The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries

"The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries" is the broadest, most scholarly, yet open-minded exploration of the whole concept of this place and these beings we usually cannot even see. Evans-Wentz was catching the last of the lore as it was seen and believed in by the old people who would've come of age in the 19th century, since he was recording their stories about 1910, in out of the way places where the inroads of the Industrial Age had not made a permanent home in the mind sets of the country people. There is so much in this one book, it would tax me to list it all; so dive in for yourself and see, and hear the words of the people as Evan-Wentz recorded them. He does it in an admirable way, though he, as an American, was an outsider coming into this lore, the respect he feels for the knowledge and insights, the values and views of the informants is evident in every line.

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) was an anthropologist and writer who was a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. He was born as Walter Yeeling Wentz in Trenton, New Jersey, and as a teenager read Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine and became interested in the teachings of Theosophy. He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats. He then studied Celtic mythology and folklore at Jesus College, Oxford; there he added his mother’s Welsh surname Evans to his name, being known henceforth as Evans-Wentz. He travelled extensively, spending time in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East. He spent the years of the First World War in Egypt. He later travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India, reaching Darjeeling in 1919; there he encountered Tibetan religious texts firsthand. Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan, especially The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Evans-Wentz credited himself only as the compiler and editor of these volumes. The actual translation of the texts was performed by Tibetan Buddhists, primarily Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, a teacher of English at the Maharaja’s Boys’ School in Gangtok, Sikkim who had also done translations for Alexandra David-Neel and Sir John Woodroffe. Evans-Wentz’s interpretations and organization of this Tibetan material is frequently unreliable, being influenced by wholly extraneous preconceptions he brought to the subject from theosophy.