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The gods of the ancestors of my ancestors
Dec. 18th, 2023 04:33 pmSome books have been sitting on my to-read shelf for so long I can no longer remember when or how they got there. One of these books is Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth and Legend, which I apparently got long enough ago that I either didn’t notice or was at least sort of interested in “New Age”/pagan revival stuff rather than history/folklore studies. The back cover labels it “New Age/Mythology” and the introduction is by one Sirona Knight, a neopagan author of books with titles like “Faery Magick.” I could probably find a bunch of her books around town but I’m frankly no longer as interested in reading them as I was back in the day. Anyway, the intro to this text is a bit incongruous to the rest of it, burbling happily about how great it is that modern people are rediscovering Celtic mythology as a serious spiritual practice and blithely assuring us that recent scholarship has shown anything nasty ever said about it (especially the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices) to be the work of the pernicious Romans and Christians. From this there’s a sort of emotional smash cut to the extremely British, extremely Victorian opinions of Mr. Charles Squire, writing in 1905, dutifully ranking every last thing he can find to rank into “higher” and “lower, “primitive” and “civilized,” “degraded” and “advanced”; comparing Celtic antiquity to Greek at every turn; and confidently breaking down every supposed historical claim about ancient Britain and Ireland to show that it’s just myth, except the nasty ones (like the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices). It is, at least by Victorian standards, strictly a work of serious, secular scholarship. Knight’s intro and Squire’s own intro are two such different flavors of editorializing that I’m rather amazed they were allowed into the same book.
Anyway, I have a high tolerance for smug Victorian writing, so that didn’t really stop me from enjoying both the peek into the state of early 1900’s scholarship into Celtic myth, nor from enjoying the myths themselves. The book is split into roughly two parts: the first part gives us a study/overview of the ancient myths of Ireland and the Gaels; the second gives us the myths of the Brythonic Celts, aka the Welsh, both as they relate to the Gaelic myths (many of them seem to be basically the same gods and stories with slightly different names), and how they eventually grew into the legend of Arthur, undoubtedly one of the most influential legends/bodies of storytelling in the British literary tradition.
This seems to be as good a primer as any, if you are a particular type of reader who doesn’t need a primer on “reading Victorian scholarship” but does need a primer on Celtic mythology, which is… maybe not too many people these days, but it works for me. It’s not a compilation of tales put together short-story-anthology style, the way a lot of my Baby’s First Mythology books were that I read when I was a kid, but a dense 400 pages of names, place-names, context, legacies, and whatnot, mapping out the relationships between different stories more than telling them. That said, you get a good overview of the major player and there are a select handful of ripping good tales in there that you’ll learn the basic storylines of–the legends of Cuchulainn, and of Fionn Mac Coul, and of Diarmad and Grainne, and of Deirdre and Naoise and King Conchobar, and of Balor and his eye of death, and a bunch of other tales of the Tuatha De Danann and the beings who came both before and after them. I’m not great at remembering any of the gods’ names but that’ll change if I read more on the subject. The chapters on the Welsh were a little harder because I really can’t remember any of the Welsh names, but I remember the stories were fun, and the genealogy of the tales of Arthur was fascinating if only because of how much it deviates from the Arthuriana I’m most familiar with, most of which is already a generation or two downstream of Tennsyons’ Idylls of the King or Malory’s Morte Darthur, which I have never read. It’s a long way from ancient Wales to BBC’s Merlin or even T.H. White’s The Once And Future King. I received a book of the real olde-skool Welsh versions of the legends when I was in fourth grade, and the Welsh threw me so badly I didn’t get around to actually reading it until 2011.
Anyway, I can’t necessarily recommend this book to anybody as the most approachable intro to Celtic mythology, but I’m certainly really glad I read it, outdated as it is! I’m looking forward to reading more weird Victorian takes on ancient Irish literature from the Irish Literary Revival period. I’ve got a bunch of that weirdo Yeats sitting on my shelf.
Anyway, I have a high tolerance for smug Victorian writing, so that didn’t really stop me from enjoying both the peek into the state of early 1900’s scholarship into Celtic myth, nor from enjoying the myths themselves. The book is split into roughly two parts: the first part gives us a study/overview of the ancient myths of Ireland and the Gaels; the second gives us the myths of the Brythonic Celts, aka the Welsh, both as they relate to the Gaelic myths (many of them seem to be basically the same gods and stories with slightly different names), and how they eventually grew into the legend of Arthur, undoubtedly one of the most influential legends/bodies of storytelling in the British literary tradition.
This seems to be as good a primer as any, if you are a particular type of reader who doesn’t need a primer on “reading Victorian scholarship” but does need a primer on Celtic mythology, which is… maybe not too many people these days, but it works for me. It’s not a compilation of tales put together short-story-anthology style, the way a lot of my Baby’s First Mythology books were that I read when I was a kid, but a dense 400 pages of names, place-names, context, legacies, and whatnot, mapping out the relationships between different stories more than telling them. That said, you get a good overview of the major player and there are a select handful of ripping good tales in there that you’ll learn the basic storylines of–the legends of Cuchulainn, and of Fionn Mac Coul, and of Diarmad and Grainne, and of Deirdre and Naoise and King Conchobar, and of Balor and his eye of death, and a bunch of other tales of the Tuatha De Danann and the beings who came both before and after them. I’m not great at remembering any of the gods’ names but that’ll change if I read more on the subject. The chapters on the Welsh were a little harder because I really can’t remember any of the Welsh names, but I remember the stories were fun, and the genealogy of the tales of Arthur was fascinating if only because of how much it deviates from the Arthuriana I’m most familiar with, most of which is already a generation or two downstream of Tennsyons’ Idylls of the King or Malory’s Morte Darthur, which I have never read. It’s a long way from ancient Wales to BBC’s Merlin or even T.H. White’s The Once And Future King. I received a book of the real olde-skool Welsh versions of the legends when I was in fourth grade, and the Welsh threw me so badly I didn’t get around to actually reading it until 2011.
Anyway, I can’t necessarily recommend this book to anybody as the most approachable intro to Celtic mythology, but I’m certainly really glad I read it, outdated as it is! I’m looking forward to reading more weird Victorian takes on ancient Irish literature from the Irish Literary Revival period. I’ve got a bunch of that weirdo Yeats sitting on my shelf.