; Neil O'carree; Trunk-without-head; The Hags Of The Long Teeth; William Of The Tree; The Old Crow & The Young Crow; Riddles; EndnotesAbout the Publisher: Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, Esoteric and Mythology. www.forgottenbooks.orgForgotten Books is about sharing information, not about making money. All books are priced at wholesale prices. We are also the only publisher we know of to print in large sans-serif font, which is proven to make the text easier to read and put less strain on your eyes.

    The second edition includes a review of recent research and new

    While all but one or two of the longer tales seem to the modern reader formless and quite unworthy of comparison with the Iliad and the Odyssey, many of the briefer prose narratives pack a whole gamut of emotions into two or three thousand words.

    

    . . they stand to reason.' The author, an intimate friend of Yeats and a friend too of the great folklorist Douglas Hyde and the myriad-minded mystic G.W.Russell ('A.E.'), was a staunch believer in 'the ancient and continuing spirit life of the countryside'. Writing not as a folklorist but as a historian, Diarmuid MacManus records in factual detail many manifestations of the Irish faery world early in the twentieth century. He tells how the Thornhill fairy appeared to two sisters in their room, and the Mount Leinster fairy to a young woman as she was taking the cows home, and a young girl tried to pat the Wicklow pooka as it walked beside her, but her hand went right through it. This is a strikingly persuasive book, tackling in a serious and intelligent manner a subject that has a strong romantic appeal. The author set out to write the book with certain principles in mind: first, that a central character in each incident was still alive at the time the book was first published (in 1959); second, that he could vouch for their reliability; and third, that each agreed to stand up, if asked, and vouch for the truth of the experience. Except in a few instances, those telling the stories had been friends of the author for many years. Since its publication forty years ago it has retained its uniqueness as the only collection of true Irish fairy tales.