When the powers that be here asked me to write a post about my feelings on “Celtic Fantasy,” my “yes” was a hesitant thing, dubious and hedged around with caveats. I can talk—a little—about intensely local Irish fantasy: Ian McDonald’s King of Morning, Queen of Day, or Ruth Frances Long’s A Crack in Everything. Or Jo Walton’s Táin-influenced The Prize in the Game, for that matter. (Or Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane, which is really fantasy set in the future, if you ask me.) Pat O’Shea’s The Hounds of the Morrigan and Michael Scott’s unfinished De Danann series were foundational texts for me before I turned ten: episodes from the Rúraíocht, especially the Táin Bó Cuailgne, and from the Fiannaíocht, cropped up in my primary school readers.
Some of the very first history I was formally taught involved the Christianisation of Ireland and the exploits of St. Patrick as taken from his Confession and a couple of 7th-century hagiographies. My secondary school English and History classes were practically swathed about in the “Celtic Twilight” and the late 19th/early 20th century Anglo-Irish literary renaissance:
“The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caolte tossing his burning hair
And Niamh calling Away, come away—”(W.B. Yeats, “The Hosting of the Sidhe”)
But Celtic fantasy? What does that even mean, in this context?
Among scholars of pre-history, there is no general agreement—outside linguistics, where the use of the term “Celtic” for several language groups descended from Indo-European is no more or less arbitrary than the use of the term “Germanic” or “Semitic”—as to what “Celtic” means in terms of material culture; the 19th century theory that Hallstatt and La Tene material constitute definitively “Celtic” cultural assemblages is… fuzzy, let’s say. The surviving Celtic language groups (Goidelic, comprising Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx; and Brythonic, comprising Welsh, Cornish, and the Breton language) were spoken into the medieval period in a geographically limited range of locations which shared some cultural similarities beyond mere language kinship, so I guess “Celtic” is a thing we can point to and say more like that than the other thing. But the boundaries are fluid, and fuzzy, and edge cases are hard to pin down.
But Celtic fantasy?
Oh, Marion Zimmer Bradley, you did us all a disservice with Mists of Avalon. That’s a personal opinion, mind. I can’t stand that book.
According to the internet (because it should know, right?) “Celtic fantasy” comes in two main flavours: urban fantasy featuring beings from “Celtic” folktales, usually set in America, like Holly Black’s Tithe, or Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye series, or Kevin Hearne’s Hounded and its sequels; or novels involving the Matter of Britain, like Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, or more recently Mercedes Lackey’s Gwenhwyfar: the White Spirit. There are outliers, like the novels of Juliet Marillier and Manda Scott’s Boudicca books (great story if you realise they’re taking place in a fantasy land with very little actual connection to real Roman Britain), but on the whole, that seems to be the general topography of the fictional landscape. Although there also appear to be people who consider Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander as “Celtic fantasy.”
(For those interested in such things, Kari Sperring has a very entertaining essay about some of the myths about “Celtic” history that crop up in fiction. I recommend it.)
Maybe it’s because of who I am and where I come from, but I don’t get the attraction of “Celtic” fantasy. It always seems strangely flat, compared to the complicated tangle that is Irish history: pieces of folklore taken out of context and seen through a distorted mirror that robs them of their local natures and their complexities.
My response to “Celtic fantasy” is tied up in a difficult knot connected to negotiating my own identity as Irish, and how I find space for myself in my own country and its history of language erasure and suppression of difference and layers of colonisation. In the myths it tells about itself and the faultlines it tries to paper over and never, quite, forgets. Celtic fantasy as a genre feature is a creation of expatriates and foreigners: it simplifies and romanticises, the dulled edge of a knife that never cuts the ones who produce it because they’re not close enough to bleed.
“I suppose that having to live
Among men whose rages
Are for small wet hills full of stones
When one man buys a patch and pays a high price for it
That is not the end of his paying.”(Patrick Kavanagh, “Having to Live in the Country”)
Bleed? Perhaps I exaggerate. There’s no real harm in it, after all. But the only novel I’ve ever read that does fantasy in a Irish world I recognise is Ian McDonald’s King of Morning, Queen of Day. A brilliant, powerful novel: and it works so well because it’s not Celtic, it doesn’t deal in generalities or a grab-bag of decontextualised folktales and pseudo-historical images. It works so well because it’s specific, and local, and rooted. And because it uses myth and fiction to have a—quite frankly terrifyingly—honest discussion of what modern Ireland means to (some of) its inhabitants.
