The Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorian giants, Lugh of the Long Arm and Cú Chulainn: the divine race of pre-Christian Ireland, lifted out of the old manuscripts and told as one continuous story.
Charles Squire wrote at the height of the Celtic revival, when the Irish and Scottish manuscript literature was being edited and translated in earnest for the first time. The Gods of the Gaels gathers the Gaelic half of his Celtic Myth and Legend, Poetry and Romance of 1905: who the gods were and where they came from, the rise of the sun god, the war with the giants at Moytura, the conquest of the gods by mortal men, and their long afterlife as fairies once the saints had arrived.
Squire tells the stories rather than picking them apart, keeping the Irish names and the strangeness intact while making the shape of the material clear – the Ulster cycle and its Táin, the ruin of Deirdre and of Diarmuid and Gráinne, Finn and the Fianna, and the slow demotion of a whole pantheon into a fairy people. It remains one of the most companionable ways into a body of legend that later fed Yeats, Lady Gregory and a good deal of modern fantasy.
This edition features:
- The Gaelic chapters of Squire's 1905 survey, covering the gods of Ireland and their Scottish kin
- The Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians, from the fighting at Moytura to the coming of the Milesians
- Retellings of the Ulster cycle, the Fenian tales and the best known of the Gaelic love stories
- Material traced back to the Irish and Scottish manuscripts in which these gods survive
- A companion volume to The Gods of the Britons, which covers the other half of Squire's work