Celtic Myth And Legend Poetry And Romance

by Charles Squire, Cary Wilkins (Foreword), J. H. F. Bacon (Illustrator)

""Celtic Myth and Poetry and Romance"" is a comprehensive anthology of Celtic myths, legends, poetry, and romance written by Charles Squire. The book explores the rich and enchanting world of Celtic mythology, which has inspired countless tales of magic, mystery, and adventure. The book is divided into several sections, each of which covers a different aspect of Celtic culture and mythology. These sections include the gods and goddesses of the Celts, the heroes and warriors of Celtic legend, the magical creatures and monsters that populate Celtic folklore, and the romantic tales of love and passion that have been passed down through the ages. The book is written in a clear and engaging style that makes it accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the mythology and folklore of the Celtic peoples, and a valuable resource for scholars and students of mythology and folklore. Overall, ""Celtic Myth and Poetry and Romance"" is a captivating and informative book that will delight and inspire readers with its tales of magic, heroism, and romance.""This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Genres: Mythology, History, Nonfiction, Folklore, Ireland, Religion, Reference

484 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1905

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this book is a little dry and probably dated in places it is very detailed in the names and places of celtic mythology. Yes, what we have is a book that explains everything and tells everything, unlike modern equivelants. Not a book to read too avidly, but certainly a useful reference.

Would recommend a copy of this for the shelves.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting! Not the most dramatic storytelling, perhaps, but that can be found in other collections. This placed more of an emphasis on the history of Celtic legends, giving a good overview of the major players, the etymologies of their names and sacred locations, and the holdovers from ancient worship into modern times. It also provides solid comparison of the different strains of myth throughout the British Isles, and lists resources for further reading. Check it out if you want to see all the ways that King Arthur's knights are just gods in disguise!

When I say "modern times," however, I mean the early 1900s, which is when this book was written, and you can tell. Fortunately, in the current modern times, we have grown past the use of terms like "savage," "primitive," and "uncivilized" when referring to older pagan cultures - and most of us do not uphold "Aryan" as the culminating ideal of evolution.

Filtering out that particular lens, however, there's a lot to like here! Squire clearly cares deeply about his material and sometimes his language is quite beautiful. To quote his conclusion:

"Whether the great edifice of the Celtic mythology will ever be wholly restored one can at present only speculate. Its colossal fragments are perhaps too deeply buried and too widely scattered. But, even as it stands ruined, it is a mighty quarry from which poets as yet unborn will hew spiritual marble for houses not made with hands."

(Although possibly my favorite quote concerns Julius Caesar's reports on the old inhabitants of Britain: "So far as it went, it was no doubt correct; but it did not go far. Caesar's interest in our British ancestors was that of a general who was his own war-correspondent, rather than that of an exhaustive and painstaking scientist.")

[Maurean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one from my PC shelf; not one to read cover-to-cover, I refer back to this from time to time, and read it sporatically. Lots of interesting bits about the Celts..

2/15/08: I am currently in the midst of reading "The Mists of Avalon" (heehee), and so I am reading bits of this as a sort of "background"; specifically, chptr. 21, "The Mythological Coming of Arthur", which relates the similarities of the tale with that of Finn Fenian, and the Red Branch Heroes of Ulster.
Also of interest here is chptr. 23, "The Gods as King Arthur's Knights" (pp. 354-370).

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably the best-written and compiled collection of Celtic legends I've read so far. There are some stories missing from this collection that I've read elsewhere, but overall it's a great primer for those just getting into Celtic lore. It spans the entirety of the British Isles, from Scotland to Wales, and the stories are for the most part unabridged.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, a delight. Sometimes a difficult read because of the academic tone of the book, but other times turning a phrase and often retelling stories so fascinating that it became a page-turner.

Interesting patterns:

Myths and religion in the Celtic world tended from worship of a pantheon of gods, who later turned into pseudo-historical personages, and later were appropriated by Christians for the purposes of conversion.

Myths focusing on high level themes with clever stories in the telling: honor, deception, good versus evil, basic needs (food, shelter, love, crops, prowess in battle and hunting, etc.), and so forth.

The Celtic "Argonauts" and the British equivalent are fascinating and worth epics of books.

Interesting facts:

Arthur was originally a god with a pantheon of gods, later converted into a king (Tennyson was not the first to do so), with a number of branching stories of what could be the possible "truth."

The Greek, Celtic, and British pantheon are strikingly similar, and I imagine the more I read of other Euro-mythologies, and probably even farther abroad, the more similarities can be seen. We have a god of the sky and a god of the sea and a god of the underworld and so forth, and the movings and workings of the gods, their battles and vengeance and tricks are all so similar.

