This was a nice and quick read for me. It was very beautiful and poetic and had stunning imagery. Each little tale was enthralling and wonderful. Though I did have to keep google open so I could look up some of the allusions and such. Overall I love the charming fairy/fantasy elements.

3.5/5

This is an unusual book. In some major ways, it is a singular joy, and I spent most of my read building up a plan to seek out more of the same. In others, it smacks of petty nationalism and the sort of egotistical romanticizing born of a concerted ignorance of the realities of others, to the point that it didn't surprise me upon wiki'ing Yeats to find out he was somewhat of a cryptofascist in both his aesthetics and his political favorings. What, then, is a critical reader to do? Is what I would have asked had I read this all the way back in 2011, or even in 2014 when I snagged a copy, but these days, I'm more interested in tracing the ancestries of modern day paradigms of the legitimized and the anathematized through both the admirable and the hateful, and if you think that Yeats was the only Nobel Prize laureate who would've gotten along just fine with Hitler, you've another thing coming. In any case, better to have parsed this out in barely 130 pages that, as my edition so proclaims, is freely available online, rather than trudge through 500+ at the petty price of $23.00, not including tax and shipping. There are certainly parts of these meditations penned during the course of the fin-de-siècle and on the cusp of the 20th century that engage on their own merit, and I wouldn't mind tracking a few of them further. However, there is nothing like a elitist believing itself to have all the answers to make for a hell on earth, and when it comes to said elitist's less 'controversial' works, I want readers to know exactly what they're getting into.

At one point in my life, as many have been before me and many will do long after, I was committed to reading at least one work by every Nobel Laureate for Lit. In those bygone days, I was also more likely to veer towards fantasy than anything else, and so to have a laureate like Yeats who explicitly goes for 'Faerie and Folklore' right there in the title seemed too good to be true. Alas that it fulfilled in part that frequent-to-the-point-of-mundanity prophecy, but the complex way it does so is worthy of analysis in and of itself. For here we have folklore, a love for the environment, and a general beseeching for an artistic paradigm that doesn't divvy creative influence so strictly or run too fast after progress and run over everything worth living for in the process. Couple that with Yeats' involvement in Irish nationalism and the rumblings of many other nations under the British imperial yok, and you'd be forgiven in thinking that there is something not only pleasant to read, but stirringly admirable to it all. And yet, if you know anything about the trend many a nationalism took towards fascism, you'd know that an interest in the occult, an obsession with the environment ('cleansed' of impurities that are certain demographics), and a valuing of order, however invisibly oppressive, over any sort of visible strife (Yeats' tsk-tsking at Scotland for making their fairy tales 'violent' goes along with the poems he wrote in the aftermath of the Easter Rising) are all earmarks to watch out for. As such, much as I instinctively enjoyed most of this on first read, the tell tale signs were there for the taking, and I couldn't recommend something so seemingly innocuous without some context alongside.

There is much that has been lost to us, more of it due to active suppression by still major world powers than most who rhapsodize about the Library of Alexandria (see the Internet Archive to see what those folks really think about knowledge over capitalism) would like to believe. As such, there is also going to be worth in exploring what is outside of the halls of academia and the records of governments in a thoughtful, respectful, and compassionate manner as befits a village folk passing amongst their community. However, everyone has angle in such matters, and the fact that fields of study devoted to folklore and the like are so choked with enforced decontextualization and vocational awe just make it that much harder to take the material seriously in a way that is much less whimsical or obfuscating. In terms of this work, given how Yeats passed in 1939, one can only wonder what true colors he would have revealed had he lived during the main thrust of the WWII era and, as most were forced to, to choose a side on a much more visible ideological plain. As it stands, there isn't enough for me to do other than note how unsurprising it is that Yeats went for Pound, as well as ruminate on how he may have well turned a corner in artistry and realize that staying silent was the surest way to have his creative community stripped from him in one way or another. We shall never know what this laureate, so rhapsodizing in his fantastical wonderings and so authoritarian in his real world musings, may have done. I can only hope that readers of this text make the extra effort of taking the good within its proper context so that they need not do so much unpacking later.

Not exactly what I had hoped for, but Yeats writes beautifully.

"Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet."

Beautiful collection that offers insight into both the faery mythology and the Irish culture. Had to take one star off due to the Kindle version of the book having some annoying editing errors.

Interesting take on fairies an other folklore myths, but the writing made the book less attractive.

Delightful

This was a fun novel, full of short stories. I really liked the mixture of tales and the voice of the author. While this might not make it to the top 1000 books to read before you die, like many of the books are that I chose for this Alphabet challenge, it's still an awesome read.

Чудова збірка есеїв про край фейрі, істот, що ведуть рід від давніх богів і не належать ні до сил світла, ні до сил тьми, екскурсія в країну духів і привидів, в саме серце Ірландії. Тут вірування сягають туманної прадавнини, де з потойбіччям прийнято дружити та задобряти.

Здебільшого це ососбисті нотатки Єйтса. Він досить ретельно і з захопленням записував оповіді селян про народець фейрі.
Привиди, банші, лепрекони, велетні, келпі - ці всі містичні істоти-фейрі зустрічаються на сторінках "Кельтських сутінок".

Мені дуже сподобалися ірландські уявлення про фейрі - вони всі дуже різні, кожні по-своєму цікаві, пустотливі та невгамовні. З легкістю можуть і допомогти, і нашкодити.

Ця книга просто must read для всіх шанувальників фентезі, так як більшість книг в жанрі фентезі та роментезі написані на основі саме ірландської міфології.