A warlike people who have all gone away

Mythology is a funny thing. It can tell you a lot about a culture in some ways, and in other ways it just tantalizes you with what it can't tell you about a culture. Mythology and folklore are distinct and that's important to keep in mind: myths tell you what a culture values and wants to think of itself, folklore tells you more about what the people of that culture are actually like. On the whole I think I prefer folklore - myths are too stodgy, too militaristic, and in some ways just too damned sad.

I didn't know a hell of a lot about Celtic mythology before diving into this collection of stories and I don't know a hell of a lot about Celtic mythology now. This collection is just a tiny snippet of the history of kings and gods and god-kings who went into forming the collective unconscious of the Celtic fringe, and it's primarily an Irish collection so it's even more limited. There's a lot of love for green hills and cold seas and pale enchanting maidens and musclebound warriors, which is all to be expected, but there are more stories about might of mind and wiry kings than I would have thought to anticipate.

What I did anticipate, and what saddened me, is that you can see cultural assimilation happening as you move through these stories. Chivalry isn't a thing that the ancient Celts would have embraced, it's an English court thing and it plays too much of a role in these myths for them to do anything but communicate the eventual defeat of these independent peoples and kingdoms into a massive monarchy. Even more disheartening is the displacement of old religions to make space for Christianity. It's difficult to read about the Sidhe disappearing from the lives of men, difficult to see golden druidical wands tossed aside in favor of crosses, difficult to wait for a spell to be ended by the announcement of the one lord and savior coming into the land. There's one particular story in this collection, "The Children of Lir," in which the titular characters are tortured by the methods of the old magic of their people and made to wait a millennium to be saved by the good news. Setting aside that that's fucked-up bullshit it's also internally inconsistent - if there is one true god and he is the source of all the supernatural power in the universe it was he who allowed the children to be tortured in the first place and to have to endure the torture until a dude with a dislike of snakes showed up to tell everyone about him. The evil stepmother in this tale isn't the villain, the Christian god is. And that's kind of the moral of the entire set of stories - they all have this ring of "wow, things used to be awesome and full of wonder and mystery and honor and loyalty, but things are much better now that we've assimilated into a different culture."

I wanted to know more about the world that came before, not learn how that world got swallowed up into ours. But I guess I'll just have to look for those stories in folklore, not myths.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Neeson, Eoin. Celtic Myths and Legends. Barnes & Noble Books.
     New York: New York. 2000. (1965)

I'm not sure why this book is a thing

I have no idea where my copy of The Magical Worlds of the Lord of the Rings (MWLotR for the rest of this post) came from. It's not the kind of book that I would typically buy, it's unlikely that I kidnapped it from my dad's shelves, and I'm not sure who could have given it to me (though I think a gift is the most likely source) but one way or another I have it and I read it.

It's an odd sort of book. I can tell that David Colbert, its author, is a huge Tolkien fan (or at least I would hope so) and is super duper into literature and research. Oddly enough this isn't the kind of book that I would typically read but it really seems like a kind of book that I would write - a fan-made exploration into the literary tradition that lead to the creation of a much-beloved fictional universe.

But that's part of why it's so odd: it seems like the kind of book that can really only appeal to lit geeks while also being simplistic enough that most lit geeks will already know what's in it. Maybe I'm just a very particular kind of weirdo, but I found myself asking "why am I reading this, I already know this," on pretty much every page.

I didn't have to guess that Tolkien was enamored of Finnish - I knew it because ten years ago I read an essay or letter by JRR himself discussing that Finnish inspired Elvish. I didn't have to be told that Aurthurian legends and Beowulf paved the road that Tolkien tried to follow - I would have thought that would be obvious to anyone who's ever read Tolkien, Beowulf, or heard of Excalibur. But then I guess that hardcore Anglo-Saxon scholars don't tend to hang out with Tolkien heads unless they become Anglo-Saxon scholars because they were into Tolkien first.

Honestly I'm pretty fucking perplexed by MWLotR. I understand the book but not its audience. As a best guess I would say it's written for people who like the story of LotR but dislike reading; people who want to know more about the background of Middle Earth but who don't want to do research; or children who lack the vocabulary to read Tolkien but really liked the movies (based on the language this is my strongest contender) and want to read more about them. I'm not sure how many people in the above categories actually exist, but based on the 16 reviews this book has amassed on Amazon since 2002 I'd say not bloody many.

The book is alright-ish. Nothing seems overtly incorrect, the language is simple to understand (and perhaps a bit patronizing), and the illustrations are somewhat shitty. But it's a quick read and good background if you don't want to spend a bunch of time reading Old English poetry and Scandinavian myths but do want to know what inspired Middle Earth. If you've already spent a bunch of time reading Old English poetry and Scandinavian myths (ENGLISH LIT MAJORS FOR LIFE!) then you're probably better off skipping this one or passing it on to a deserving nerdy child.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Colbert, David. The Magical Worlds of the Lord of the Rings. Berkley Books. New York:
     New York. 2002.