Most books about Irish myth are either too dry to enjoy or too eager to believe. This one refuses both.
The Morrígan washing the armour of men about to die. Cú Chulainn lashed upright to a standing stone so he could meet death on his feet. A whole race of gods retreating underground to become the fairy-folk. These are among the greatest stories Europe ever told ? and Ireland left the earliest and largest record of them in the entire Celtic world. Almost none of it survives anywhere else. All of it survives here.
The Hollow Hills tells that inheritance in full: the coming of the Túatha Dé Danann and their wars at Mag Tuired, Manannán's otherworld across the western sea, Cú Chulainn and the great cattle raid of the Táin, the sorrow of Deirdre, Finn and the Fianna, the doomed kings and the goddess who makes them ? and the long afterlife of it all in the saints, the festivals, and the pumpkin lantern of a modern Halloween.
And it tells it honestly. Every Irish myth reaches us through three Irelands ? the pagan world that believed it, the Christian monks who wrote it down, and the Victorians who romanticised it. This book renders each tale at full narrative force, then reads the seams between those layers: what is genuinely ancient, what the monks invented, and where the record simply stops.
A mythology to be delighted by, and a guide you can actually trust.
