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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.18 pp.25-54
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2002.18.25

W. B. Yeats and Irish Fairy Tales

Hye Sook Suh

Abstract

Yeats’s study of fairy had occupied him steadily for fifteen years from 1887 to1902. He continued to study in connection with spiritualism until 1915. Yeats’s owncollection of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry had been published in 1888,Irish Fairy Tales in 1892 and The Celtic Twilight in 1893 before he met LadyGregory. Any theory about nature of the fairy-faith shared with her came from Yeats,and he claims originality. In writing The Celtic Twilight(1902) his study of fairy wasdeepened by his collecting trips with Lady Gregory. The result of Yeats’s collaborationwith lady Gregory was not to appear until 1920 when she published her two volumeedition of Visions and Beliefs in West of Ireland, “Collected and arranged by LadyGregory: with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats.” Yeats’s essays(both dated 1914)were “Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places” and “Witches and Wizards in IrishFolk-lore.”
Like all the Irish antiquarians, Yeats also commonly referred to the fairies as “thepeople of Raths,” “the Danaan nations,” “The Tribes of the Goddess Danu,” In Fairyand Folk Tales he explains the Galic terms. The Irish word for fairy issheehogue[sidheog], a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee[daoineshee](fairy people)
In Irish tradition anyone may be taken by the sidhe, but there is, in fact ahierarchy of those who are most desirable. Yeats follow this tradition in one of his firstpoem about the sidhe, “The Stolen Child.” As Yeats understood the Irish tradition, thesidhe can do nothing the help of mortals and it is for this reason that they mustalways seek out humans. When the sidhe take someone that person is said to be“away.” As a spiritualist would interpret this, it means that the soul has left the bodyand is travelling with the fairies. Often when appears ill or asleep or “lies in a deadfaint upon the ground” it is because that person is reality “away.” The Sidhe, accordingto Yeats’s countrymen never take anyone or anything without leaving some changelingin its place. In The Only Jealousy of Emer―Yeats’s most successful and movingdramatization and use of a changeling― Emer guesses that Cuchulain is “away.”
When people are taken to live with the sidhe, they take on supernatural powersand work and live just as the Shape Changers they are amongst. The chief distinctionto be made between the shide and the dead is that the dead return to the earth asghosts of their former selves, whereas the sidhe are the everlasting ones.
The idea that the fairy faith is in reality a doctrine of souls was lent support bythe fact that the country people say that almost all who are dead are taken by thesidhe. As a place where souls temporarily reside, the middle land of the sidhe is, theBardo of the Tibetans, the summerland of the Spiritualists, and ethereal world oftheosophy and magic.
Yeats saw his studies of spiritualism as a continuation of his studies of fairy, bothof them as leading to the beginning of his philosophy. His study of fairy led him tothe formulation of two the formulation of two theories that makes his system possible--that of Anima Mundi and that of the “airy body” or “vehicle” of the soul. A Vision isthe result of his study about fairy.
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