Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland

Rating:
Summary: Enter the Authentic Realm of the Good People
Review: A wonderful, potent, enspirited, and true-to-essence treatment of an often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misrepresented subject: the faery folk. Lenihan is an authentic seanachai (storyteller) in the Irish traditions, but even more he is one who undoubtedly has a profound relationship with the life-affirming powers known as faery. Thanks to Carolyn Eve Green's mastery of the written (and spoken) word, we are invited into the world of Irish story, not as mere tales, but as maps into the Otherworld. In Ireland sacredness is inseparable from story, and story is inseparable from place--both the places named and seen in ordinary reality, and those places that border our world, that are inhabited by intelligent and powerful beings. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the Gaelic visionary traditions and the "co-present dimension of faery" this book will serve as an ample introduction to these enlivened cosmologies. For others who think the faery people are little gossamer-winged sprites, think again. Meeting the Other Crowd takes us into the faery world. Ultimately, this book is a profound contribution to understanding the transpersonal realities of the primal Irish and primal Celtic traditions in general. Where the classic work by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, was essentially an outsider cataloguing an ethnological record of belief, Meeting the Other Crowd offers us the perspective and perceptions of an insider--a living practitioner who knows quite well that the realm of faery is real, and alive, and capable of initiating the human being into a profound reality of spirit and connection to earth.--...

Rating:
Summary: Reason to believe!
Review: Eddie Lenihan is a national treasure of Ireland.

The folklorist is obsessed with the collection and sharing of Ireland's old stories. Realizing that the old ways -- sharing stories over a peat fire or a pint -- are in danger of extinction in modern Ireland, Lenihan moves mountains to find tales before they're lost and forgotten in the wake of television and technology. Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland is Lenihan's latest effort to share and preserve those tales.

Worth the cover price alone is Lenihan's lengthy introduction, which discusses Ireland's vanishing oral tradition, as well as ancient and modern perceptions of fairy stories. Ireland may be a player in the international field of the 21st century, but that doesn't mean the people there -- even the younger generation -- discount entirely the lore that forms the bedrock of their society. And maybe, just maybe, there is still good reason to believe....

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful bridge ...
Review: I read this book straight through, because I couldn't bear to put it down! Mr. Lenihan has a great talent for capturing the ideas and "brogue" of the people he hears stories from, and his reviews of each story really make you think. I found this book to be fascinating, informative, and yet at times chilling. (I certainly wouldn't want to read these stories to my children at bedtime!) It offers a great deal of insight to the lives of the Good People, as well as into the lives of the past Irish, may their knowledge and stories ever be preserved.

Rating:
Summary: Testimony of a hidden Ireland about to vanish
Review: Lenihan's prefatory remarks deserve a quote:

Yet I am not so sentimental as to imagine that people can be other than creatures of their time and place. And our time and place is a world, a society that emphasizes the technological rather than the personal (despite what advertisers might have us believe), the superficial and fleeting rather than the profound, the commercial at the expense of the communal. All these changes have their price, and the casualties we can see all around us. (12)

Here, Lenihan speaks for all of us who witness the recent decades that have transformed the physical and spiritual Irish landscapes irrevocably. Lenihan's compilation of oral testimony, mainly gathered from the region, witnesses a less manicured environment. There, ringforts survive as fairy redoubts, lights dance and dust puffs as evidence of fairy activity, and those of us who dare to cross to their side live shortly or longer afterwards, seemingly at the whim of beings diminished in size but not in power. Speaking Irish, hurling, dancing, they represent the survival of a "hidden Ireland" refusing to capitulate to the modern age, just as Daniel Corkery wrote, perhaps romantically I admit, of the 18c bards clinging to the their remnants of an indigenous Munster mentality. Lenihan's collected accounts of rural informants tell us of an era that may, I hazard, hearken back to a "race memory" of the Iron Age, as the indigenous people retreated before the triumph of the unbending ax and the steely blade, so that their descendants the Tuatha de Danaan cringe before the mower's scythe or the spalpeen's knife, while we flee from their nocturnal hegemony across flowing water to at least temporary refuge.

Many who read these stories in urban Ireland or abroad, as Lenihan observes, hide their unease by scoffing at--or denying these tales as those of--a skittish and inebriated peasantry. The storyteller takes pains to gradually let these reactions surrender to, at least in an older generation, the revelation of their own rumours, those of a friend of a friend, that often parallel the encounters he has gathered over the past quarter-of-a-century, He tells us that his audience has to be able to remember a time before 1970 or so to recall any such tales.

This reminded me of the sign I saw at the National Irish Folk Museum outside Castlebar. It requested visitors to fill out forms if they wanted to share their own rural memories, specifying, however, that these needed to be prior to 1960. Between Lenihan and the National Museum system, we notice the great division between those (like myself) who remain cut off from the other side of the water, living always in a land where television silenced the seanachai, and the tales of the dark faded when, as you can see on your evening stroll, the blue light emitted from the box in every room near at least one window of nearly every electrified domestic interior.

In the depopulated hinterlands, the old folks tell their stories of the other side (the "wee folk" or its like never finding an expression in these respectful pages.) Lenihan analyses each account in an afterward combining deftly a folklorist's skill and a reciter's interpretation. He avoids skepticism and enthusiasm admirably, balancing his sympathy with the vanished culture these tales capture with a frank admission that this culture will never revive.

(Excerpted and edited from a review article in the on-line Belfast-based journal The Blanket.)