Irish Folklore in Contemporary Literature: Myth and Piseog

Article Summary

What this article covers: How Irish folklore in contemporary literature works in practice. It separates the four mythological cycles from living folk belief, then names the books, authors and archives behind the current revival.

Who this is for: Readers building an Irish reading list, travellers who want the stories attached to Irish places, and students studying Irish folklore in contemporary literature.

Key takeaway: Irish folklore in contemporary literature has largely moved past retelling the old epics. The strongest recent work uses small, local superstition to write about grief, violence and land.

Expert insight: “The first time I read Doireann Ní Ghríofa on the keening tradition, I recognised the same sound you still hear at an Irish wake. The lament never really left Ireland, it just moved from the graveside onto the page.” , Ciaran Connolly, Founder of ConnollyCove

Quick facts:

• The National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin holds roughly 740,000 pages of folklore gathered by schoolchildren between 1937 and 1939
• The Irish Folklore Commission collections were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in December 2017
• Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, appointed Laureate for Irish Fiction in 2025, holds a PhD in folklore and worked as a folklorist at UCD

Ask most people about Irish folklore in contemporary literature and they’ll picture Cú Chulainn, swans, a warrior with a spear. Fair enough. Those stories are in there. But the books actually winning prizes in Ireland right now are doing something quieter and stranger. They’re working with the lonely bush in the corner of a field that nobody will cut. The iron left in a cradle. The valley where the air feels wrong.

That shift matters if you’re choosing what to read, or if you’re travelling in Ireland and want to know which stories belong to which places. This guide separates high myth from everyday folk belief, tracks the recent turn towards folk horror, and points you towards the sites and archives behind the writing. ConnollyCove covers Irish heritage and Celtic mythology alongside travel across the globe, and this is one of those subjects where the reading and the visiting genuinely feed each other.

What Irish Folklore in Contemporary Literature Actually Draws On

Two separate bodies of material get lumped together, and telling them apart is the single most useful thing you can do as a reader. Mythology means gods, kings and demigods, written down by monastic scribes and organised into four cycles. Folklore, or béaloideas, means the oral tradition of ordinary people: local legends, cures, weather signs, warnings. Our background piece on the origins and tales of Irish folklore covers how both bodies were assembled. Irish folklore in contemporary literature pulls from both, but for very different effects. Knowing which one a book is using tells you roughly what kind of experience you’re in for.

The Four Cycles and the High Myth Tradition

The four cycles are the Mythological, Ulster, Fenian and Historical, and they supply the epic material. This is where the Tuatha Dé Danann, Cú Chulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill live. Writers reaching for scale and world-building tend to start here, because the cycles already come with genealogies, battles and named territories.

Retellings in this mode carry the weight of the original. They also carry its distance. Nobody in modern Ireland now believes a warrior gained wisdom from a burnt salmon. When Irish folklore in contemporary literature reaches for the cycles, it works with inherited architecture rather than lived belief. If you want that scale, our guide to the Tuatha Dé Danann and their mythology sets out who’s who before you start.

The Piseog and Living Folk Belief

A piseog is a small superstition or ritual, the kind of thing a grandparent still half observes. Don’t cut the hawthorn. Don’t bring the may bush indoors. Leave the first of the milk. This is the layer that survived into living memory, and it’s where the most interesting recent fiction sits.

The distinction has practical consequences on the page. Myth gives a writer heroes. The piseog gives them dread, because a piseog implies a rule you might break by accident. Most of the strongest Irish folklore in contemporary literature sits in that second register. That’s why so much writing in this vein reads closer to horror than fantasy. Ireland’s fairy trees and the folklore around them are the clearest surviving example, and farmers still route machinery around them.

Why Irish Folklore in Contemporary Literature Is Growing Again

The current wave isn’t an accident of taste. It rests on an archive that became genuinely searchable in the last decade, and on a generation of writers who studied this material formally. Irish folklore in contemporary literature has a research base that Yeats and Lady Gregory never had. You can see the difference in how specific the new books are about place and practice.

