This Irish folktale is about a boy who likes to play tricks on people and wants nothing more than to grow up to be a thief. His mother warns him that if he does become a thief he will be caught one day and hang from the Bridge of Dublin. The boy does some rather terrible things on the way to becoming the most famous thief in the country. Luckily, there is still justice in some folktales and the Shifty Lad is soon lying dead under the Bridge of Dublin… but not for the reason his mother expected.
Our source for this story was The Lilac Fairy Book, one of a series of twelve collections of folk and fairy tales for children edited by Andrew Lang. This is the last book in the series, and was first published in 1910. Lang’s source was “The Tale of the Shifty Lad, the Widow’s Son” from Popular Tales of the West Highlands by John Campbell, published in 1860. This story has a lot of extra action between the Shifty Lad killing the Black Rogue and the king’s soldiers coming after him.
Original Text / PDF / Audio (4,400 words)
Similar Stories
In our notes to another folktale, The Master Thief, we pointed out that stories about thieves are common in European and Asian folktales, and that many of these share elements from very early literary sources. Some elements in the second half of The Shifty Lad can even be found in the story Rhampsinit and the Master Thief, recorded around 2,500 years ago by the Greek historian Herodutis based on the legend of a fictitious Egyptian pharaoh.
Rhampsinit and the Master Thief Original Text / PDF (1400 words)