That terrifying honesty, that rootedness, is what’s missing, for me, in most “Celtic fantasy.” So if you spot any going? Please let me know.
Liz Bourke is a cranky person who reads books. Her blog. Her Twitter.
This is so old a trope and frame, that I remember jokes about everything being written as “Celtic Fantasy trilogies”…back in the early 1990’s.
Maybe it’s because of who I am and where I come from, but I don’t get the attraction of “Celtic” fantasy. It always seems strangely flat, compared to the complicated tangle that is Irish history
I think that’s true of a lot of founts of fantasy. As a parallel example, Arthurian stories can be awfully boiled down, and it takes a good, clever writer to flesh them against the usual stereotypes.
Being Irish descendant but not really connected in any way to that heritage(after all the family name is Drake), I get, but don’t feel personally outraged over the devaluation of all things Celtic.
But what stuck out to me is the dislike of Bradley’s Mists of Avalon? I mean I get that’s a personal thing(and while I love it, I get it’s not for everyone) but I’m not real sure as to how the book itself ties in to your thesis. How is Celtic fantasy been disserviced by MoA?
My first thought when I saw the title (and note that this is not an area of expertise for me, so the word Celtic is kind of a vague word for me that evokes something like ancient Ireland) was the novels of Juliet Marillier (specifically the Sevenwaters series, and the Fortriu series) so I am kind of wondering what makes them ‘outliers’ in your view :)
At any rate, I happen to love all those books (and actually, what I think is very interesting about them, are the way both paganism and Christianity and the conflict between them and the respective characters are treated with respect and nuance) – but this is not area I’m very educated in, so perhaps it is all hogwash.
This is all very true. I am of Irish descent, and spent a good part of my time in college studying Irish folktales and myths. Every writer of “celtic fantasy” seems to focus on superficial details without coming to grips with all the stuff that added depth and density to the originals, and ultimately make them worth reading. A lot of “celtic fantasy” is intolerable.
Though, to be honest, this is true of a lot of fantasy. Kate Elliott touched on this issue in her essay earlier today on writing women. Most authors seem reluctant or unable to come to grips with the varied reality of life, and instead regurgitate bland truisms.
Celtic fantasy brings to mind the works of Kenneth C Flint, like Riders of the Sidhe, that I devoured back in the 80s/early 90s but haven’t read since – so I can’t remember much except a lot of the gods and legendary heroes were involved, Finn, Dagda, Morrigan, Lugh.
Also Diana Paxson and Morgan Llwellan with the focus on Druids and female priests.
Then there’s Ceceilia Dart-Thornton’s Bitterbynde trilogy, which is overflowing/crammed full of Celtic style folklore and tales and fairie folk, perhaps to the detriment of the simple fairytale plot with a truly strong female protagonist.
I don’t think any of these have much of the “rootedness” you are asking about – they are all about larger than life Heroes and Gods and Destinies and Curses. It’s glorified? storified? to the point where a reader can’t relate to the characters as humans anymore – I loved all that when I was a teen, but nowadays not so much.
And for some reason, I don’t like Celtic urban fantasy at all – somehow the mix just seems…off. Those Gods and Goddesses and Heroes just seem diminished by making them deal with modern technology – for me anyways.
I think one of my favorite stories of Ireland is Diane Duane’s “Herself,” which is so solidly rooted in both contemporary & historical Dublin.
You might enjoy The Story of Mona Sheehy by Lord Dunsany. It’s a later work, and not like his more famous stories.
I’m not sure how you can discuss Celtic fantasy without mentioning Stephen Lawhead, who in his career has heavily mined Welsh, Celtic and Arthurian traditions.
I especially like his Song of Albion, which mashes up much of the traditional Celtic mythology with a bunch of Christian redemption themes.
In my mind Celtic fantasy is things like the Chronicles of Prydain, which draw heavily from the Mabinogion and Welsh traditions, or Moorcock’s Corum Jhaelen Irsei, which draws from Nuada and the Irish traditions.