The Schools’ Collection Changed What Writers Can Reach

In 1937 the Irish Folklore Commission launched a collecting scheme with the Department of Education and the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation. More than 50,000 schoolchildren gathered folklore from their own districts. The scheme ran to 1939 and produced around 740,000 pages, now held at UCD and published at dúchas.ie. The Commission’s collections were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in December 2017.

What this means for a novelist is precise, local, attributable detail. You can look up what people in one parish in Kerry said about a particular well in 1938. That’s a different resource from a general book of myths, and it shows in the writing.

Trained Folklorists Are Writing the Fiction

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is the clearest case. She earned a PhD in folklore in 1982, worked as a folklorist on the Urban Folklore Project at the National Folklore Collection, and is president of the Folklore of Ireland Society. In 2025 the Arts Council appointed her Laureate for Irish Fiction.

Her short story “Midwife to the Fairies” shows the method plainly. She sets the old legend of a midwife summoned to a fairy hill against news reports of the 1984 Kerry babies case. Ní Dhuibhne has described this as counterpointing a modern story with a folk legend to give it another dimension. That technique treats the legend as a coded way of saying something the community could not say directly. It now runs through much of Irish folklore in contemporary literature.

Irish Folk Horror: The Darkest Recent Turn

Folk horror is the fastest-growing strand of Irish folklore in contemporary literature, and it works because Irish folk belief was never gentle. The fairies of the oral tradition are dangerous, easily offended and bound by rules they will not explain. Strip away the Victorian prettiness and you have a horror premise already built.

A.M. Shine and the Watching Forest

A.M. Shine’s debut novel The Watchers appeared in 2021 from Head of Zeus, and it is probably the single best entry point to Irish folklore in contemporary literature at its darkest. A Galway artist breaks down beside a forest that isn’t on any map. She shelters in a concrete bunker, then discovers she is watched every night by creatures with a grievance. Shine, who holds a Master’s in history from Galway, builds the creatures out of Irish fairy tradition rather than generic monsters.

The book was adapted into a feature film in 2024, directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan. Shine’s second novel, The Creeper, sends academic researchers into an isolated Irish village where the locals lock their doors at sundown. Both books share a premise drawn straight from folk belief: superstitions only persist because something once justified them. If the screen versions interest you, we cover Irish folklore’s move onto modern film separately.

Peadar Ó Guilín’s Vengeful Sídhe

The Call, published in 2016, takes the premise further. Ireland has been cut off from the world for twenty-five years. Every adolescent will at some point vanish for three minutes and four seconds of local time. In that gap they spend a full day in the Grey Land, hunted by the exiled Sídhe. Almost nobody survives intact.

Ó Guilín’s Sídhe are cruel, inventive and constitutionally unable to lie, which is drawn directly from traditional accounts. The novel folds real Irish history, language and poetry into the survival plot, and the sequel, The Invasion, continues it. For the wider bestiary, see our reference on mythical monsters in Irish folklore.

Reclaiming the Banshee and the Keening Woman

A large share of the best recent work is by women rewriting figures the tradition treated badly. This strand of Irish folklore in contemporary literature asks a simple question of the old stories: who was telling them, and who was left out? The answers have produced some of the most formally adventurous Irish books of the past decade.

Deirdre Sullivan Gives Aífe a Voice

Savage Her Reply, published by Little Island in 2020 with illustrations by Karen Vaughan, retells The Children of Lir from the point of view of Aífe. In the traditional tale, Aífe is the jealous second wife who turns her four stepchildren into swans for nine hundred years. Sullivan keeps the curse but gives Aífe her own account of it.

The result is not a defence. Aífe remains guilty. What changes is that a woman handed between men by agreement finally narrates her own decisions. Sullivan had already worked this territory in Tangleweed and Brine in 2016, a collection of feminist retellings of fairy tales, and Aífe’s story was originally meant for that book.

The Keening Tradition Comes Back

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, published by Tramp Press in 2020, centres on Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill composed that lament in 1773 after her husband was murdered. It survived because women passed it orally between generations, while written record belonged to men.

A caoineadh is a keen: a lament for the dead, sung by the women of the family at the wake or graveside. Ní Ghríofa translates the poem and reconstructs Ní Chonaill’s erased life alongside her own. Anyone drawn to that material will recognise the tradition in our collection of Irish farewell blessings you can actually use.

