The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends
SynopsisPlot
From all six Celtic cultures - Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Breton - Peter Berresford Ellishas included popular myths and legends, as well as bringing to light exciting new tales which have been lying in manuscript form, untranslated and unknown to the modern general reader. The author brings not only his extensive knowledge of source material but also his acclaimed skills of storytelling to produce an original, enthralling and definitive collection of Celtic myths and legends - tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, magical weapons, fabulous beasts, and entities from the ancient Celtic world.
Story
About this book
Peter Berresford Ellis compiled this collection by drawing from all six Celtic language cultures: Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, and Breton. Each tradition carried its own body of stories through centuries of oral telling before they were written down in manuscripts across the British Isles and Brittany. Ellis selected well-known tales alongside stories that had remained untranslated and largely inaccessible to general readers at the time of publication.
The stories span the broad landscape of Celtic narrative. Gods and goddesses appear alongside mortal heroes and heroines. Magical weapons, shapeshifting creatures, and other supernatural elements recur across cultures, sometimes in strikingly parallel forms. Ellis, a historian and writer with long experience in Celtic studies, retold each piece in his own prose rather than offering bare academic translations, aiming to preserve the momentum of oral storytelling while staying close to the source texts.
The six Celtic cultures represented here are tied to specific places: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany in northwestern France. Though separated by sea and political borders, these communities shared a related family of languages and, through their myths, a connected imaginative world that predates most written European literature.
