Reprinted from Roots & Branches.
This book is certainly the best full-length treatment of the banshee I’ve yet to read. (W. B. Yeats defines a banshee in his A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore as “ban, a woman, and shee (sidhe, a fairie), is an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death. Many have seen her as she goes wailing and clapping her hands.The keen (caoine), the funeral cry of the peasantry, is said to be an imitation of her cry. When more than one banshee is present, and they wail and sing in chorus, it is for the death of some holy or great one.”) And even more surprising is that the book is written well enough to appeal to both the academic and lay audiences.
Patricia Lysaght uses primary documentation and the oral folk tradition to create a fuller understanding of just how the banshee folk motif fits within Irish culture. (The banshee does appear under different guises elsewhere. For example, the Scottish call her bean-nighe, the ghostly washer woman.) Lysaght correctly notes that banshee has a very long existence going back to the Old Irish period.
It is worth noting that she does not take the rationalist approach that many folklorists take. Her very excellent example is the folklorists who claim that reports of the Wild Hunt are just flocks of geese. (The Wild Hunt, which consists of a spectral leader and his men, usually accompanied by baying hounds, who ride through the air or over hills, is common to many parts of the British Isles. The Wild Hunt figures in many novels including Jane Yolen’s The Wild Hunt, Raymond Feist’s Faerie Tale, Charles deLint’s Jack of Kinrowan, and Patricia McKillip’s The Book of Atrix Wolfe.) If folks believe that banshees exist, who is to say they don’t?
Suffice it to say that this is a most interesting text which belongs in any library that has a serious Celtic folklore section. It certainly is a valued addition to my library.
(Roberts Rinehart, 1996)
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