Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth Hardcover – November 1, 2016

Extremely interesting, to me at least. The author clarifies many issues about Irish mythology, which I have found to be very confusing. Recent studies of Irish DNA and genealogy have tried to draw inferences from the origin myths. Williams efforts to decipher the origins of these myths puts up the red caution flags about such attempts.

This is a remarkable book -- the scholarship is first-rate and the prose is admirably clear and fluent. A most enjoyable and profitable read!

a thorough and well-researched book. I love the subject. Not a light read.

The author is a master of his subject and presents his methodology and its limitations from the start. This is so refreshing. He show a great respect for all his readers and makes a complex subject clear and enjoyable.

This is a good introduction to Irish mythology and the literature that it has inspired.

How the Christian Irish regarded their island's pagan divinities, in medieval and modern times, comprises the two halves of Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Mark Williams, an Oxford medievalist, unravels the tangled threads in texts that challenge even the skilled interpreter. Old Irish remains formidable for scholars, and the fact that the evidence exists only in copies centuries after its first renditions onto parchment, deep within already Catholic times, complicates any explicator's task. Dr. Williams remains steady throughout this study. His accessible style remains academic but blessedly free of jargon or cant. His glossaries summarize key concepts and his footnotes address arcane debates.His history of the gods of Irish myth examines key writings left by the monks and scribes, from the period after conversion. Williams estimates that within a half-century after the Patrician period, Ireland would have been effectively under Christian control. Although pre-Christian practices may have endured, they diminished rapidly, despite the imaginations of later bards eager to insist on secret continuity with centuries nearly up to our own. Williams separates the archaic from the innovative elements inserted into these stories and chronicles preserved within monasteries. Although these tales and accounts were tamed, a "ferocious weirdness" persists in surreal or juxtaposed scenes, distinguishing imagery from the dour scenarios in Anglo-Saxon sagas such as Beowulf, for instance.These Irish pre-Christian versions resemble (as in the Book of Invasions, a chronological origin myth of successive waves of those landing on the nation's shores) the configurations of Romanesque architecture. Williams compares the sagas to these simple, repeating structures which are decorated with teeming surface details. The medieval corpus, furthermore, rises as a massive edifice, if resting on slender foundations. Pseudo-scholarship at its most ingenious labored to match biblical lore with Celtic supposition. This tension, concentrating around the meaning of the "god-people" the {Túath Dé}, sustains itself within the literature Williams examines. As a blend of inherited narratives with concocted alterations shaped into a Christian mindset, these tales' impact faded by the end of the Middle Ages. The Irish seemed to lose interest. Only in the nineteenth century did curiosity revive about gods.Part two delves into more recent re-workings of the myths of the Irish gods and goddesses. Romanticism, antiquarianism and the occult all generated speculation. W.B. Yeats and George Russell epitomized the poetic turn of the Celtic Revival at the end of the Victorian period, in the wake of a British passion for the classics and the pagan to counter the tamed, the scriptural and the stolid. Gods, as redefined by the Irish revivalists, emerge as "spiritual entities." Among the Anglo-Irish gentry emerge intellectuals eager to fabricate a past for their country, rooted in wisdom of the earth and appeals to the forces lingering, despite the reign of Christendom, supposedly on fringes of the Celtic homeland.The ninth chapter introduces William Sharp (1855-1905). Taking on the feminine alter ego of Fiona Macleod, Williams engagingly shares this fantasist of Gaelic Scotland. In Fiona, we encounter a fabled "self-sequestered Highland visionary." Williams labels her as "an imaginary personage, albeit an alarmingly insistent one." Characteristic of this author's tone, he keeps his investigations lively even as he grounds them in careful judgment. He counters the bent suppositions and fey imagination lavished upon sources that, in modern times, create a "feedback loop." Williams analyzes distortions within American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz's The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. He adapted his Oxford dissertation oddly; this 1911 compendium persists as a New Age "crank piece."For Mark Williams' predecessor at his university proved both an "exorbitant Celtophile" and a misled eccentric. Evans-Wentz conjured up the peasantry as informants for a pan-Celtic fairy belief system. He incorporated an unnamed mystic's testimony. Yet this was none other than George Russell. Williams reasons that Evans-Wentz betrayed a "spiritual crush on Russell." Testifying as to the endurance of this account lies beyond the scope of Williams' work, but he admits he had to cut a third of his own draft. The results remain impressive, even if the source of that apt John Cowper Powys colophon beginning Chapter Nine lacks attribution to that fabulist, as obsessive as many in this volume, of strange magic.Nowadays, Williams tracks a second arc, again with diminishing attention to the old gods, among Irish writers. The Túath Dé and their replacements, the Túatha Dé Danann, as the Irish supernatural race, endure within the "wide uptake" by creative classes outside the isle. The fine arts alongside Celtic Paganism and Celtic Reconstructionism enshrine goddesses, notably the fire spirit of Brigit.Unfortunately, opposition to the ancient forces still exists. Vandalism of historic sites and a modern sculpture to the Celtic sea-god testifies to the powers of these representations as feared by evangelicals. Unlike other cultures where monotheism replaced paganism, Williams concludes that in Ireland, a "restless refusal to resolve" the ambiguities of the survival of the venerable if often barely recalled deities within a Christian context distinguishes that island's literary legacy within the extant sources.Fittingly, Williams ends his six-hundred page survey with a tribute to the late John Moriarty, a philosopher and shaman from County Kerry. Moriarty's "ecological and psychic sensitivity" to summon up again the mythic terrain's specters signifies the restoration of "imaginative vitality." In a nation divided by income inequality and sectarian squabbles, Moriarty's vision and Williams' precision combine. This learned volume contributes valuable insights that may guide all those who look to the Irish tales and Celtic heritage as a relevant force of energy.

