About the Author

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878–1965) was an anthropologist and writer who was a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. He was born as Walter Yeeling Wentz in Trenton, New Jersey, and as a teenager read Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine and became interested in the teachings of Theosophy. He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats. He then studied Celtic mythology and folklore at Jesus College, Oxford; there he added his mother's Welsh surname Evans to his name, being known henceforth as Evans-Wentz. He travelled extensively, spending time in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East. He spent the years of the First World War in Egypt. He later travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India, reaching Darjeeling in 1919; there he encountered Tibetan religious texts firsthand. Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan, especially The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Evans-Wentz credited himself only as the compiler and editor of these volumes. The actual translation of the texts was performed by Tibetan Buddhists, primarily Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, a teacher of English at the Maharaja's Boys' School in Gangtok, Sikkim who had also done translations for Alexandra David-Neel and Sir John Woodroffe. Evans-Wentz's interpretations and organization of this Tibetan material is frequently unreliable, being influenced by wholly extraneous preconceptions he brought to the subject from theosophy.

Evans-Wentz presents an accurate record of ancestral Celtic devotion about the apparent reality of leprechauns, pixies, elves, fairies and other nature spirits. Not only is this a formal and scholarly study but an educated report of how beliefs became the standards of ancient Pagan magic. We come away with the conclusion that fairies and other such manifestations may be the inhabitants of a more advanced existence that only a few of us can understand. This account combines medieval myths, traditional fairy knowledge, and early Paganism with folk-lore, history, anthropology and psychology to become a narrative which appears too consistent to be the result of an insane distraction. This magnificent book is a very readable collection of anecdotes, interviews, and legends made available to Evans-Wentz who has fashioned them into an essential reference for generations to come.