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.
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 Tuath 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 19th century did curiosity revive about gods.
Part two delves into more recent reworkings 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). Williams engagingly shares this fantasist of Gaelic Scotland, who took on the feminine alter ego of Fiona Macleod. 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.”
Mark Williams’ 