Or you could look at Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles, which reimagines the Tuatha Danaan and the Fomor in the distant past of our earth, though that blurs the lines of SF and Fantasy.
I’d even probably work some of David Gemmell’s heroic fantasy into the mix, since he drew from the Roman conquest of Britain, and frequently used various Irish and Welsh heroes as archetypes, though his stories were his own.
I completely agree with a lot of what Kari had to say on the plundering of the culture to make unsupported arguments. On the other hand, Boudicca was real. Exceptional, but certainly a real person.
I could easily credit there being such a person as Scathach, an exceptional woman who had great skill at arms for the time. And she would naturally be briefly honoured and then ostracised to some remote location where such a person could be tolerated until they died while the real men got on with the business of bashing each other with metal sticks. Relegating her to a training role would also make sense – rulers with brains could use her skill, while making sure she could never be a threat to their own authority.
There’s also R.A. MacAvoy’s magnificent The Grey Horse, which (to my admittedly Irish-American eyes) seems very rooted indeed in late 19th century Connemara under English landlords. And The Book of Kells, which takes a modern Irish historian and Canadian artist through a timeslip into 10th century Ireland under Norse raids. Jo Walton reviewed the latter here on Tor.com back in 2010.
OK, it might be a little hard to say what is not “Celtic Fantasy”, but there are some things that really can’t be described as anything else, and I agree with Mayhem that Lloyd Alexander and Michael Moorcock have to be included. To omit the various retellings of the Mabinogion (especially Evangeline Walton) is awfully parochial. And however you personally feel about Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, it’s still gotta be celtic fantasy.
Marion Zimmer Bradley did a lot of things, things which mean we no longer talk about her in polite company. Ruining Arthurian fantasy for everyone is just one of them.
I always took “Celtic Fantasy” to be more a label on what it isn’t. It isn’t Saxon-culture based like Lord of the Rings and its imitators. It isn’t Norman based, like generic middle ages fantasy Knights. It isn’t Barbarian Warrior fantasy, like Conan et al. Celtic Fantasy will cod-Irish/Scots (maybe Welsh on a good day), have a lot of female characters but strangely still a male protagonist, and talk about peace and love and the magic of the greenwood a lot.
If there is one thing to take away from it; Marion Zimmer Bradley did a lot of very bad things. Don’t read her books.
The real thing’s far more worth your time anyway. The Welsh and the Irish have rich and very readable mythic traditions – they certainly make re-boiled “Celtic fantasy tropes” look pretty pallid.
Mind you, an author who can slip into them – I’m thinking of Alan Garner here – can do a lot with them. But appropriation is more prevalent.
I know exactly what you are talking about, Liz, because as someone who plays in Irish sessions, and listens to a lot of music from all over, I see the same thing you are talking about in the musical world. There is a broad category within the “World Music” category called “Celtic,” and it involves music from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the other nations listed above. When that music is true to a single tradition, like Irish or Scots, it is has a strength and purity to it. But there is also a lot of music called “Celtic” that is a melange of various traditions, and quite often that music ends up being a least common denominator, and instead of finding synergy in the mixing of styles, just ends up being a bland mishmash.
Celtic fantasies often seem to just grab a few things from the surface, without the depth and complexity that comes from delving deep into a single tradition.
A handful of examples I’ve liked over the decades:
The late Tom Deitz’s “David Sullivan” series, beginning with Windmaster’s Bane — Irish/Celtic folklore crossed in very interesting fashion with Cherokee and American Southern motifs. That had “rootedness” for me, because it seemed to me that Deitz had an equally good handle on both sets of mythology, which doesn’t happen often in cross-cultural material of that kind.
Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s Keltiad series — absolutely not historical in character (even in its nominally historical parts), very much drawn from what I’d call the modern neopagan branch of “Celtic” tradition, but enormously entertaining for all that.
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, which is more properly Welsh/Arthurian than “Celtic” as such, and is straightforward about using the myths for Cooper’s own purposes.
