Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race
1911
Enter a world where heroes are doomed, poets live forever, and the boundary between earth and the otherworld grows thin. This landmark collection, first published in 1911, gathers the greatest myths of Ireland and Wales into a single enchanted volume. Rolleston traces the Celts from their earliest sacred traditions through the great narrative cycles that defined their literature: the Ulster cycle, with its doomed king Conor and the Hound of Ulster, Cuchulain, whose battle-fury blazed like a flame against the shadows; the Fenian tales of Finn mac Cumhal and his son Oisín, the poet-warrior who wandered through faery hills and returned to find centuries had passed; and the strange, luminous Voyage of Maeldūn, a surreal odyssey beyond space and time that predates similar journeys by a thousand years. The Welsh material brings us Arthur and his knights seeking the Grail, the god-king whose court glows at the edge of legend. More than a compendium, this book argues that Celtic imagination shaped the very soul of European storytelling, and that its wild, dreaming spirit still haunts the modern world.
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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
