The task of reviewing Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth is a daunting one, due in part to the sheer size and breadth of the erudite work—almost 600 pages devoted to investigating Irish pre-Christian divinities, stretching throughout the range of Irish history. As the author makes clear, this is no easy job, as it is not always clear who the gods are, or even what they are. Irish divinities do not come in a discrete package; rather, there is a bewildering mish-mash of various figures, characters, and even types of divinities. Are the Tuatha Dé Danann gods? Are they sí? Are they the same? It all depends on which text one references. Even the most identifiable god, Lug, shows up in a variety of forms, including a couple of female forms. Many early gods seem regional, or even local. In the face of such a thorny topic, Mark Williams’s attempt to trace the appearance of the gods in literary texts is a welcome and eminently helpful addition to the available scholarly corpus.

The book is composed of two halves, each of which could have been a book on its own. The first half traces the story up until the late Middle Ages, and the political end of the Celtic realm. The second, slightly slimmer, half takes up the story again in the Anglo-Irish Celtic Revival of the early modern era. These are widely separated topics, with the first mostly lodged in the Irish language and culture, and the latter reflecting colonial re-interpretations of Irish material, nearly all composed in English. The latter half is also more straightforward, in that the dramatis personae of the Anglo-Irish Celtic Revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their works, are well-known and well-documented. Yeats is given center stage, here, and Yeats’s portrayal of Irish divinities is given context by various influences, from people to religions. This section ends with a brief overview of more contemporary re-imaginings of Irish divinities, including Irish neo-pagan movements.

The first half of the book is thicker, more dense, and at times more speculative and idiosyncratic, perhaps due in part to the murkier nature of the data at hand. Yet it is also more of a treasure trove, due to the author’s masterful investigation of the bewildering collection of various literary portrayals of Irish divinities by early Christian writers. His treatment has merit both as an overview of Irish divinities over centuries of literary adaptations, and as a source of several new interpretations of that data, which range in effectiveness from highly convincing to speculative and unlikely. This might therefore be a tricky work for the uninitiated. On the one hand, it provides an excellent introduction to a complex topic; on the other hand, many of the interpretations require a fair amount of scholarly context in order to be able to weigh their relative merits.

While there is much to be praised with this monumental, erudite, work, there is one major lacuna that would be felt by anyone with an interest in Irish folklore: there is almost none of that, here. Folklore is only obliquely mentioned once in the entire first part of the book, the time period where presumably most of the island was illiterate, and the vast majority of stories and beliefs existed entirely in the oral realm. There are no attempts to connect folklore with literary redactions, toponyms, archaeology, or any other lines of evidence. This book presents a history of the Irish divinities as if they existed solely in the minds of elite writers.

Likewise, in the second half of the book, folklore appears only as a vague, unspecified backdrop to Yeats. It is strange, and strangely colonial, to read of the Celtic Revival with chapters devoted to Yeats, yet nothing on Douglas Hyde or any of the other pioneering folklorists (to say nothing of the folk themselves!) that provided the material for Yeats’s re-imagining of Irish divinities for English-speaking audiences.

Towards the end of the book, Williams also covers in some detail the work of folklorist Evans-Wentz, but mostly to dismiss his work, and particularly his considerations of folklore. He asserts (without evidence) that “Many of Evans-Wentz’ informants fed him ideas which owed less to the lore of the shanachie than they did to O’Curry, O’Grady, and the Dublin periodical press” (412). Indeed, one gets the impression throughout the book that there was, and is, no actual folklore in Ireland whatsoever, and that the remote, windswept, at times illiterate places that relied on traditional storytellers received all their narratives from the elite literary productions—an extreme case of gesunkenes Kulturgut.

This book has much to recommend it, and I am sure it will be a valuable resource for many scholars. Yet, as a folklorist, I mourn for the erasure of the folk, the people themselves, as well as the erasure of the data of the discipline of folklore. Perhaps this is a personal, rather than general, criticism: after all, it was the ongoing strength and vitality of Irish folklore, lodged most stubbornly in the Irish language, and in toponyms, customs, stories, music, superstitions, and word-play of the people themselves, that entranced me into beginning my study of Irish folklore so long ago. This book intersects with almost none of this world—any similar characters appear instead as distant reflections, refracted through literature and social elites, and later through the colonial invaders.

In the concluding, reflective section of the book, the author acknowledges as much, stating, “The same material might have held a very different shape for a folklorist” (493) and that, “Such a study would be a valuable complement to the views expressed here, allowing a more rounded picture to emerge” (494). I can only concur with this summation, and eagerly await such a volume. In the meantime, Williams’s work must be judged for what it is: an overview of the literary appearances of Irish gods. Within this remit, there is much to praise.

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[Review length: 991 words • Review posted on June 22, 2017]