This giant, delightful tome showcases a selection of legend stories from each region of the British isles. Ancient tales can feel tedious when you get to the parts where the same series of events is repeated, typically in threes, sometimes going on for multiple paragraphs each time. Setting aside these and other more mundane tales, many of the other stories were distinctly captivating and beautiful. ( )

The Love of Fand was just a goddamn mess of a story and it wasn't even compellingly written. I read a few of the other stories, none of which were especially entertaining or well-written, so I'm just gonna take the L on this one.

I'm really disappointed, I love mythology and really enjoyed the episodes about Cu Chulainn in the podcast Myths & Legends (highly recommend that podcast by the way) and decided to try reading this as I had seen it floating around in the past when I was looking for Celtic mythology recs. Ironic that it's the Cu Chulainn story in this book that made me decide to put it down.

I appreciate the authors efforts, and Celtic mythology definitely deserves to share some of the spotlight with the more popular myths out there, but... I'm not going to put myself through reading something I'm not enjoying.

Maybe I'll eventually continue, but for now I'm putting it down. ( )

Useful source of celtic stories and legends but from a oral performance perspective raw material only that needs a lot of work to make them live for the listener as they once would have. ( )