Download or read book Myths of Gods and Goddesses in Britain and Ireland written by Sharon Jacksties and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient deities have shaped the mythological landscapes of Britain and Ireland. Layer by layer, these tales of the ancient gods and goddesses make up the narrative bedrock of these islands. Throughout the ages this has been the meeting place of successive cultures, each bringing their own stories to glorify those beings with supernatural powers. Despite their immortality, these divinities and superhumans are nevertheless vulnerable, depending on the voices and memories of people to celebrate their wondrous exploits. Here you will meet the all-powerful beings once revered throughout these lands. Elemental divinities of sky and earth, goddesses and gods in human guise, have escaped the confines of dusty encyclopaedias. Now you will come to know them by the stories of their deeds, famous and infamous in equal part.
Download or read book Celtic Mythology written by Philip Freeman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people have heard of the Celts--the elusive, ancient tribal people who resided in present-day England, Ireland, Scotland and France. Paradoxically characterized as both barbaric and innocent, the Celts appeal to the modern world as a symbol of a bygone era, a world destroyed by the ambition of empire and the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe. Despite the pervasive cultural and literary influence of the Celts, shockingly little is known of their way of life and beliefs, because very few records of their stories exist. In this book, for the first time, Philip Freeman brings together the best stories of Celtic mythology. Everyone today knows about the gods and heroes of the ancient Greeks, such as Zeus, Hera, and Hercules, but how many people have heard of the Gaulish god Lugus or the magical Welsh queen Rhiannon or the great Irish warrior Cú Chulainn? We still thrill to the story of the Trojan War, but the epic battles of the Irish Táin Bó Cuailgne are known only to a few. And yet those who have read the stories of Celtic myth and legend-among them writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis-have been deeply moved and influenced by these amazing tales, for there is nothing in the world quite like them. In these stories a mysterious and invisible realm of gods and spirits exists alongside and sometimes crosses over into our own human world; fierce women warriors battle with kings and heroes, and even the rules of time and space can be suspended. Captured in vivid prose these shadowy figures-gods, goddesses, and heroes-come to life for the modern reader.
Download or read book The metrical Dindsenchas written by Edward John Gwynn and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Spirit of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses written by Carl McColman and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Celtic gods and goddesses are among the most popular of deities revered by today's neo-pagans, witches, wiccans, and druids. Among pagans, the gods and goddesses of Gaul, Ireland, Wales, and the other Celtic lands rank with the most popular and influential of the Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian pantheons. This book provides an accessible guide for readers to learn about and connect spiritually with the Celtic gods and goddesses of the Celtic lands"--
Download or read book Celtic Mythology written by Proinsias Mac Cana and published by Reed Mitchel Beazley. This book was released on 1997 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the gods, myths, and epic legends of the Celts, discussing their sources, their relationship with Celtic history, and the influence of the Romans.
Download or read book Gods Heroes Kings written by Christopher R. Fee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology.
Download or read book The Great Queens written by Rosalind Clark and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though men dominated early Irish society, women dominated the supernatural. Goddesses of war, fertility, and sovereignty ordered human destiny. Christian monks, in recording the old stories, turned these pagan deities into saints, like St Brigit, or into mortal queens like Medb of Connacht. The Morrigan, the Great Queen, war goddess, remains a figure of awe, but her pagan functions are glossed over. She perches, crow of battle, on the dying warrior CuChulainn's pillar stone, but her role as his tutelary deity, and as planner and fomentor of the whole tremendous Tain, the war between Ulster and Connacht, is obscured. Unlike the Anglo-Irish authors who in modern times treated the same material in English, the good Irish monks were not shocked by her sexual aggressiveness. They show her coupling with the Dagda, the 'good god' of the Tuatha De Danann before the second battle of Mag Tuired, but they conceal that this act - by a goddess of war, fertility and sovereignty - gives the Dagda's people victory and the possession of Ireland. Or they reduce the sovereignty to allegory - when Niall of the Nine Hostages sleeps with the Hag she is allegorical of the trials of kingship! With the English invasion and colonization, the power of the goddesses diminishes further. The book shows the fall in status of the pagan goddesses, first under medieval Christianity and then under Anglo-Irish culture. That this fall shows a loss in the recognition of the roles of women seems evident from the texts. This human loss only begins to be restored when, presiding over the severed heads in Yeats's The Death of Cuchulain, the Morrigu declares, 'I arranged the Dance.'
