"The Gods return to a divine country . . ."

In the woods of Slieve Bladhma a boy was reared in secrecy, and taught the skills of the woods and the court. In his travels he met many friends, and many enemies -- above all the magical Aillen, chief of the Sidhe of Beinn Boirche . . . whose defeat might gain the young Finn, the Fair, his rightful place, as a king, a seer, and a poet!

From the battles of Nuada, king of the Tuatha de Danaan, to the arrival of St. Patrick, Lady Gregory presents the great tales of Ireland, telling them faithfully with the voice of the Irish countryside -- in "the manner of the thatched houses."

Lady Augusta Gregory's "Gods and Fighting Men" preserves the legends and lore of the earliest inhabitants of Ireland, the coming of the Tuatha De Danaan (The People of Dana) and the stories of Finn MacCumhail. Containing stories for Irish mythology form the earliest legends, Lady Gregory's book preserves the native Irish sense of story-telling throughout her account of the Gaelic world. Lady Gregory's eloquent speech and style breathes life into Ireland's forgotten heroes and gods. Although Lady Gregory was more of a storyteller than an academic, her book remains one of the best available on Irish mythology and is a great starting point for anyone interested in Gaelic lore.

A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin of Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories, although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called, with its green mounds and its partly wooded sides, and its more gradual slope set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows, had brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their youth for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic lives, and of the five white roads that carried their armies to the lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given Teamhair its sovereignty, all that sought justice or pleasure or had goods to barter.

The Story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland.

"The Gods return to a divine country . . ."

In the woods of Slieve Bladhma a boy was reared in secrecy, and taught the skills of the woods and the court. In his travels he met many friends, and many enemies -- above all the magical Aillen, chief of the Sidhe of Beinn Boirche . . . whose defeat might gain the young Finn, the Fair, his rightful place, as a king, a seer, and a poet!

From the battles of Nuada, king of the Tuatha de Danaan, to the arrival of St. Patrick, Lady Gregory presents the great tales of Ireland, telling them faithfully with the voice of the Irish countryside -- in "the manner of the thatched houses."