Overall, this will serve as a wonderful reference book to which I will return in order to seek out other threads I want to revisit or further pursue.

[Ruth Collier · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book for an overview of the origins and history of Celtic mythology. There's less of the individual stories, and more of the various characters that show up repeatedly, how the myths vary from country to country, how changes in the real world change the characters from gods to fairies to saints, how histories get merged...
This was first published in 1905 so some of the language can be a bit archaic (and that's without the old gaelic and Welsh names!), For instance instead of saying something might have been, the author might say it was 'not improbable' and to a modern eye you have to work around a few double negatives.
The author also uses the words 'savage' and 'peasant' to describe the customs and beliefs he's talking about. In this way, the book is a bit of a historical document itself.

[Anthony Zappia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more a study and comparison of myths than a collection of myths and legends you can read. Certainly there are plenty of myths and legends re-told, especially in the first section of the book: The Gaelic Gods and Their Stories. But I found the next section of the book - The British Gods and Their Stories - rather dry, as Charles Squire makes comparisons between the characters in the Welsh/British myths and those in the Gaelic. If you're interested in studying the origin and developments of certain myths and legends in the Celtic world, then this book may interest you. But if like me, you're just looking for a re-telling, then this book won't satisfy you.

[Aaron Meyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not solely a retelling of celtic myth but a grand study of it. Alot of myth and legend is covered in chapter sized studies which give one so much to chew on. Covers the Irish and British mythology and legends as well as the Arthurian legends as well and how it ties into the old myths. Hard to put down once you begin reading it, thoroughly enjoyable. Goes nicely hand in hand with a book solely retelling the myths by being able to expand and extrapolate meaning in the mythology.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some 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 Lord Alfred Tennsyon's Idylls of the King or Sir Thomas 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 W.B. Yeats sitting on my shelf.

Originally posted at The gods of the ancestors of my ancestors.

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I thought that it was interesting learning about all the pagan deity's and legends. Although I thought that the beginning of the book was less interesting than the rest of the book since it just explained why these myths and legends helped develop english literature, and who the celtics were. After this portion of the book though I found the legends really interesting, especially hearing the full story of king Arthur since I only knew part of it before hand. overall I really enjoyed the reading the book.

[Jolene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book :) I think it taught me a lot about what my ancestors believed and grew up believing. I think it was very educational and for anyone who does, or may have Irish or even Scottish heritage might want to read it.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this one a long time ago. Devoured it, really, but I was thinking of it today for some reason. Wonderful book about the old gods of Ireland and Northumbria. Beautiful myths, legends, and stories. Probably my favorite mythology book.

[CivilWar · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first picked up this book, I thought it was a very modern one because it shares an identical cover and very similar title with a modern publication - I am not yet out of the introduction when the author starts to go on about racialist discussions of "lower" Iberian races against the "Indo-Aryans" (a word here used to refer to Indo-European peoples as a whole, rather than what we call the Indo-Aryan peoples now) in the very outdated racialist "conquest" model that everyone was fucking obsessed with in the era of the new finds of the Hittites in Anatolia and the Minoan civilization in Crete. I look up the book in shock that any Brit would have the balls to claim Celtic legacies as some sort of racial things and turns out this book is from 1905, just straight outta the Victorian era. Well, that explains some things.

Literally the day before I started reading this book, I had read some very old (1917) analyses of Gilgamesh about how it was a solar myth, using not just whatever existed of the epic at the time but also Aelian's Gilgamos tale, the only reference to Gilgamesh in the whole Greco-Roman corpus and it has nothing to do with any other Gilgamesh-related material we have. This is, of course, hilariously wrong, and the whole argument seemed to be that Gilgamesh goes East, then West, where he dies, which isn't even correct hysterically. I found out reading this book that it was apparently just a fucking mania of Anglo academics to call any heroic myths "solar myths" that had been degraded into heroic myth.

Because of the Christianizing writings which have come down to us, Celtic myth, as is well known, is largely euhemerized, with gods turned humans with supernatural powers, some of them even becoming saints - Brigit, the Irish equivalent of the PIE dawn goddess (not "Minerva", as Squire claims), became the famous Saint Brigid - while gods are not acknowledged as "gods" but they are all a "people". The thing is, the Christianizers did not do a thorough job at all, and I don't think they were even trying beyond what was obligatory, because it is extremely obvious that the Tuatha Dé Danann are just the pantheon of the Celts.

