Author : Eddie Lenihan
Review by: Brian Connellan, Athy Library
In modern Ireland, it is sometimes easy to forget the old traditions, the old wisdom and the old knowledge that is part of the heritage of our country. So it is nice to be reminded every now and then of aspects of our cultural inheritance. Eddie Lenihan is one of the most famous traditional storytellers we have, and in his book Meeting the Other Crowd, he invites us back to a world that was very relevant to our ancestors, that of the fairies. Whether this should be classed as fiction or not might be a debatable point. However, for the people who told these stories to the author, they definitely were not. Meeting the Other Crowd is a collection of stories which the author collected from local people he talked to over the past forty years. These are stories that most people have not heard before as they are very specific to the localities from which they were collected. There are stories of changelings, the banshee, magical hurling matches, the perils of interfering with fairy forts and many more. These are not stories for children, and more than a few of them serve as cautionary tales. But what they are more than anything else is resource for us to access a part of our rich well of traditional culture that is becoming rarer and rarer as time passes.Â
Available to borrow from Kildare Libraries be sure to go online or call your local branch to make an appointment.
Leave a Reply