Ireland is a land steeped in story. Generations of Irish people have narrated their relationship with this island – its people, its landscapes, its monuments and sacred stone temples, its birds and animals, its unique climate – through myth, legend, folklore and song. This rich tradition of storytelling and mythmaking began in the very distant past, in the Stone Age. Thousands of years ago, during the Neolithic, people began to construct huge stone monuments here.
Many centuries later, when people first began to write things down, their manuscripts were brimming with stories about monuments and sacred sites that are still well known to us in the twenty-first century. Something about the eminent places of old captivated audiences in the Middle Ages. Those medieval stories are peppered with Biblical references and Christian themes, but when you peel back the layers there is a distinct sense of something very ancient.

Leading us into a mystical past, he finds a world not dead but vibrantly alive, an Ireland whose mythic luminaries, archetypes and metaphors are resuscitated and interrogated to reveal their timeless wisdom. There is a reason these stories survived centuries and even millennia of change, and that in the twenty-first century, brimming with existential crises and challenges, they retain an immediate, urgent relevance.

The legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann, Ireland’s prehistoric deities, are immutably infused with the belief that although they retreated beyond this world to another realm – accessible through ancient portals of stone and earth – they never really went away. In attempting to find out why, Murphy believes the stage has been set for a Third Battle of Moytura, an epic confrontation between darkness and light in the modern era foreshadowed by myth that is almost as old as the hills themselves.

In Ireland, myths never die or vanish. They sleep for a while, like the Tuatha Dé Danann, until they are called forth again to usher in a new age of renewal and enlightenment.
Anthony Murphy is a journalist and the author of 10 books on ancient Ireland, including Dronehenge: The Story Behind the Remarkable Discovery at Newgrange; Mythical Ireland: New Light on the Ancient Past and Newgrange: Monument to Immortality. He lives in Drogheda and manages the website www.mythicalireland.com.
Trade