Aye...you too huh tjj
Lady Gregory is another one that sanitised everything.
I dunno how much was missed, and how much deliberately left out, Fourwinds. Lady Gregory even wrote letters which said she had "quite rightly" left out certain unsavoury elements from the stories which had come from the peasantry as being unsuitable for genteel reading. I heard Lady Gregory just fripperised stuff too, to make it more childishly appealing.
For instance. The Blackbird than feeds a whole tribe "lon dubh" seems magical and fanciful, showing the quaintness of irish peasantry. But londubh means black elk (irish elk), the black bird is called the black elk bird (lon-dubh-ean) in irish. If it was a black elk that fed the whole tribe, it is just a commentary on the size of the black elk. Amazing if memory of that beast survived in folklore, showing the amazing talents of the oral tradition in Ireland. Possible it only survived as an explanation for giant deer in rockart we no longer have, perhaps.
If you like the quaintness of it all Dodge, but want some druids, you'de like this one too:
http://www.archive.org/stream/druidpathmarah00ryanrich#page/n7/mode/2up wrote:
A curious dream of white birds came to him there; the
dream had come to him before, yet not with clearness.
And in the dream was a dusk path in an ancient wood,
and a well there. A well rising and sinking with the tide,
and a vision of a maid moving before him into the shadows.
A vision swathed in a white cloud, with hidden face,
but with a voice in which was held all the music of beauty of
life in all the world. His soul was as a harp on which that
music played.
If you want unsanitised folklore there's pavee traveller stuff relating to the god of human sacrifice (mentioned briefly in the Dindsenchas) Crom.