Download or read book Gods and Heroes of the Celts written by Marie-Louise Sjoestedt and published by Turtle Island Foundation, Netzahaulcoyotl Historical. This book was released on 1982 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description: Sjoestedt's splendid gifts of interpretation and synthesis, together with her remarkably balanced judgements, are an essential contribution to understanding the unique balance of male and female power found in the Celtic mythology. Within her clear analysis of myth and tradition, the author explores the matriarchal world-view of early Celtic religion, as that religion was formed in careful companionship with the male-defined Heroic world of social and political order. This text is a vital part of the recovery of women's spiritual traditions, and a clear outline for future studies of Celtic mythology.
Download or read book The Goddess written by David Leeming and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.
Download or read book The White Goddess written by Robert Graves and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1966-01-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Graves's works on the psychological and mythological sources of poetry. In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.
Download or read book Celtic Mythology written by Hourly History and published by Hourly History. This book was released on 2016-10-16 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gifted W.B. Yeats wrote of his own people “...even a newspaperman, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.” This introduction to Celtic Mythology will serve the novice well – for it is a complicated history with the earliest written records destroyed by the marauding Vikings. Inside you will read about... ✓ The Arrival of the Tuatha dé Danann ✓ Hibernia ✓ The Main Gods of the Celtic Pantheon ✓ Celtic Life and Rituals ✓ Sources of Celtic Mythology ✓ The Effect of Christianity and Beliefs and Superstitions The oral tradition harks back to 4000BCE and is a compilation of myths and cultures of many different peoples including the Indo-Iranians, Slavs, Greeks, Germans, Austrians and finally, the Gauls, who washed up on the shores of the Emerald Isle. Whatever aspect of this rich, mystical and lavishly embellished heritage you would like to investigate further you will find the author has supplied a marker to guide you on your way.
Download or read book The Gododdin written by Aneirin and published by Llanerch Publishers. This book was released on 1994 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Download or read book Celtic Myth and Legend written by Charles Squire and published by Career Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sets the ancient tales of gods and heroes in the context of the burgeoning interest among spiritual seekers of all persuasions in the ancient celtic mythical and legendary traditions.
Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends written by Peter Berresford Ellis and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developed from an early oral storytelling tradition dating back to the dawn of European culture, this is one of the oldest and most vibrant of Europe's mythologies. From all six Celtic cultures - Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Breton - Peter Berresford Ellishas included popular myths and legends, as well as bringing to light exciting new tales which have been lying in manuscript form, untranslated and unknown to the modern general reader. The author brings not only his extensive knowledge of source material but also his acclaimed skills of storytelling to produce an original, enthralling and definitive collection of Celtic myths and legends - tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, magical weapons, fabulous beasts, and entities from the ancient Celtic world.
Download or read book Lion of Ireland written by Morgan Llywelyn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King, warrior, and lover Brian Boru was stronger, braver, and wiser than all other men-the greatest king Ireland has ever known. Out of the mists of the country's most violent age, he merged to lead his people to the peak of their golden era. His women were as remarkable as his adventures: Fiona, the druidess with mystical powers; Deirdre, beautiful victim of a Norse invader's brutal lust; Gormlaith, six-foot, read-haired goddess of sensuality. Set against the barbaric splendors of the tenth century, Lion of Ireland is a story rich in truth and legend-in which friends become deadly enemies, bedrooms turn into battlefields, and dreams of glory are finally fulfilled. Morgan Llywelyn has written one of the greatest novels of Irish history. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend written by Miranda Jane Aldhouse-Green and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 1997 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains entries on Celtic myth, religion, and folklore in Britain and Europe between 500 BC and 400 AD.
Download or read book The Mythology of the British Islands written by Charles Squire and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-11-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'The Mythology of the British Islands' by Charles Squire, readers are taken on a fascinating journey through the rich tapestry of myths and legends that have shaped the cultural landscape of the British Isles. Squire delves into the ancient tales of gods, heroes, and folklore from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, providing a comprehensive look at the literary heritage of the region. His writing style is both informative and engaging, making this book a valuable resource for those interested in British mythology and its influence on literature and culture. The inclusion of original texts and translations adds depth to Squire's analysis, offering readers a deeper understanding of the stories and their significance. Charles Squire's meticulous research and scholarly approach to the subject make 'The Mythology of the British Islands' a must-read for anyone interested in delving into the enchanting world of Celtic and British folklore.
