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Reviewed by:
  • The Other World: Myths of the Celts
  • James H. Matthews (bio)
The Other World: Myths of the Celts Margaret Hodges . Illustrated by Eros Keith. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $5.95).

If you scratch deep enough, W. B. Yeats once observed, everyone is a visionary; he quickly added that "the Celt is a visionary without scratching." Margaret Hodges' delightful collection, The Other World: Myths of the Celts, is an invitation to scratch. The ten stories she has "retold" are for children, to be sure, but—in Yeats' terms again—for "children of light," for those who are hospitable to visitors from magic worlds. Those visitors include Cuchulain, Dermot, and Finn MacCool of Ireland, the Scottish Tam Lin, Dahut of Brittany, and Bran of Wales. Of course, there are also some of the familiar faces of Arthur's court, along with one not so familiar but just as heroic, Gareth of Orkney. "How Finn MacCool Got His Wisdom Tooth" and "The Lad of Luck and the Monster of the Loch" are the most engaging of the stories, all of which are set in that mythical world of the shadowy past, where the pressures of the present workaday world are given meaning by the presence of something divine. "The well-loved heroes are part of ourselves," Ms. Hodges announces in her Introduction, "but the light is from the Other World."

The oral literature of the Celtic peoples—represented in this book by stories from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany—is a treasure hoard of bardic legends, fairy tales, and heroic sagas. For the most part, this primal stuff has been submerged in the folklore of the dominant, English-speaking culture, especially in the Arthurian matter. But the important thing is not to vindicate its antiquity but to give it life in the present. On that alone, Margaret Hodges' book is a success. The magic is in the stories, and her telling doesn't detract from it. The style is simple but not simplistic, direct but not prosaic. The teller neither condescends nor exaggerates. It is regrettable that the same can't be said of the illustrations.

Frank O'Connor, himself a masterful teller of tales and a preserver of the Irish past, once summarized the Celtic gleam in this way: "From magic we come,/ To magic we go." This book captures the gleam.

James H. Matthews

James H. Matthews, Ph. D., Vanderbilt University, teaches at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. His field is Irish literature. He recently returned from a year in Ireland, where he held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.

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