The thing is, Squire, and scholars of the time, were not so adept at this because of the mania of the era to turn the godlike deeds of epic into the supposition that all heroic myth was really "degraded" divine myth - which is partially true in the Celtic case, and only very partially in the Greek case because the line between hero cult and deified hero is very vague -, rather than expected and natural shared storytelling tropos (i.e. things are dramatic the same way regardless if it's about a god or a supernaturally strong hero) or even intentional doubling of a god in a mortal hero as a means of divinizing them in whatever way the artist wishes - that is indeed why every other man is described as "godlike" in the Iliad, not because they actually used to be gods.

As such, it's very obvious that the multiple generations of not-gods that come before the Tuatha Dé Danann to establish some fundamental aspects of nature, are just what we call primordial creators, like Ask and Embla of Nordic myth, to use a non-Greek Indo-European example (in my eyes, Greek divine myths have much that is obviously Near Eastern over Indo-European). Because of their ties to the Bible, some of these might even be made up by the Christian scribes, specially the more inconsequential ones like the Nemedian ancestors of the Tuatha Dé Danann which have ties to the Flood myth of Genesis. Likewise, the endless war between the Fomors and the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the marriage between the two, should not be understood as anything beyond what it obviously is, namely, the Indo-European mythologem of the war of the gods: the Titanomachy, the Deva-Asura war, the Æsir–Vanir war, a general PIE mythologem which finds an equivalent even in the Christian elaboration of world, with the civil war in heaven between the angels and the fallen angels.

Squire does not get even something as basic as this, and insists that this instead represents part of the eternal struggle between chaos and order, dark and light, even though these myths of war between the gods are very obviously, even in the Christianized state they come to us from, meant to be in the past and thus done for, they don't have established cycles like celestial or seasonal myths do.

Much more baffling is that he, and presumably scholars of the era, somehow do not pick up on the difference between the "age of the gods" and the "heroic age" due to how the Tuatha Dé Danann were written by the Christian scribes as simply supernatural humans, but the disguise is so thinly veiled (they should be congratulated for that!) that barely anything is changed as far as their obvious divinity goes - and thus their great superiority in power and "magic" over the demigods. Yet Squire just writes as if he does not know what a heroic age is, or what a demigod is:

The twilight of the Irish gods was at hand. A new race was coming across the sea to dispute the ownership of Ireland with the people of the goddess Danu. And these new-comers were not divinities like themselves, but men like ourselves, ancestors of the Gaels.

This story of the conquest of the gods by mortals —which seems such a strange one to us—is typically Celtic. The Gaelic mythology is the only one which has preserved it in any detail; but the doctrine would seem to have been common at one time to all the Celts. It was, however, of less shame to the gods than would otherwise have been; for men were of as divine descent as themselves. The dogma of the Celts was that men were descended from the god of death, and first came from the Land of the Dead to take possession of the present world.

Upon reading it, I immediately thought "wow that sounds a lot like an heroic age or something, and like it is just written as a "next generation" because of how the gods were written of a previous people inhabiting Ireland". And sure enough, we read:

But though mortals had conquered gods upon a scale unparalleled in mythology, they had by no means entirely subdued them. Beaten in battle, the people of the goddess Danu had yet not lost their divine attributes, and could use them either to help or hurt. “Great was the power of the Dagda”, says a tract preserved in the Book of Leinster, “over the sons of Milé, even after the conquest of Ireland; for his subjects destroyed their corn and milk, so that they must needs make a treaty of peace with the Dagda. Not until then, and thanks to his good-will, were they able to harvest corn and drink the milk of their cows.” The basis of this lost treaty seems to have been that the Tuatha Dé Danann, though driven from the soil, should receive homage and offerings from their successors.

Hm, unparalleled in mythology, I wonder why that is? Oh, they were "defeated", but they haven't been "subdued"? And they have powers over the land and the elements and other "domains"? And live in underground structures? And these powerful, semi-divine mortals must pay tribute and sacrifice to them, almost like, you know, demigod heroes paying sacrifice to gods?

Needless to say, none of this is right, these are obviously heroic demigod in a heroic age, with the gods still around because, well, they are gods and gods have their favorites during the heroic age for their grand cosmic plans to shape the world, as is the case for most Indo-Euro mythic history of a developed sort. The gods were not defeated because, quite simply, what vanquished side is the one to receive tribute? The divine mythology that takes place outside of time was merely turned into spurious, fake history because of how the Christian scribes decided to handle that question, and I think again it's frankly very obvious what are gods and who are heroes.

