THE FOLIO SOCIETY

The myths of this creative warrior people are imbued with their untrammelled imagination – champions clash, impossible tasks are undertaken and monsters wreak destruction upon the land...

The Celts were a warrior people who swept through Europe two thousand years before Christ. They came from the foothills of the Himalayas, pillaging the Greeks, who called them 'keltoi' (the strange people) and ravaging the Romans with their guerrilla warfare. They created some of Europe's earliest and most beautiful art, and they told amazing stories. When at last the Romans drove them out to the very fringes of the empire - to Ireland, the Isle of Man, to Brittany, Cornwall, Wales and the Orkneys - their stories went with them, shifting their shape to meet the needs of far-flung communities, but always imbued with the fierce brilliance of their untrammelled imagination.

This marvellous book draws on the whole range of Celtic legend to tell the story of these remarkable people. The result is one of the most varied and brilliant mythologies of all, rich with giants and dragons, and ranging from heroic epics to flowery fantasies, from folktale simplicity to chivalrous sophistication. In the adventures of Cuchulainn and Finn MacCool, in love-stories like 'Tristan and Iseult', in tales like 'The Island of the Ocean God', 'The Shadowy One' and 'The Princess of the Shining Star', human emotions precipitate triumph and disaster on a grand scale, and, woven in with the fairy-tale elements, the supernatural powers, is a portrait of a real society. At the great feasts where alliances are made, marriages arranged, illicit seductions accomplished and treacheries plotted, we see the Celts in all their barbaric magnificence: from the challenges of champions to the pillow talk of kings and queens, every story has the ring of a sword upon a shield.