The People of the Sea is an incomparable evocation of the pagan Celtic world, where even today magic coexists with reality, and where ancient traditions, beliefs, and ways of life somehow endure. The late David Thomson, a Scotsman raised among fishermen and storytellers, was obsessed from childhood by the Celtic seal legend-the large body of stories and songs surrounding the gray Atlantic seal-and the dream-like hold that his own encounters with seals had on him. In the early 1950s he took a journey to seek the legend out-in the Hebrides, on the east coast of Scotland, on the west coast of Ireland, in the Shetlands and the Orkney Islands. He gives us here the fruit of his search as he found it-in bar conversations, in chance meetings on the beach, at a country dance, in a crofter's kitchen-and he also tells us something of the men, women, and children from whom he heard the stories. The result is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a book that his friend Seamus Heaney, in an introduction written especially for this edition, calls "a poetic achievement," a work of "intuitive understanding, perfect grace, and perfect pitch."