Not are the heroes of Irish myth like the Fenians and Cuchulainn also "gods" that were turned into heroes as British academics around this time liked to claim for seemingly literally every heroic mythos (all of these, according to Squire and co, are of course "solar myths" which leads one to ask how many solar gods, exactly, they thought Celts used to have), as Squire unable to help himself, goes on to claim:

Cuchulainn may have been the name of a real Gaelic warrior, however suspiciously he may now resemble the sun-god, who is said to have been his father. King Conchobar may have been the real chief of a tribe of Irish Celts before he became an adumbration of the Gaelic sky-god. It is the same problem that confronts us in dealing with the heroic legends of Greece and Rome. Were Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Paris, Æneas gods, demi-gods, or men? Let us call them all alike—whether they be Greek or Trojan heroes, Red Branch Champions, or followers of the Gaelic Finn or the British Arthur—demi-gods. Even so, they stand definitely apart from the older gods who were greater than they were.

Further "evidence" of this viewpoint is given by the impossible, enormous bodycount of the hero of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, compared to the more realistic single-combats of the Iliad. I know that this is a hard concept to get, but we may say the same of most manga protagonists and antagonists, and if that's too forward for you, then you may only only look at the incredible numbers of the slain in the Old Testament. Quite simply, it takes the scribe no more effort to write "on his way, Cuchulainn killed two hundred men", as often happens in the Táin, than it does to say "killed one man", indeed much less than the detailed, personalized combats of the Iliad.

Finally, Squire gives us the why of why he is so like the sun:

If Achilles and Heracles were, as some think, personifications of the sun, Cuchulainn is not less so. Most of his attributes, as the old stories record them, are obviously solar symbols. He seemed generally small and insignificant, yet, when he was at his full strength, no one could look him in the face without blinking, while the heat of his constitution melted snow for thirty feet all round him. He turned red and hissed as he dipped his body into its bath—the sea. Terrible was his transformation when sorely oppressed by his enemies, as the sun is by mist, storm, or eclipse.

Okay, so let's summarize what makes it like a solar myth:
1) the hero starts small, reaches a peak, and then descends;
2) They have a radiance about them, like the light of the sun;
3) He fought much harder when cornered by his enemies.

Now, the issues here are very clear, but if they aren't, you may notice that 1) is literally just what we call a standard narrative arc, and that it is not just the sun that rises, reaches a peak, and then descends, but most narratives and indeed people in general. 2) barely needs addressing because "radiance" is genuinely universal imagery for divinity and thus princeliness: in Sumerian it was called melam, in Middle Persian it was farr, Hittite kings literally refer to themselves with "My Sun" as "My Majesty" - I shouldn't need to explain this. Finally, 3) should be recognized as not characteristics of the sun (specially because that isn't even fucking true of solar myths but whatever), but indeed of all human beings which is why Sun Tzu's Art of War wisely advises the reader to always let the enemy think he has a way out because they'll fight much harder if they realize they're cornered.

To put what could be a very long explanation of something quite frankly simply and easy to get: Squire, and academics of the era, do not seem to be able to distinguish the most basic heroic imagery from divine mythology, and due to the fact that Christian scribes were known to have messed with the original myths with varying degrees of euhemerization, they were fine with deeming all heroes former gods, and eventually to other mythologies too. Gods and deified heroes were, it seems, hard to distinguish for people of this period.

That said, despite the outrageously outdated scholarship, I must say I actually quite enjoyed reading this book as a monography on Celtic mythology and religion. I have knowledge on old scholarship and I was already reading this for the purposes of comparative mythology, which is to say, I am used to old scholarship and I am aware of how other religions&associated mythos of Indo-European origin "are". It means that the bad, old scholarship was, if frustrating, not actually an influence on the explanations of the stories and thus did not distract from the explanations of the stories, which are remarkably complete.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Those of us whose ancestors come from Great Britain have likely heard snippets of names, rituals, and superstitions about May 1st, the solstices, and other key days that go so far back few people know when, why, or how the customs began. This book offers some insights into those questions through analysis and stories of British and Gaelic Celt mythology.

As the author points out, the stories of the ancient gods can be confusing at best, given that the same gods were given different names and interpretations among the people of Britain, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. It’s like unravelling a mystery containing numerous entangled threads. Still, this book gave me a clearer picture of the Celtic gods than I’ve ever had and draws on comparisons between them and Greek and Roman gods.

Written in 1975, the style won’t be to everyone’s taste as many pages are one long paragraph. There’s some repetition from chapter to chapter as the story of specific gods overlaps with one another. On the upside, the text is enough to follow and quite educational. The author admits that this book isn’t comprehensive, so for those who wish to dig deeper into specific stories, there’s a detailed reading resource list at the end of the book.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I pick up a book of mythology, I really want it to just be a retelling of the myths. This one has a lot of commentary, and describes the myths more than actually tell them. It’s not a bad overview/ reference point if you’re interested in it as that. It really did explain a lot about Celtic myth that I had picked up from reading other stories (mostly Arthurian literature) without fully understanding it. Also, the author has some problematic phrasing about “primitive” and “lower races” throughout, though the first edition was published in 1905, so he may be using the standard language of the time.

