The style encountered in the book’s parts ranges from the occasional and discursive to the sustained and scholarly. Keeping pedagogical considerations in mind, readers can encounter some degree of confirmatory overlapping and circularity that also reflects the author’s own ongoing understanding and interpretation of the matters involved. A distinguishing feature of the book is the manner in which descriptive and analytic treatments of fundamental aspects of vernacular worldview – duality in cosmology, creative ethnopoetics in narrative tradition, the symbolic and socially functional significance of the conception of the otherworld feminine – combine to bring readers to an appreciation of how vernacular worldview can be understood to continue to inform issues of gender, history and politics in the modern world. This follows on from the stance adopted in my earlier book, The Book of the Cailleach (Cork University Press, 2003).

Gearóid Ó Crualaoich was Lecturer and Associate Professor (Emeritus) of Béaloideas/Folklore and Ethnology at University College, Cork and Head of Irish Studies Programme at Thomond College of Education.