down
the rule to include only tales that have been taken down from Celtic
peasants ignorant of English.

Having laid down the rule, I immediately proceeded to break it. The
success of a fairy book, I am convinced, depends on the due admixture
of the comic and the romantic: Grimm and Asbjoernsen knew this secret,
and they alone. But the Celtic peasant who speaks Gaelic takes the
pleasure of telling tales somewhat sadly: so far as he has been printed
and translated, I found him, to my surprise, conspicuously lacking in
humour. For the comic relief of this volume I have therefore had to
turn mainly to the Irish peasant of the Pale; and what richer source
could I draw from?

For the more romantic tales I have depended on the Gaelic, and, as I
know about as much of Gaelic as an Irish Nationalist M. P., I have had
to depend on translators. But I have felt myself more at liberty than
the translators themselves, who have generally been over-literal, in
changing, excising, or modifying the original. I have even gone
further. In order that the tales should be characteristically Celtic, I
have paid more particular attention to tales that are to be found on
both sides of the North Channel.

In re-telling them I have had no scruple in interpolating now and then
a Scotch incident into an Irish variant of the same story, or _vice
versa_. Where the translators appealed to English folklorists and
scholars, I am trying to attract English children. They translated; I
endeavoured to transfer. In short, I have tried to put myself into the
position of an _ollamh_ or _sheenachie_ familiar with both forms of
Gaelic, and anxious to put his stories in the best way to attract
English children. I trust I shall be forgiven by Celtic scholars for
the changes I have had to make to effect this end.

The stories collected in this volume are longer and more detailed than
the English ones I brought together last Christmas. The romantic ones
are certainly more romantic, and the comic ones perhaps more comic,
though there may be room for a difference of opinion on this latter
point. This superiority of the Celtic folk-tales is due as much to the
conditions under which they have been collected, as to any innate
superiority of the folk-imagination. The folk-tale in England is in the
last stages of exhaustion. The Celtic folk-tales have been collected
while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though
there are every signs that its term