Celtic Folk Tales
Fairy realms, enchanted animals, giants and difficult promises recur in these tales associated with Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Breton traditions. Sources include Joseph Jacobs’s collections and Edmund Leamy’s literary fairy tales. Their versions do not all come directly from a village storyteller: source notes explain the particular book or earlier material used.
The collection ranges from comic trickery to violent tragedy. Check the guidance for the individual telling before reading it with children.
54 stories are in this collection right now.
Browse by region: Europe.
Celtic Folk Tales
Ages 9-12
Connla and the Fairy Maiden
An invisible fairy maiden calls Prince Connla away to the Plain of Pleasure, and even the king’s Druid cannot break the longing she leaves behind.
Celtic Folk Tales
Conal Yellowclaw
Caught stealing the King of Lochlann’s brown horse, Conal Yellowclaw wins his three sons’ lives one by one by telling of the narrowest escapes of his life.
Celtic Folk Tales
Ages 9-12
Beth Gellert
Prince Llewelyn comes home to find his faithful greyhound Gellert covered in blood and his baby’s cradle overturned, and he acts before he knows the truth.
Celtic Folk Tales
Brewery Of Eggshells
A Welsh mother suspects her twins have been swapped for fairy changelings, and a wise man’s trick with an eggshell makes them reveal who they are.
Celtic Folk Tales
Andrew Coffey
Lost on a stormy night, Andrew Coffey shelters in a strange cabin where a voice demands a story, and a drowned neighbour appears with a blackthorn stick.
Celtic Folk Tales
A Legend of Knockmany
The giant Fin M’Coul dreads a fight with the mighty Cucullin, so his clever wife Oonagh disguises him as a baby and bakes iron griddles into the bread.