Irish tales

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin and wrote his fairy tales for two books published in London, The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888 and A House of Pomegranates in 1891. These are not folk tales gathered by a collector. Wilde made them up himself.

In The Happy Prince a gilded statue and a swallow give away everything the statue has to the poor of the city. In The Nightingale and the Rose a bird gives her life for a single red flower, and the rose ends up in the gutter under a cart wheel.

Not all of them end happily, and that is part of what makes them worth reading. The Devoted Friend is a sly story about a miller who talks endlessly about friendship and does nothing for his friend, told by a linnet to a water rat who misses the point.

The longer tales, The Fisherman and His Soul above all, suit older children and adults reading for themselves, while The Selfish Giant works well read aloud. All of them can be read free of charge, retold from Wilde’s own text, which is now in the public domain.