Mark Williams, _Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth_ (1)

MAYBE NOT EXACTLY what the cover (shamrock green with Celtic curlicues) would lead some to expect--that is, an Edith Hamilton-esque retelling of the myths. Instead, we have an historical survey  of the Tuatha De Danaan, the sídhe, Finn mac Cumhaill, and so on, in their literary representations, from the middle ages until the present.

Williams aims (and succeeds) at the kind of book achieved by James MacPherson in The Battle Cry of Freedom. The main narrative is scholarly and authoritative, but composed with the Intelligent General Reader (that possibly mythical beast) in mind, while Williams deals with the knotty controversies among his scholarly peers in the footnotes. These notes are conveniently placed right there at the foot of the page, reviving a practice fallen almost in disuse. Having the notes handy is very useful in this instance, as they tend to be more flavorful than the main text, which has a bit of the aridity that afflicts attempts to write the definitive account of anything.

Ireland's Immortals qualifies as a tome, clocking in a 500 pages exclusive of index, etc.. Part One, roughly the first half, deals with the primary sources of the mythology, which date from the middle ages up to the dawn of early modernity. About these, Williams makes two crucial points.

(1) Even the earliest surviving written accounts of these figures date from after the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. The characters and the stories themselves are older than that, presumably, but the only writing system available to the early Irish, a system of notching wooden stakes, was not adapted for recording long narratives, so the stories were not recorded until Christianity and the alphabet arrived. This means that the hope of many later cultural nationalists--that the the myths contained some kind of extractable national essence, some well of pure Irishness undefiled, untainted by Christianity or Latinity--was doomed. Even the earliest surviving texts about these gods were written by people who no longer believed in them (but who nonetheless often found them fascinating). Same goes for the hope of some later Celticizing New Age folks who hoped to find traces of a reconstruct-able pagan religion from the myths.

(2) The later cultural nationalists also hoped that there would be some way to systematize this material, give its gods, goddesses, and heroes stable roles and attributes, as had happened with the Greek and Norse gods, thus creating a foundation for distinctively Irish art, music, literature. No such luck, Williams emphasizes. The primary sources, composed over a span of several centuries, are inconsistent to the point of outright contradiction, not even agreeing on so basic a premise as that these figures are gods, as in divinities, as opposed to mortals with a variety of superpowers, or a race of comely, gifted, long-lived beings like Tolkien's elves (the Tuatha de Danaan may well have been Tolkien's inspiration, Williams argues [475-76]).