Celtic symbols, arts and culture
Celtic Mythology
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION IN all lands whither the Celts came as conquerors there was an existing population with whom they must eventually have made alliances. They imposed their language upon them the Celtic regions are or were recently regions of Celtic speech but just as many words of the aborigi…
Buy Celtic Mythology at Amazon
| Print article | This entry was posted by Maire on January 15, 2010 at 4:39 am, and is filed under Celtic myth. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |

about 2 years ago
Despite it seemingly basic title, this is not a basic text for explorers of Celtic mythology. For those interested in introducing themselves to the stories, something like Squire or Rolleston might be more useful. But to someone who already knows them, they will find the tale theme comparisons interesting and might also enjoy the presentations of alternative forms of the tales. It is more of a comparative study, rather than a straight forward rendering of the tales. While the three major heroes (CuChulain, Fion, and Arthur) get a fuller treatment, other stories, which would be pages long in other books, are reduced to as little as a paragraph. It is a great book, though, for one ready to delve farther into this fascinating subject.
about 2 years ago
I suppose that some of the work in this book, one of a 13 volume set written between 1916 and 1932 (reprinted in the 1960s), has been changed by more recent scholarship, but there is still nothing to equal this fantastic achievement. The set includes not only the more familiar myths such as Greek and Roman, but pretty well succeeds in its goal to include all of humanity. The text is extremely detailed but very readable; none of the turgid prose so often associated with academia. The volumes contain numerous illustrations, both in the text and as plates (mostly black & white.)
One of the most useful parts of the set is the final volume, an extremely detailed index, which allows the reader to pursue a theme, or even a topic as specific as the significance of belts, across all the volumes. The individual volumes do not have their own indices, but the tables of contents are fairly detailed. The books appear to have been issued without dust jackets.