“Totally unlike the uncultured Firbolgs, the Tuatha De Danann were a capable and cultured, highly civilized people, so skilled in the crafts, if not the arts, that the Firbolgs named them necromancers and in course of time both the Firbolgs and the later-coming Milesians created a mythology around these.” The Tuatha De Danann reminded me of Tolkien’s elves: I returned to The Story of the Irish Race right after I had read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Legend says they came from Greece, where they had been long enslaved, and whence they escaped in the captured ships of their masters.” It did make an impression with the chapter on early colonisations: Curiosity made me pull it out one day when I was around 12 or 13. Ireland has produced more than its quota of writers in the realm of the fantastic: Lord Dunsany, James Stephens, Maurice Walsh, Lady Gregory, Joseph O’Neill etc.Ī book that had a profound impact on me is Seumas MacManus’ The Story of the Irish Race.
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