Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland: With Two Essays and Notes (Classic Reprint) by Lady Gregory

Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland: With Two Essays and Notes (Classic Reprint) Reviews

• 
  Becky

  This was excellent!
  It's a collection of stories from people around the West of Ireland as told to Lady Gregory over a couple of years. Some of them are only a paragraph long and amount to, "I've never seen them, but one killed my sister," while others are a page or two and more detailed. Most are very short. It's divided into sections, like, "charms," "blacksmiths," "butter" (which I did not know was a big thing but apparently people used magic to steal butter a lot), "monsters," and a bunch more that I can't remember and my cat is sleeping adorably on the book so I can't check. Then withing those sections there was a sort of order as well, as there were many pages within one section that were entirely devoted to sightings of big, black dogs. It was super well organized and highly readable.
  
  
• 
  Bill Wallace

  Most of this book chronicles oral traditions of fairy lore as collected and recorded by Lady Gregory, one of the guiding lights of the Celtic Renaissance. Most of these are not "fairy tales," in the sense most people understand the term, but first person accounts of encounters with the uncanny world that co-existed with rural Ireland, like a place one might enter through Machen's Hill of Dreams but wider, wilder, and unbound by literary concerns. I don't know of any work of fiction that captures that world as well as these little tales do. Some of them are more terrifying than anything classic or modern horror writers have conceived and are closer to nightmare than artifice. Others are laced with the fine spirit of blarney and are amusing in an entirely different way. Lady Gregory's portion of this volume is completely enchanting.
  
  The concluding essay by Yeats is less delightful though interesting in a more academic way. Yeats takes the underlying assumptions of the "fairy world" and attempts to compare them to the spiritual plane as envisioned by Swedenborg and his followers and to the effects of the post-Victorian séance room. In this exercise, he almost takes the fun out of the fairy stories, but not quite.
• 
  Jay Callahan

  A remarkably good 365-page book published in 1920, the fruit of many years conversations with the then Irish-speaking small farmers of south Galway and nearby north Clare. Lady Gregory was a landlord, but one long involved in the Gaelic revival, and , for some reason, people talked fairly openly to her. Certainly her own predilictions and personality filtered what she heard, but there is not a lot of author-speak or of the author in the stories. They are clear prose; basically, she says, "the very words in which the story had been told." Gregory was a mentor to Yeats, and it is interesting to compare her writing to his gushy, fulsome, ill-informed and self-centered writing on similar topics.
  
  Sections of the book include Seers and Healers ; Away: Herbs, Charms and Wise Women: Astray, and Treasure: Banshees and Warnings: The Fighting of the Friends: Appearances: Butter: The Fool of the Forth; Forths and Sheoguey Places. There have been almost no similar books, in Irish or English. Books of individual storytellers' stories include some similar stories, but there is no colections (intelligent and well-informed) on these topics.
• 
  George Noland II

  Lady Gregory’s collection of “stories” from people around the West of Ireland as told to her and W.B. Yeats. They are generally short Irish folktales that range from one paragraph to a couple of pages. I liked one reviewers’ description of most: "I've never seen them, but one killed my sister”. It’s fascinating what stories people will conjure to justify or give meaning to bad things happening to them or others. An apparent lack of formal education by the storytellers is important to note as you judge the credibility of the myths. The “Biddy Early” myth is captivating.
  
• 
  Carolyn

  It is an extremely long, repetitive snooze fest. Has helped me fall asleep many nights. There is great value in collecting folk stories, but some editing would have been beneficial. So many of tales are identical. Not just a few either. Like hundreds saying basically the same thing about the same person (Biddy Early). It was probably not necessary to publish every tale from every person.
• 
  Lee Ann

  I do love the stories in this book; they're the inspiration behind my own fiction. The length is the only drawback, to be honest. There are many stories that are similar to each other, so to read over 300 pages with several of the same stories told in only slightly different ways can become tedious. Still, I can't ignore the influence this folklore has on me- and the influence it had on Yeats!
• 
  M F

  Well, it only took me two years to finish reading this...
  
  Seriously. I started this in July 2015 and only just got around to finishing it. It's not really the kind of book you read all at once, but even bearing that in mind, that's a bit shameful on my part. I've set myself a challenge to try and deal with my ridiculous 'Currently Reading' shelf -- whether by finishing stuff, or by admitting that I'm never going to and removing them altogether.
  
  Anyway, there's some interesting stuff in this, but it's not all brilliantly easy to understand. Stories are quoted as told to Lady Gregory by country people, which means they're sometimes phrased in a rather peculiar way.