When I see “Celtic Fantasy,” I think similarly to Random22 (@11) re: it being a label excluding other things (Saxon fantasy, Norman fantasy, etc.). More, though, I think of “Celtic Fantasy” in the same way I think of “Steampunk”: most of the stories I have encountered graft the surface elements of the style onto a tale rather than having it be part of the tale’s core.
As an aside, I don’t think Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid series could rightly be considered “Celtic Fantasy” because although it involves a druid and the Irish gods, it ALSO involves, well, pretty much every other god and magical being in existence, as seen through the ancient druid’s eyes. It’s not “Celtic” so much as it contains a character who is a Celt. (It’s an enjoyable series, though. I recommend it.)
Mary Beth (@9) mentioned “The Book of Kells” so I’ll add only one more title for consideration: “The Earth Witch” by Louise Lawrence (published in the late 80s, set in modern Wales, but with echoes and influence of the myths and legends of ancient Wales – were it published today, it would be a YA/Teen book). It is very much a book rooted in Wales and reflecting that tension between the modern world, represented by the English and technology, and the older world which is the land itself.
Right in the heart. <3 I loved this.
When I think of Celtic fantasy, the first thing that comes to my mind is always Patricia Kennealy-Morrison and her series of books “The Keltiad”. They hold what to my mind has always been the heart of celtic fantasy. I read them over and over, I love them.
What you say here, every word. I find it very hard to name a so-called ‘Celtic’ fantasy that works for me. There are excellent books using tropes and tales from early Ireland, or early Wales, or early Scotland, but the vast majority of the mish-mash fictional tourism that comes under the label? No. Early Wales and Early Ireland were different lands with different traditions and languages and tales, yet far too much ‘Celtic’ fantasy treats them as interchangeable.
And then nearly all ‘Celtic’ fantasies are written by Americans. Some of them are people with Irish or Welsh or Scottish ancestors, but they don’t necessarily have the close visceral connexion that native Gaels and Celts have. The US writers who get it right, for me, anyway, are Evangeline Walton, whose retellings of the 4 Branches of the Mabinogi are redolent of a deep and committed respect for and understanding of the source materials, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books, which don’t claim any authenticity, and use what they borrow with wit and charm, and Katherine Kerr’s immaculately researched Deverry series, which works with material drawn from late Roman Brittany and sub-Roman Britain and shows a genuine sensitivity for the period and the societies it held.
I still don’t believe in Scathach. Boudicca isn’t an analogue for her: they are several centuries apart (if Scathach existed, which I doubt hugely) and they come from very different cultures. The Iceni and the Irish of early mediaeval Ulster are not the same peoples, not at all, any more than the 6th century Angles and Swedes were, despite speaking related languages and using objects that were similar to each other. (Or, indeed, any more than the French and Italians are today.)
I’m fascinated by all the citations of recent work — when I remember somebody asking at a panel in 1987 how we could cure SF of the flood of Celtic fantasy. (I snarkily suggested using a time machine to inoculate potatoes against blight — cf Bourke’s complaint that the subgenre is a creation of expatriates and foreigners.) I can’t remember titles from then, but there weren’t that many matter-of-Britain stories and urban fantasy was just beginning to appear.
@8: May doesn’t “blur the lines”; ISTM she treats our legends as coming from a stfictional history. Her stories were long enough after Campbell (JW, not Joseph) that psi was no longer a major thread in science fiction, but it was still treated as such rather than as fantasy.
@18
Apologies, I didn’t mean to run the two cultures together, rather I meant to imply that the odds of an exceptional female military figure arising every few hundred years would not be unexpected. Personally I see parallels between Boudicca and Joan of Arc, a mixture of strategic nous and figurehead status. I rather feel that a remarkable number of mythological figures and events have turned out in recent years to have a surprising amount of truth in them, if not in the fashion that legends might claim.
@19
Oh it is definitely SF, especially when you look at the rest 0f the Mileiu where it belongs, but it was heavily marketed in my neck of the woods as fantasy. That was probably a combination of the links to mythology, and skim reading of the plot by marketing ;)
Back on topic though, I also realised I completely ignored the most popular Celtic fantasy ever … Asterix!
After all, the Gauls and most of France and Spain were also Celtic before the Roman conquest. And we definitely need to refer to Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel, which also uses the Roman invasion of Provence as a backdrop.