This is the clearest case of Irish folklore in contemporary literature reaching back into a specifically female oral form. The keen was never written down by its composers. Recovering it required a poet willing to translate and research at once, and the book has since drawn readers towards the pioneering Irish women who shaped the country.

Folklore as Political Allegory in Northern Irish Writing

Northern Irish fiction has historically favoured realism, which makes the recent use of folk material there worth watching. Irish folklore in contemporary literature from the North tends to use the supernatural for what realism struggles with. Inherited violence. The strangeness of a border. A peace that hasn’t finished arriving.

Jan Carson’s Belfast Sirens

Jan Carson is based in Belfast and calls herself a magic realist. The Fire Starters, published in 2019, won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland, and it remains the best-known example of Irish folklore in contemporary literature written from the North. Two fathers in an East Belfast summer fear what they have passed to their children, one in a realist register and one in a mythological one. A doctor becomes convinced his newborn daughter is a siren.

The city itself is burning through marching season, and the folk material carries the part of the story that plain reportage would flatten. Carson’s The Raptures followed in 2022, and her 2026 novel Few and Far Between imagines Lough Neagh drained to create an archipelago that became a refuge from the Troubles.

“In Belfast you can stand near a bonfire site in July and feel the whole city holding its breath. Carson’s sirens make complete sense once you’ve been there.” , Ciaran Connolly, Founder of ConnollyCove

The Otherworld and the Border

The Otherworld of Irish tradition is a parallel place reached by accident, governed by rules outsiders don’t know, where time runs differently. Writers from the North have found that a useful shape for a contested border and for communities living beside each other under separate rules.

This is not a claim that every Northern novel using folklore is writing about partition. It’s narrower than that. The Otherworld gives writers a ready-made way to describe two places occupying the same ground, and some of them have taken it. For the shared source material, our guide to legendary creatures in Celtic mythology covers the figures that recur across both traditions.

Where to Read Next and Where to Visit

Irish folklore in contemporary literature is easiest to approach by deciding which strand you want first, rather than working through a ranked list. The table below sorts the books discussed here by the kind of folklore each one uses and the reader each suits. All are widely available in Irish bookshops and libraries.

Book	Author	Folklore source	Best for
The Watchers (2021)	A.M. Shine	Fairy tradition, west of Ireland	Readers who want horror first
The Call (2016)	Peadar Ó Guilín	The Sídhe, exile narratives	Readers who want scale and stakes
Savage Her Reply (2020)	Deirdre Sullivan	The Children of Lir	Readers who want myth reworked
A Ghost in the Throat (2020)	Doireann Ní Ghríofa	The caoineadh, keening	Readers who want language and grief
The Fire Starters (2019)	Jan Carson	Sirens, Belfast folk belief	Readers who want the North
Tangleweed and Brine (2016)	Deirdre Sullivan	Irish and European fairy tales	Readers who want short forms

Places Behind the Books

Irish folklore in contemporary literature makes these sites legible in a way a guidebook rarely manages. The Hill of Tara in County Meath and the Brú na Bóinne complex in the same county anchor the mythological cycles. Connemara and the Galway forests supply Shine’s territory. Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the British Isles, sits behind Carson’s recent work.

The National Folklore Collection at UCD is open to researchers, and dúchas.ie lets anyone search the Schools’ Collection by parish before travelling. If a story is attached to the field you’re standing in, that’s usually where you’ll find it. Our writing on traditional Irish proverbs and their meanings covers the same oral tradition from a different angle.

Watch: Irish Folklore and Its Living Traditions

The ConnollyCove video below explores Irish folk tradition on location, including the beliefs and storytelling customs that the writers above draw from. It’s a useful companion if you want to hear this material spoken rather than read it.

Explore More Irish Heritage

Irish folklore in contemporary literature rewards readers who go looking for the source material. Most of it is a short search away at dúchas.ie, or a short drive from a named site. Start with whichever strand suits you, then trace the story back to the place it came from. ConnollyCove covers Irish traditions, Celtic mythology and travel across Ireland. You can also read how Irish folklore has shaped modern media more widely, or subscribe to our YouTube channel for guides filmed on location.

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