Having grown up in an Irish family I heard these stories as a child from my great grandmother. Seumas MacManus passes on the valor and humour of the Gaelic race in a beautiful flowing style. This is a story book to read to your child at night to excite the wonder and magic in the world for him/her. I highly recommend this book to you...

Irelands stories, have been told for generaitions . And Now that they are written, Thay can never be Lost. .. Seamus macManus, In my oppinion had a great reason to wright this down. Because story Tellers like himself are a Dieing Breed, And People need to keep these intact.

I recently read one of the stories from this book to a group of 4th graders for St. Patrick's Day. It was very entertaining and amusing and the class appreciated its humor. From the stories I read in it it has a very Irish type of humor which I enjoy. Excellent book. Pity it is hard to find.

Genocide has recently become an issue again in current events. The Yugoslavians are having at the Albanians. Africans have and are decimating Africans. Germans have reduced Jewish and Roman Catholic numbers efficiently and effectively. Spanish, French, Scandanavian and English swacked the native Americans and their cultures from Alaska to the southern most end of South America. It's an old story. The English are not alone in their chapters. In fact, they still pompously and righteously perpetuate their own form of genocide at the hands of the native Irish, as they have with South Africans and Indians.

Seumas MacManus allows this to be perfectly clear, not as a biased self appointed judge, but as a historian making available in print information previously unavailable to me and others of Irish descent who have lost their roots because they've been hacked away from them by shame.

It seems once again unjust that a work which salutes the dignity, power and grace of a people is left to die its own death and is no longer published. I was looking for a copy to purchase so I could leave it for my children and their children. I know of no shenachies to continue the tales. Another positive cultural influence destroyed by the insecure British. Just think of what could have been if the British weren't so afraid of the people they didn't understand and therefor massacred and worked with them toward their mutual benefit. We'll never know.

The gentle nature of the Irish people is greatly emphasized in this book. The ideas of democracy were practiced in ancient Ireland, according to MacManus. Women were treated as equals in a time when they were but chattle in other areas of the world. The desire to aquire knowledge is clearly evident in the way the scholars of celtic culture were respected and looked to for direction. I was amazed by the Englishmen that participated in the destruction of Irish culture. In particular, Sir Walter Raleigh and the masacre of the Spanish soldiers that came to assist the rebellion of the English invasion of Ireland. That is a part of history not taught in American schools today. We were taught that Raleigh was an heroic man. This book opened my eyes to the true barbarian he was. These are only a few of the details that shocked and interested me about my heritage. I am still reading and anticipate the aditional information I to come.

With very original drawings and fun stories, Favorite Fairy Tales told in Ireland, retold by Virginia Haviland is a good buy. It gives the reader a different view of folklore than the traditional stories usually told in the US by adding different spins. Overall I feel this is a good book to own in a library collection.

I am glad that someone finally pointed out that this book has an original publication date in the early 1920s. This is not a good history book - historical analysis has moved on considerably since this was written. The book is more fiction and opinion than anything else. Early Irish myths, for example are taken as historical fact and his work on later Ireland, especially the eighteenth century, shows a total lack of knowledge of what was actually going on. Original source material is not something that the author apparently understood. If you are looking for a valid history of Ireland go somewhere else.

I have had a copy of this book for years and originally thought that it was a valid history book. However, I now know [having read much more about Irish history over the years] that while this is a very interesing read it should not be read as a history book. MacManus was a storyteller who lived about 100 years ago and was popular but he was never a trained historian in any way. Enjoy this if you want fiction.

The reason that this work only covers up to the first part of the twentieth century is that it was first written in 1921, before Ireland even had independence from England. Mr. MacManus did not get "tired", he simply wrote this work before much of the twentieth century happened.