The King of Ireland's Son: An Irish Folk-Tale

What a joyful and engrossing book this is! An marvelous network of interlaced stories-within-stories keeps you on your toes, trying to keep it all in your head at one time. Each tale is a marvel of masterful storytelling in itself, but the relationships of the stories and characters to each other compounds the delight. Treat yourself to a unique experience - read this book.

I immensely enjoyed the fine job Padraic Colum did of crafting these disparate tales into a rambling--yet consistently attention-riveting--"tale within a tale" in the Arabian Nights (e.g., Tale of the Hunchback) style. I am sure that people new to the genre will sit spellbound while the often humorous, always enchanting, adventures of the various characters play and interplay. I was a bit disappointed that many episodes were familiar to me from the folklore of other nations, and--given Colum's background and predilections--one wonders how much of that was accidental and how much, quite deliberate albeit (Colum may have presumed) safely beyond detection. For example, the Unique Tale is reminiscent of both the Grimm's story of the seven geese and the Norwegian tale of the twelve wild ducks (sans the sewing gaffe that leaves the youngest brother with one arm and one wing). The Churl's comeuppance is identical to a southern French tale about the clever servant, though--since the erstwhile denigrated youngest brother (Askeladde, as it were) outdoes his elder siblings, the tale could easily have hailed from Scandinavia. Next, during Flann's adventures with the giant Crom Dubh, I was all but certain that the episode would segue into the thrice-plus-thrice hiding contest, but I was let down when the king of Greece's daughter--on hand to coach our hero as the giant hid in the ring, the football, etc.--was nowhere to be found. (By the way, for the Prydain fan, the side tale of Gilly's origin smacks of extreme familarity anent one of Alexander's novellas--if not in the chronicles of Taran Pig-Keeper, then somewhere along those lines.) Names were also freely borrowed from other sources: Art (but where are Neart and Ceart?) and Aefa (Ler's wife: more commonly, Aeife) spring immediately to mind. Notwithstanding these picayune (if not sciolistic) criticisms--which would only be of concern to the folklore expert with encyclopedic recall and fingertip command of such nineteenth- and twentieth-century authorities as Asbjornsen, Burton, Glassie, Moe, O'Suilleabhain, Pourrat, and Thygesen-Blecher--the saga is extremely well done and a profound pleasure to adults and older children alike. Enjoy!

I read this book to my 8- and 4- year old sons and they were both enthralled. We've decided that it is the best book we've ever read, even compared with the Chronicles of Narnia or Half Magic. We're going to read once a year for probably the next five years! It's beautiful, thrilling, and even if you get lost among the many plot twists, it all comes back in the end, and the wandering is so enjoyable it doesn't matter.

The King of Ireland's Son was a beautiful, enjoyable wonderful fairy tale. If you read one sentence you would already love it. It has excitement, sadness and happiness. You should read it.