Irish Folk Tales of Love

Irish Folk Tales of Love gathers stories from Ireland’s oral storytelling tradition, where love brings longing, devotion, heartbreak and trouble in equal measure. Colin Urwin’s collection includes doomed romances, crimes of passion, awkward courtships and tales of cunning matchmakers whose interventions do not always produce happy results.

Fairies also meddle in affairs of the heart, adding a magical thread to stories set along wild coasts, through enchanted glens and across windswept mountains. Firelit cabins and shadowed castles provide other backdrops for accounts in which love triumphs, falters or takes an unexpected turn. Together, these tales present romance as tender, comic, tragic, mischievous and sometimes ruinous.