Mythology
The Heroic and Magic Myths
There is much that is graphic and lurid about early Irish Mythology, but unlike that of Greece and Rome it is disorganized and chaotic, a random mix often without much of the poetry many of the deities professed to be so interested in. In one way this is a delight. It is a distorted reflection of human life, where, seek as we may, there is no pat-tern, and comedy and tragedy, happiness and sadness, are strung together in a haphaz-ard way. In the personages, human, semi - human, and supernatural, who exist is Irish myth there is a mixture of good and bad qualities, rarely the perfection that graces characters from other mythologies. This often leads to the unexpected, as when a hero behaves in a decidedly unheroic way; an untypical way is understandable, considering that most Irish legend was not written down until the eleventh century, and pagan stories had to be grafted onto a Christian format. Sometimes the story tellers had to ex-ert their ingenuity to the full to make a comprehensible narrative, and in doing so what were personal and often wild interpolations were taken out of context by their succes-sors until the irrelevant assumed an importance it did not merit. all writers on the subject must be aware of this, and this applies as well to the readers. They are not reading a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but a stirring compilation of what appealed to a scribe at a random point in time.
Other Sections still to come are
The Fairy Folk
The Druids and After
The coming of St Patrick
Afterword
Yahoo Clubs on Mythology
Mythology Links