In early Ireland tales were told by official storytellers at great public assemblies and storytellers also provided entertainment in noble households. These were learned and, it would appear, professional storytellers, who were rewarded for their art, and mention is made of them in various contexts in early Irish literature. In the tragic story of ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’, for example, dating fromabout the beginning of the ninth century, such a storyteller (scélaige) is met with. He is Feidhlimid mac Daill, the father of Deirdre (of the Sorrows) and he is the storyteller of Conchobhar Mac Nessa, king of Ulster. The story implies that Feidhlimid is a man of substance and social standing as he is entertaining the king and his retinue in his house (Windisch 1880: I, 67, lines 2-3). Other storytellers are also glimpsed in medieval Irish literature, and extant tale-lists show that the professional activity of the file or learned poet included storytelling, and that his repertoire consisted of a large corpus of tales for narrating ‘to kings, princes and noblemen’ (Mac Cana 1980: 15-16, 137; Rees 1961: 16).

While the tales appearing in medieval Irish manuscripts are grouped by scholars according to cycles (Mythological Cycle, Ulster Cycle, Fenian Cycle), the classification of tales in these surviving tale-lists is according to subject matter (Mac Cana 1980: 33-131; Rees 1961: ch. X) as in a modern-day index of folktale types, and indeed several examples of international folktales, including ‘Tales of Magic’, listed by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson in the international catalogue The Types of the Folktale (1961), are found in medieval Irish literature and will be dealt with below.

In ancient Ireland, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, storytelling appears to have taken place at night-time and during the winter or dark half of the year. In a story probably composed in the eighth century, the learned poet Forgoll, who came on visitation to an Ulster king named Mongán mac Fiachna, is said to have recited a story each night to Mongán from Samhain to Bealtaine, that is, from Halloween to May Day, thus also indicating the extensiveness of the poet's repertoire (Rees 1961: Mac Cana 1980: 14-16), an assertion which was still made about some gifted storytellers in the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland in the last century (Delargy 1945/1969: 22; Zimmerman 2001: 458)