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Meeting the Other Crowd | 
 enlarge | Authors: Eddie Lenihan, Carolyn Eve Green
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $5.94
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 228633
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 1585423076
Dewey Decimal Number: 200
EAN: 9781585423071
ASIN: 1585423076
Publication Date: February 2, 2004
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Product Description
"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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 The perfect book about the Good People April 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Never have stories about the Good People sounded so convincing and true. An excellent read (and re-read).
 Enjoyable and Entertaining March 4, 2006
This book explains the fairy stories from old Ireland. It is a joy to read.
Testimony of a hidden Ireland about to vanish September 11, 2004
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
Lenihan's prefatory remarks deserve a quote:
Yet I am not so sentimental as to imagine that people can be other than creatures of their time and place. And our time and place is a world, a society that emphasizes the technological rather than the personal (despite what advertisers might have us believe), the superficial and fleeting rather than the profound, the commercial at the expense of the communal. All these changes have their price, and the casualties we can see all around us. (12)
Here, Lenihan speaks for all of us who witness the recent decades that have transformed the physical and spiritual Irish landscapes irrevocably. Lenihan's compilation of oral testimony, mainly gathered from the region, witnesses a less manicured environment. There, ringforts survive as fairy redoubts, lights dance and dust puffs as evidence of fairy activity, and those of us who dare to cross to their side live shortly or longer afterwards, seemingly at the whim of beings diminished in size but not in power. Speaking Irish, hurling, dancing, they represent the survival of a "hidden Ireland" refusing to capitulate to the modern age, just as Daniel Corkery wrote, perhaps romantically I admit, of the 18c bards clinging to the their remnants of an indigenous Munster mentality. Lenihan's collected accounts of rural informants tell us of an era that may, I hazard, hearken back to a "race memory" of the Iron Age, as the indigenous people retreated before the triumph of the unbending ax and the steely blade, so that their descendants the Tuatha de Danaan cringe before the mower's scythe or the spalpeen's knife, while we flee from their nocturnal hegemony across flowing water to at least temporary refuge.
Many who read these stories in urban Ireland or abroad, as Lenihan observes, hide their unease by scoffing at--or denying these tales as those of--a skittish and inebriated peasantry. The storyteller takes pains to gradually let these reactions surrender to, at least in an older generation, the revelation of their own rumours, those of a friend of a friend, that often parallel the encounters he has gathered over the past quarter-of-a-century, He tells us that his audience has to be able to remember a time before 1970 or so to recall any such tales.
This reminded me of the sign I saw at the National Irish Folk Museum outside Castlebar. It requested visitors to fill out forms if they wanted to share their own rural memories, specifying, however, that these needed to be prior to 1960. Between Lenihan and the National Museum system, we notice the great division between those (like myself) who remain cut off from the other side of the water, living always in a land where television silenced the seanachai, and the tales of the dark faded when, as you can see on your evening stroll, the blue light emitted from the box in every room near at least one window of nearly every electrified domestic interior.
In the depopulated hinterlands, the old folks tell their stories of the other side (the "wee folk" or its like never finding an expression in these respectful pages.) Lenihan analyses each account in an afterward combining deftly a folklorist's skill and a reciter's interpretation. He avoids skepticism and enthusiasm admirably, balancing his sympathy with the vanished culture these tales capture with a frank admission that this culture will never revive.
(Excerpted and edited from a review article in the on-line Belfast-based journal The Blanket.)
A wonderful bridge ... June 20, 2004
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I read this book straight through, because I couldn't bear to put it down! Mr. Lenihan has a great talent for capturing the ideas and "brogue" of the people he hears stories from, and his reviews of each story really make you think. I found this book to be fascinating, informative, and yet at times chilling. (I certainly wouldn't want to read these stories to my children at bedtime!) It offers a great deal of insight to the lives of the Good People, as well as into the lives of the past Irish, may their knowledge and stories ever be preserved.
Reason to believe! January 28, 2004
25 out of 25 found this review helpful
Eddie Lenihan is a national treasure of Ireland. The folklorist is obsessed with the collection and sharing of Ireland's old stories. Realizing that the old ways -- sharing stories over a peat fire or a pint -- are in danger of extinction in modern Ireland, Lenihan moves mountains to find tales before they're lost and forgotten in the wake of television and technology. Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland is Lenihan's latest effort to share and preserve those tales. Worth the cover price alone is Lenihan's lengthy introduction, which discusses Ireland's vanishing oral tradition, as well as ancient and modern perceptions of fairy stories. Ireland may be a player in the international field of the 21st century, but that doesn't mean the people there -- even the younger generation -- discount entirely the lore that forms the bedrock of their society. And maybe, just maybe, there is still good reason to believe....
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