by Eddie Lenihan (Editor), Carolyn Eve Green (With)

"The Other Crowd," "The Good People," "The Wee Folk," and "Them" are a few of the names given to the fairies by the people of Ireland. Honored for their gifts and feared for their wrath, the fairies remind us to respect the world we live in and the forces we cannot see.

In these tales of fairy forts, fairy trees, ancient histories, and modern true-life encounters with The Other Crowd, Eddie Lenihan opens our eyes to this invisible world with the passion and bluntness of a seanchai, a true Irish storyteller.

Author Biography:

Storyteller, teacher, folklorist, and author of numerous books and recordings, Eddie Lenihan has been collecting stories from the elders of Southern Ireland for twenty-seven years. He lives in County Clare, Ireland. A director, writer, and editor, Carolyn Eve Green produced an award-winning audio series for children, Secrets of the World, which includes the work of Lenihan and others.

During folklore's first and greatest period, the end of the nineteenthcentury, gifted writers like Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats wandered into the Irish countryside, gathering the oral vestiges of a great tradition. Publishing their gleanings later, sometimes altered in transcription, they garnered an audience eager for the tales of heroes, fairies, and gods. Such compilations as theirs remain major sources of Irish mythology.

One of the best-known seanachies, or traditional tale-spinners, in Ireland today, Lenihan is an Irish-speaking schoolmaster in the very area where Gregory and Yeats gathered their tales. He discloses that, despite the arrival of fax, Internet, and cel phone, the old tales persist. His fresh collection includes some famous motifs, such as the "fairy blast" that steals away people and things, but also such regionally specific figures as Biddy Early, the White Witch of Clare-a historical figure around whom myths have accrued. Lenihan focuses on the "other crowd" of the title: the fairy people, who are the diminished remnants of old gods, still able to affect the world of humankind. This is not quaint fluff but the powerful, sometimes disturbing lore of a world parallel to and occasionally intersecting ours. A major contribution to its field, the book is also compulsively readable, not least because Green, an audio producer, has helped capture the torque of Irish speech in Lenihan's storytelling. —Booklist