Keltische Mythen En Legenden
1911
Before Tolkien imagined Middle-earth, before George R.R. Martin built Westeros, there was the Celtic twilight: a world of warrior-poets, shape-shifting gods, and heroes doomed by their own glory. T.W. Rolleston's 1911 masterpiece gathers these ancient Irish and Welsh tales into one indispensable volume. You will find the Ulster Cycle here, with its thunderclap hero Cuchulain and the tragic queen Deirdre, whose beauty launched a war. The Ossianic cycle follows Finn mac Cumhal and his son Oisin, bards who walked among the first mortals. There is the Voyage of Maeldun, a surreal island-hopping odyssey that predates similar traditions by centuries. And of course, the Welsh tales: Arthur before Malory, the Grail before it became everyone's Grail. Rolleston writes with scholarly precision but never loses the fire of the original bards. This is where Western fantasy was born, in the mists between Ireland and Wales, where every ford held a monster and every bard carried a sword. Fifty illustrations by artists including J.C. Leyendecker bring this lost world into haunting focus.
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“There is perhaps no law written more conspicuously in the teachings of history than that nations who are ruled by priests drawing their authority from supernatural sanctions are, just in the measure that they are so ruled, incapable of true national progress. The free, healthy current of secular life and thought is, in the very nature of things, incompatible with priestly rule. Be the creed what it may, Druidism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or fetichism, a priestly caste claiming authority in temporal affairs by virtue of extra-temporal sanctions is inevitably the enemy of that spirit of criticism, of that influx of new ideas, of that growth of secular thought, of human and rational authority, which are the elementary conditions of national development.””
— T. W. Rolleston
“while at the same time it gives the deliberateness and depth, the reverence for ancient law and custom, and the passion for personal freedom, which are more or less strange to the Romance nations of the South of Europe.””
— T. W. Rolleston
“Heer, an army (Celtic choris);””
— T. W. Rolleston
“Plato, however, in the “Laws,” classes the Celts among the races who are drunken and combative, and much barbarity is attributed to them on the occasion of their irruption into Greece and the [pg 18] sacking of Delphi in the year 273 B.C. Their attack on Rome and the sacking of that city by them about a century earlier is one of the landmarks of ancient history. The history of””
— T. W. Rolleston
