From Galicia to Ireland: Eco-Witches and Green Utopian Narratives in Álvaro Cunqueiro and W.B. Yeats

Abstract

This article offers a comparative ecocritical and ecofeminist reading of W.B. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (2008) [1888] and Álvaro Cunqueiro’s Tertulia de boticas prodigiosas y escuela de curanderos (1976). It explores the literary witch as a symbolic mediator between humans and nature, bearer of botanical and spiritual knowledge in Irish and Galician traditions. Drawing on the poetics of breathing, the Symbiocene, and cultural studies, the article argues that these texts preserve ancestral wisdom while imagining alternative, symbiotic models of coexistence. The meiga and the fairy doctor emerge as agents of ecological resilience. In contrast to dystopian imaginaries, these green utopias offer ethical tools to reconnect with Gaia and envision regenerative futures.