I know one work I would class as Celtic is The Little Country, from Charles de Lint, but I’d hardly class him as writing Celtic fantasy. Rather he writes stories based in his culture, that of the expatriate and the baggage that comes with them, intended or no. Similar to Gaiman’s American Gods.
I wonder how much of the problem though is that what people might want from certain strains of fantasy is also deeply tied up in their ancestry, in cultural assumptions, and in aging, finding something that resonates with them and what they know of their oral traditions.
That, and occasionally you just want a simple heroic romp, and swords and wizards and heroic deeds does play better with Celts than with Norman Knights, though they get equally mangled in literature.
Could it be as simple as that America and England have dominated the western publishing world for most of last century, so their voices and attitudes have been heard the loudest? We’re seeing a lot more work emerging today from a wider variety of cultures, and a huge upswing in works translated into English, where for the longest time things only went the other way.
The thing that “Celtic fantasy” often misses (for me, Irish-born and a lover of Irish myth) is that the Celtic culture is very different to the Anglo-Saxon/Frankish culture that dominates most fantasy. In the Celtic world, the supernatural was always just a footstep away and always dangerous, even when (perhaps especially when) it was at its most appealing. More than that, the culture of the heroes who had a foot in both the natural and the supernatural world was an alien one, full of codes of behaviour and attitudes that would make little sense to us.
At its best, the History Channel’s Vikings, has done very well at representing the sheer alienness of that point of view. For an insight into just how different from us the Celts (specifically the Irish) were, the best you could do would be to read Thomas Keneally’s translation of The Tain, the greatest of the Irish epics, which is as close to the original text as you can get.
The best definition of “Celtic fantasy” has to be Diana Wynne Jones’ in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Because it does skewer the pseudo-Irish/Welsh/Scottish (never Manx, have you noticed?) fantasy that bears no relation to the actual countries, languages, cultures or mythologies.
“PanCeltic Tours are normally taken seperately from the rest of Fantasyland. Here the map will be of only one country, which has a Welsh name, and show towns called things like Dun Bhlaioinaidbth (pronounced Dublin) or Glas Uedhaoth (pronounced Glasgow) and rather more mountains. The tour will however take place in the usual way, except that porridge will largely replace stew and there will be rather more magic. But the weather will be a great deal worse. When it is not raining, everything will be hidden (shrouded) in mist. If you go on one of these Tours, you will not always find it easy to know either what is going on or what people are talking about. The Mist seems to get into everyone’s brains.”
Maybe it’s because of where I come from – being one of those expatriates you seem to sneer at – but I frankly found this essay rather condescending and obnoxious as well as rather … odd. (I am btw a Canadian of English, Scottish, Irish, Norwegian and German ancestry).
You begin by admitting that “Celtic” is a fluid and inexact label that can properly be applied to a multitude of tribes which spanned almost the entire continent of Europe and a millennia or two of time. You then narrow it down – at least in terms of modern “language and culture groups” – to half a dozen languages spoken by some of the current inhabitants of a large part of the British Isles and much of the coastal area of Western Europe.
You then discuss “Celtic fantasies” — and after noting that two main strands are urban fantasies and reworkings of the Arthurian legends (which were originally based in England, Wales and Brittany and had nothing whatsoever to do with Ireland) — you dismiss them all for not being “Irish” enough for you to accept them as “real Celtic”.
In particular, you dismiss many of them (and in particular ALL of the urban fantasies that draw partly on Celtic wellsprings) on the grounds that: “Celtic fantasy as a genre feature is a creation of expatriates and foreigners: it simplifies and romanticises, the dulled edge of a knife that never cuts the ones who produce it because they’re not close enough to bleed.”
So a Roman Catholic who lives in Ireland “understands” pre-Christian Celtic culture enough to be able to write “Celtic fantasy” … but someone of Scottish, Irish, Welsh or Breton ancestry who lives in North America (and may well still speak their original tongue more than the person living in Ireland does) is a “foreigner” who can no longer qualify as a “real Celt” and therefore can’t hope to understand the pagan Celts of Western Europe as well as the Irish Catholic can?
Uh huh…
Perhaps Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Last Light of the Sun?
@20, if we include de Lint’s The Little Country, what about Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks?