TALES FROM THE IRISH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 802, 3 December 1954, Page 13

TALES FROM THE IRISH

IRISH SAGAS AND FOLK TALES, retold by Eileen O’Faolain, illustrated by Joan Kiddell-Monroe; Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, English pfice 12.6. "THERE are many children’s books on sale today, good of their kind and profusely illustrated, about "The Little Engine Who was Tired" or "How Bill and Patsy Built Their Trolley." These are part of the imaginative world of the modern child; yet at times they seem also too efficiently extroverted, too consciously a stage in the education of Healthy Citizens. Children themselves will still listen hungrily to the | story of the Snow Queen or sad Pinocchio; for folk tales and fairy stories are unexpurgated fantasy, the coil, of dream knowledge, the delusive third road seen five centuries ago by Thomas | the Rhymer, which leads neither to | Heaven nor Hell, nor for that matter to | the Welfare State. In praising almost | without reservation these tales from the | Irish, I am aware of deep prejudice rising from a childhood saturation in myth and folk-tale. Fergus, Oisin, and the Children of Lir were known to me also, as intimately as the face of the New Zealand night sky. Eileen O’Faolain has not avoided entirely the Irish trick of pprettification. But no one (barring St. Patrick) can make the Irish heroes into Christian gentlemen. They are incurably gluttonous, arrogant, quarrelsome and_ bloodthirsty-in a word, heroic. And the tumult of noise, said Fergus, was the crashing of shields, the jangle of javelins, the ringing of helmets and the clangour of breastplates, the straining of ropes, the whirr of wheels, the trampin of horses and the creaking of chariots, an the great battle-cry of the fierce and terLe ce sear irna Warriors of the Red ranch hastening to the cleaving and the carving, the hewing and the hacking of th Men of Ein. a at igehers a to the time when I vill, have the opparsae tunity of reading the Foye (continued on next page)

BOOK S

(continued from previous page) book aloud to my own children; and I am grateful to the translator. The seven pafticularly lovely illustrations in colour, black, white and green, are entirely suited to the contents of the tales, and perfect in their kind.

James K.

Baxter