Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906)

Fairy tales, or rather fairy stories, if that's a distinction meaningful outside of my own head, about sons and daughters and Fionn, who is a son, and the things they do, fighting giants, playing games of chance and always losing the third, stealing clothes from magician's daughters who change into swans, fighting the armies of the king of Spain, outwitting hags, getting a hell of a lot of wise and/or magical help to see them through their adventures, marrying up and making out like bandits. The repetitions and similarities grate at first, but soon the tales work their magic and you feel the rhythm and the cadences, the comfort of the familiar patterns and things that aren't so much repeated as shared. Alien to a modern audience, not really prose and certainly not poetry, artifacts of a different time and yet the very stuff our dreams are made of.… (altro)