This is a history and not a novel. All fact no plot. Not sure I agree with the author's conclusions, but a good book to bring up things to consider

This is a splendid book. Essentially, we have no "native" documentation on the beliefs in Ireland prior to the Christian era, and this book leads you through the efforts to interpret, reinvent, and often exploit the earliest monastic records. Who were the Tuatha dé? We don't know in the sense that we "know" the Greek pantheon and others, but Williams will give you a convincing and witty likely answer.

Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Mark Williams)In Parnell Square, in the centre of Dublin, there is an emblem of the strong interconnection between Irish mythology and national politics. The Garden of Remembrance, created to commemorate those who died in the pursuit of independence for Ireland, features a large sculpture of the children of Lir, designed by Oisín Kelly. As it is often the case with the Irish myths also in literature, the story of the children converted into swans by their jealous stepmother functions as a symbol. It was chosen as a motif because it represents ideas of rebirth and resurrection: after many years dwelling in the lakes and seas of Ireland, the swans are turned again into people thanks to the arrival of Christianity, just as Ireland had also been reborn as a sovereign state in 1922.Mark Williams, a self-confessed philologist and literary critic, “rather than a historian” (2016, p. xiv), stresses the religious, literary and mythological aspects of his topic, over the political, in an ambitious overview covering centuries, Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. His book is helpfully divided in two distinct parts. The first one is devoted to literature written in Irish, focusing on the medieval period, and provides detailed analyses of individual works. General readers outside Ireland are less likely to be already familiar with this material: “The Adventure of Connlae”, “The Voyage of Bran”, “The Wooing of Étaín”, ”The Second Battle of Moytura”, “Lebor Gabála”, “The Colloquy of the Elders”, etc... On the other hand, the second section deals with literature written in English, from around the seventeenth century to the present day. It is structured around key authors and, in the case of the Irish Literary Revival, their interactions. At the end of each chapter Mark Williams, who teaches at the University of Oxford, provides a useful summary to ensure his readers keep track with arguments and developments extended over very large periods of time.All the written information we have about the Irish gods dates back to the Christian age, as Mark Williams takes pains to emphasize (2016, p.3), and thus what we have truly is Christian authors engaging with what they feared could be viewed mostly as Pagan traditions. Remarkedly, these chroniclers tried to dispel any possible doubts that could be harboured about their own position towards the Irish deities and, to that effect, they pointed out, “(…) though we enumerate them, we do not worship them” (cit. in Williams, 2016, p. 169). For this reason, and as part of the interactions between the old mythology and the newer Christian belief, the process is one of gradually lessening the divinity of these gods. In the earlier stories they appear indeed as gods of gigantic proportions, engaging in internecine wars and altering the geology of Ireland, in a traditional theomachy scenario. However, sometimes they come to interact with monks or saints, and can even, on occasion, be redeemed and humanized, so their souls can reach heaven. On the other hand, as part of the “pseudohistory” of Ireland, these supernaturals may also be noble ancestors of mysterious powers, involved in the formation of the country.When they do appear as full-blown gods again, it is only to be completely defeated by the humans then inhabiting the land, named Sons of Míl. Ireland's supernaturals are pushed to a form of internal exile, and they have lived in their hollow hills, called síde, ever since. At this point they seem to become more akin to the fairies of Irish folklore that many readers will be quite familiar with, found in the writings of Yeats and Lady Gregory, for instance. Each community, humans and defeated gods, keeps to “their own Ireland”, splitting the country into a physical and an otherworldly part in a very evocative way that intriguingly foreshadows social and political divisions, between Catholics and Protestants, between North and South, in later times.The overall picture of the Irish gods that emerges from the medieval literature is one of confusion, vagueness and fluidity well-suited to inspire further literary creativity. As the Celtic Twilight began to glow, in the late nineteenth century, Yeats and others, such as George Russell and William Sharp (writing also as Fiona Macleod) tried explicitly to give corporeal form to these diffuse gods and to imagine what they would have looked like. Similarly, the very protean nature of the Irish deities allowed these artists to recreate them in their work for their own personal agendas and to make them into the symbols of their obsessions. It is argued that, as the Irish supernaturals were effectively neutral, pre-Catholic mythical material, Yeats and other Protestant writers could safely claim them in the process of reasserting their feeling of belonging to Ireland just as much as Catholics did (Williams, 2016, p. 292, p. 300).There is a lot of very curious information to be amused about in Mark William’s book, although not necessarily related to Irish mythology. For instance, it is believed that Gaelic poets, the filid, used to compose their poems while lying in bed (Williams, 2016, p. 177). Probably, they could only retreat there, not having “a room of their own”. In a similar vein, linguists would be interested to learn that there is even a myth about the birth of the Irish language itself, told in a grammar book, The Scholars’ Primer, dating back to the seventh century. It is paraphrased by Williams (2016, p. 135): “At the disaster of the Tower of Babel, a Scythian nobleman named Fénius Farsaid (‘Irishman the Pharisee’) extracted all the best bits of humanity’s jumbled languages and from them pieced together the world’s first artificial, perfect language: Irish”. Clearly, language as a mark of national identity was already notable in remote medieval Irish monasteries.There is plenty of amusement too in the sections devoted to the nineteenth century. In a medley of very idiosyncratic intellectuals, there is a married couple who stand out, James and Gretta Cousins. In a marital memoir superbly entitled We Two Together the Irish gods appear to be on a first-name basis with the Cousins. When these deities appear themselves to Gretta, they ask her to pass on their sublime messages “to Jim” (Williams, 2016, p. 423). It can be tempting to view some of these visionaries as childish, maudlin individuals, or even fraudsters. However, Williams does not contemplate the latter, and it must be remembered that occultism was a very powerful current of thought at times characterised by wars, disease and high rates of child mortality.In modern days, according to Mark Williams (2016, p. 434), the importance of the gods in Irish literature has decreased, whilst they have continued to provide inspiration for writers of popular fiction outside of Ireland. Aficionados of fantasy books will be able to glimpse the Irish divinities in aspects of the fairies in the Shadowhunters sagas by American author Cassandra Clare, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by British novelist Susanna Clarke. In one of her recent novels, Lord of Shadows, Cassandra Clare conjures up two fairies chuckling over words written by Yeats about their kind: “He didn’t know anything about faeries. Nobody grows bitter of tongue? Ha!” (Clare, 2017, 20: Evermore). Surely, any god would be delighted to see that they are so immortal that they continue to appear in books, both as fictional characters and as objects of academic study.References:Clare, Cassandra (2017) Lord of Shadow, [ebook reader] New York, Simon and SchusterWilliams, Mark (2016) Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press

One of the best books to track the development and change of Irish Mythology; collates a vast amount of academic and critical material in a way that was an absolute delight to read

A very good, and for a change accurate resource.

A ripping yarn and must read for anyone with an interest in the subject matter.