Irish Folk History: Tales from the North

By Henry Glassie

Made of the words of the people who live today in the beautiful, embattled countryside of Ulster, Irish Folk History is, in essence, the people's own statement of their past. In story, song, and spontaneous essay, these texts, selected from Passing the Time in Ballymenone, tell of the coming of Christianity, of endless war, of the hardships and delights of rural life.

During a time of trouble, Henry Glassie came into a community of active story-tellers in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, and in this book he sets their voices—their chuckles, whispers, and anger—before us. The words of Hugh Nolan, Michael Boyle, of Peter Flanagan, Hugh Patrick Owens, and their neighbors, echo from the page to present a tale that is at once the story of their tiny community and the story of all of Ireland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512821680

Henry Glassie

Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, has written many books, three of which — Passing the Time in Ballymenone,The Spirit of Folk Art, and Turkish Traditional Art Today — were named notable books of the year by the New York Times. He has won many awards for his work, including the award for a lifetime of scholarly achievement from the American Folklore Society and the Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinctive career of humanistic scholarship.

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