Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth by Mark William (review)

Abstract

a general readership and appealing to readers who will bring their own gifts of desire and commitment to be in some way active parts of the church’s response to the Spirit-inspired gift that is the Second Vatican Council, readers who will be lighters of candles, not cursers of the enveloping darkness. Our response does matter. These essays direct us in a quite practical way to some of the reasons why the Council remains important, even indispensable, to the present day. My own response, having read some of the essays several times, is to pick out a small selection and follow up the attached bibliographies for further delving, and then to work out with some friends how we might in our own modest way share the fruits of our reading, with a keen awareness that there is work to be done. If we can harness some of the spirit of that parish in Kaikorai and the gritty gumption of Flannery O’Connor, and show that the church does matter to us in a profound way in our daily lives, we can be part of the change that is so badly needed in our Irish church. Those of us who are settled in the faith can be all too comfortable with the status quo. A fruitful first step might be, Augustine-like, to ‘take and read’ this provocative book. What happens after that is up to each of us. But it really does matter. James Sexton is a notary public and a retired solicitor, living in Castleconnell, Co. Limerick, where he is actively involved in his local parish pastoral council. Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, Mark William, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 578 pages. Mark Williams combines a Fitzjames Fellowship in Medieval English at Merton College, Oxford, with the Departmental Lectureship in Celtic in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. He has written a book that attempts a difficult task, that of sorting through the various layers of understanding regarding Ireland’s ‘Gods’ who, at different times, have been taken to be deities, demigods, ‘angelic’ supernatural beings, superhumans , distressingly ‘normal’ human beings and mystical archetypes (Irish manifestations of undefinable entities first encountered in distant cultures, particularly India). That he succeeds as well as he has is a credit both to his Studies • volume 107 • number 425 118 Spring 2018: Book Reviews erudition and prudent judgment concerning the material he has chosen to consider. This is a text which scholars of Irish pre-Christian and medieval Christian religion, medieval literature, folk-lore and modern nationalist literature will undoubtedly consider for some time hereafter. Paradoxically, thebookmightultimatelybefoundmostusefulbythosewhoaren’tspecialists, since it brings concise coherence to a subject that from the outside sometimes appears as chaotic, nearly to the point of incomprehensibility. The extant texts in which these different understandings are embedded (many have been lost, but sometimes are referenced in those that still exist) date broadly from the early Middle Ages through to the beginnings of the Early Modern period, although they are most often found in compositional flux in any given period and now exist without definitive or primordial incarnations. Williams examines in particular fifteen of these texts, ranging chronologically from The Scholars Primer (Auraicept na n-Éces, ca. 650 – a grammatical and linguistic handbook) to The Tragic Deaths of the Children of Tuireann (Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann, ca. 1500 – a narrative of internecine conflict within the Túatha Dé Danann – the main familygrouping within the Irish supernatural pantheon). He also considers at length The Book of Invasions (Lebor Gabála Érenn, ca. 1075, probably ‘the single most complex text to have come down to us from medieval Ireland … the story of Ireland and its various waves of settlers and invaders from the time of Noah’s Flood down to the era of the Gaels or “Milesians”, meaning the ethnic Irish themselves’) (p.512), and The Tragic Deaths of the Children of Lir (Oidheadh Chloinne Lir, ca. 1450 – the ‘best known of Irish mythological talks … really a religious fable which uses native supernatural beings to exalt the Christian virtue of fortitude’) (p.515). The subjects of the texts that have survived include (among other things) Irish and...