[Louisa Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of Celtic myths and legends. As other reviewers have stated, it is quite dry and I think that's due to it's intended audience being academics rather than the casual reader (as well as being quite dated), but I still enjoyed it and found out some useful and interesting information. It doesn't read like a collection of the different myths and stories but rather a historical account of those myths and stories, and how they were changed and adapted to fit different periods of history throughout Ireland, Wales, England, and Scotland (but with particular reference to the first two countries). Overall, I enjoyed it and found it very interesting and insightful.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a translation nor a retelling of various Celtic myths. The reader is told about various myths and given brief interpretations and comparisons with Greek/Roman gods. It dwells mostly on Irish myths and then compares it to Briton and brief passages on Welsh and Scottish. His main goal seems to be to prove that the Arthurian Legends are recycled Celtic myths.
This is rather dry. This was originally published in 1919 which explains why many of the theories have already been challenged or refuted. I feel that this book is more relevant to show the progress of ancient Celtic studies then to help with the understanding of Celtic myth.

[Wanderingdragon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is very dry. The author constantly compares the Celtic myths to Roman ones. It’d be better framed as how the Romans erased and discredited Celtic figures, attributing the legends to their own Roman gods.

Would have been more fascinating as a study of the themes and archetypes found within Celtic mythology (spoiler: there’s a lot of kidnapping).

He does mention a little the differences between the regions/countries, but most of the legends are treated as if they are same across all British isles.

I don’t recommend this book.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could be the longest it's taken me to read a book. Nearly three years lol. It is good tho. A noble effort! Charles Squire attempting to give to myths and legends of Britain and Ireland a status resemblings those of the Greek myths for writers and poets to draw some inspiration from. There is some good material on Arthur and I'm inspired to read more about him and to delve into the Mabinogion, too after readng this. Probably more my fault than Squire's that I dragged my heels so.

[Michael D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of Squire's claims regarding God's being degenerated and euhemerized over history are interesting but spurious. Perhaps narrative analogs can be drawn between motifs of tales between Ireland, the Welsh traditions, and the Matter of Britain, but Squire's tendency to claim God's from one tradition ARE knights in another are not proven satisfactorily. Still, the study of the evolution of the motifs in the tales is worthwhile.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, though some parts are quite hard to follow and the author has a habit of describing the old religions as ‘savage’, ‘crude’ and ‘primitive’ and Christianity as wise and wholly good, which seems questionable.

[Arawn Ravencraft · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a follower of the ancient Gods and Goddesses of Ireland, Also a writer myself I strongly do not recommend the author seems full of himself and is all over the place with this book. It is not well researched.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lost a star for the racist/antisemetic term "aryan" used repeatedly to describe the celtic people as well as anti-indigenous language. 
Other than that, this book is accurate and easy to read and i highly recommend it to anyone interested and all celtic pagans

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Comprehensive" is the best word to describe this book. "Comprehensive", but not always "interesting".

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good source for some ancient celtic myths and their ties to later Christian myths.

[Páidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting overview of the tales of the Gael. Lots of details and suggestions for further reading. It's a book of its time but good nonetheless

[Christopher Gilstrap · Rating 4 out of 5]

The language is a little stilted and the anthropological commentary is clearly dated, but otherwise this is a good, concise overview of Gaelic mythology.

[Morgan Vester · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ineteresting topic that the author made dry as sand paper.

[valentine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very throughout and detailed record of the Celtic Myths and Legends, with history explanation along the way.

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Retells the myths. One section of the book is about Irish and Scottish myths, and the other is about Welsh ones. The two mythologies are independent of each other, though they must have developed from a common ancestor and many similarities remain and are pointed out by the author. The Irish stories are better documented, so they form a complete cycle, but the British record has more gaps in it. I came to this book knowing very few of the stories, and I found it a very helpful introduction that will provide a context for any information I run into later. It was originally published at the beginning of last century, and nationalism and ethnocentrism are jarringly explicit in it. Also, the historical linguistic background is badly out of date and I assume the archaeological background is too. On the other hand, it occurs to me that Tolkien and others of his time could have read this book or one like it when they were first encountering Celtic mythology. This author's other book which I read recently was essentially a summary of this one in about a fifth the space, and was not nearly as good.