First published in 1892, Joseph Jacobs’s Celtic Fairy Tales gathers twenty-six stories drawn from Irish, Scottish, Welsh and wider Celtic oral traditions. 

Inside is a cornucopia of talking animals, enchanted horses, impossible tasks, tricksters, kings, witches, giants, fairy women and people who make the poor decision to enter agreements with supernatural beings. In other words, excellent material.

Jacobs was one of the major nineteenth-century collectors of folklore, but these tales are especially interesting for the way they sit between oral tradition and literary preservation. He preserves much of the rhythm, repetition and strangeness of spoken storytelling rather than sanding everything down into polite Victorian children’s literature. Tales including “Conall Yellowclaw,” “Jack and His Comrades” and “Hudden and Dudden and Donald O’Neary” still have the abruptness and dark comic logic of stories that circulated long before they were fixed on the page.

John D. Batten’s illustrations are a major part of the book: dense black-and-white drawings, decorative borders and grotesque little figures that place the collection firmly inside the late nineteenth-century fairy-tale illustration tradition.

This edition reproduces the original 1892 text and illustrations unabridged.

Dover Publications, New York, 1968. Dover Fairy Tale Books. Unabridged republication of the original David Nutt edition of 1892. Paperback. Illustrated throughout by John D. Batten.  Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor edge and corner wear. Pages clean and bright overall; binding firm. Very good condition.