Customer Reviews

Legends of Ireland: Fairies & Leprechauns [VHS]

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IF YOU'RE INTO MYTHS AND LEGENDS-THIS IS FOR YOU!THE STORIES ARE INTERESTING.THEY MAKE YOU WONDER IF THEY COULD BE TRUE.THEY SHOW ALOT OF BEAUTIFUL SCENERY IN IRELAND.WHAT YOU HEAR OF LEPRECHUNS,MERMAIDS, AND FAIRIES TODAY-IT ALL STARTED IN IRELAND,AND THEY TALK ABOUT THE REAL SITUATIONS BEHIND THE MYTHS AND LEGENDS.MORE THAN ONE PERSON TALKS ABOUT EXPERIENCES THEY HAD.IF YOU'RE A CURIOUS PERSON-GET THIS!

The rich fairy tradition of the British Isles is a fascinating subject, yet this video manages to make it rather boring. It is also annoyingly redundant. This thing just dances around the topic at hand, offering little stories and legends without ever digging into the origin and history of the wee folk. It starts out with a few stories: first there's the leprechaun that tricked the fellow who caught him and demanded his gold; then there's the tale of a man who was invited to play the violin for a group of dancing fairies he came upon in the forest; then there's the story of a mermaid who had her tail stolen, forcing her to live upon the earth until such time as she found her hidden tail. Eventually, the video begins to point out some of the customs that men have applied (and still do, in small numbers) to the wee folk as a group: such creatures as the banshee can be a harbinger of death and loss; fairies like to steal human babies and replace them with deformed changelings; stolen human children never grow old in the land of the fairies, etc. Then the video describes the holdover into modern times of a number of good luck charms or traditional forms of protection from the fairies: iron tongs over a baby's crib, spreading ash on the face of a baby to make him less desirable for fairy-stealing, the avoidance of fairy forts and fairy trees altogether, etc. Perhaps the most interesting thing in the video is the look at a tiny shoe, supposedly a fairy shoe discovered in 1834.

Between every little story or snippet of information, we have to listen to the narrator point out the fact that these are mythic creatures - or are they? They're harmless - or are they? Over and over again, we get these "or are they?" questions, and it quickly becomes rather tiresome. Maybe we should be afraid of the wee folk, the video tells us - after all, the existence of these creatures has never been disproved. Oooohhh! Nobody has proven fairies don't exist- apparently, that fact is supposed to make me wary of them (and might I point out that it is essentially impossible to prove that something does not exist somewhere). I'm afraid that kind of "powerful" evidence just doesn't do the trick.

The Fairies and Leprechauns episode in the Legends of the Isles series only lasts about 26 minutes. The video I watched had an episode about Merlin on the same tape - that episode is even worse than this one, so you're not missing much of anything if you only get the one episode on the wee folk. My advice is to read up on fairies and the like on the Internet or at the library - I'm sure that offers more enjoyment than this short video delivers.