Do you know what happened to Deirdre?

Deirdre of the Sorrows
 It's one of the most famous tales in Irish mythology, but so many Irish people don't know  anything about it. It's like a cross between Rapunzel and True Romance, Bonny and Clyde and the little mermaid, only it's hundreds of years older and much more bloody.
It's the story of a howl from the belly of a pregnant woman. She was preparing food for her visiting high king, Conchobor, when the unborn baby within her let out a craven screech, unlike anything anyone had ever heard. It was enough to set his soothsayer on his feet.

"This child is cursed," he said, "she will be born too beautiful for this world. She will cause horrors and bloodshed, war and mayhem." He took his seat again at the table. "It's what no one wants to hear, but you need to kill her now, before it's too late." The mother was horrified, letting out a screech of her own and dropping her serving dish onto the tiles, but the king stood by her. He promised to take the child away when she was born, raise her as his own in seclusion from the outside world where she could do harm and, when she was of an age, marry her and make her his queen. It was what no one wanted in particular, but it was the high king's will, he had spoken and so it was decided. 

It was many years later that Deirdre was out in the enclosed yard, in the grounds of the high  king's castle with her handmaid and the conversation had come around to talking about men, once again. In all her years, Deirdre had never seen a man. None had been allowed next or near her by the king, to provide against the horrible prophecy coming true. But still, she had in her mind the kind of man she would have preferred to the king. She pointed out a raven, drinking blood from the snow in a nearby field.
"When I'm of age, I'll have a man with skin as white as that snow, hair as black as that raven's feathers and cheeks as red as that blood, and I'll accept no other."
"You're promised to the king," the handmaid protested, "he's raised you to become a great queen."
"We shall see," Deirdre said. 

It wasn't much longer until she found a man with exactly that appearance. He was working for the king in a nearby field. A young man by the name of Naoise, one of the sons of Uislu. Right away, she ran over to him and jumped on his back, refusing to let go until he agreed to run way with her and protect her from whatever happened. At first, Naoise refused, knowing full well Deirdre was promised to the king, but the more he looked at her, the more he realised he was already falling in love, and was ready to do anything for her. Finally, Naoise agreed to run away and take Deirdre with him. He recruited his brothers and formed a formidable party of warriors, fleeing into hiding from wherever the high king could find them. The king was furious, and dispatched a crew of ferocious trackers and killers to find them, headed up by Fergus, his most prized warrior, who hunted them to the very edges of the land and even as far as Scotland.

Finally, an offer was sent to Deirdre, Naoise and his brothers. The High King would spare their lives if only they would return to his castle with Fergus. Well, they deliberated. It seemed risky, but truly, they had no place left to go really, lest they stray into lands they had no knowledge of. Deirdre agreed and they gang were escorted back to the High King's castle. What awaited them there, however, was not forgiveness and certainly not amnesty. Naoise and his brothers were killed immediately by Fergus and his men, and dumped in a large pit, which was covered over quickly with fresh soil. Deirdre was left a prisoner again, only now it was to get even worse.

The tale ends with Deirdre aboard a chariot with Conchobor, the high king, and his chief warrior, Fergus.
"Deirdre," Conchobor asked, "whom do you hate most in all the world? Is it me?"
"No, sire, it isn't. Not quite."
"Who then?"
"Why, it's Fergus. The man who murdered my beloved and his brothers."
"Very well then. As a punishment for trying to escape, you shall be shared between myself and Fergus for the rest of your days. "

This final horror was too much for Deirdre. She looked ahead and spied a low hanging rock approaching and then, when it arrived, she raised her neck so it would catch her head and take it clean off. This was her final revenge against her king. 

So there you have it. Not the cheeriest of tales, but then this is Ireland. If you were interested enough, I'm launching Sour. my novel based on the myth at a bookshop in Dublin on November 5th. More details here if you're interested.

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WB Yeats and what we talk about when we talk about Ireland.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and Fionn McCumhail has precious little to do with the price of onions. You’re probably never more Irish than when you’re stuck watching windscreen wipers on the commute home, listening to Sean Moncrieff. But if someone were to ask you what it means to be Irish you might not say that.  The idea of a national identity is something we probably only encounter at the match, when some local band makes it big abroad or when we slate ourselves over how little we protest compared to elsewhere. In other words, it’s only really when we’re set beside another country that we see what makes us different. Our national identity for almost the last hundred odd years is the story of us differentiating ourselves from another country and no one had more say in that than the poet WB Yeats, who celebrates his 150^th Birthday this year.

            Different people take different things from the old stories. Cuchulainn has appeared in everything from the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book to Final Fantasy video games. The Táin has been illustrated by Louis Le Brocquy and re-told by Thomas Kinsella and Ciaran Carson, not to mention the album by Horselips. It’s the same way you’d explain to a tourist how Fionn McMuchaill built the Giant’s Causeway. These stories are still alive in strange and sometimes very modern ways. The phrase; ‘let me sing you the song of my people’ is an internet meme some long time now but, to paraphrase Voltaire, if there wasn’t any song any more, it would be necessary to invent one. While we all know Yeat’s role in this, the thing people don’t tend to talk about too much is what a singularly strange man he actually was, even among poets. Yeats had this massive role to play in what Ireland means and perhaps the largest influence on him came from the occult, which is something often briefly touched on but never really discussed. This is interesting because without this unusual obsession he would probably never have achieved what he did. It was the combination of all three of his obsessions: nationalism, poetry and the occult that lead him to playing the role he did in defining how we thought of ourselves as a culture.

 It was in 1884 that Yeats read a book called The Occult World by AP Sinnett.  The book aimed to introduce Theosophy to Europe from the East and pretty much right away Yeats became convinced of the reality of this aspect of the occult and in particular of the teachings of one Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a world famous mystic who had founded the Theosophical Society based on what were up till then secret Indian and Tibetan teachings. Theosophy is an esoteric pursuit which places a single, divine, universal mind operating behind all teachings and cultures and determining all events, all of which an adept much work to uncover for himself. “The mystical world is the centre of all I do and all I think and all I write”, Yeats wrote in 1894. It seemed it was maybe a little too much at the centre of things for him. Yeats was eventually excommunicated from the Theosophical Society by Blavatsky for taking part in practical experiments, something strictly forbidden. As a reaction to that, his next move was to join up with a group called The Order of the Golden Dawn, a much more hands-on mystic sect which numbered among its ranks Aleister Crowley, probably history’s most famous Satanist. This group encouraged members to actively experiment in order to demonstrate their power over the material universe and Yeats experimented freely on his friends and acquaintances, writing of having undergone some pretty shocking visions. The thing about all of this is how often throughout his life he mentions this kind of thing as a chief influence on this thought. Thankfully it wasn’t the only one.

                   Around the same time, Yeats became one of the followers of Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League. The league strove for the De-Anglicisation of Irish culture and the promotion of a national Celtic identity. Yeats thought the best way to do this was to write the old stories of the Irish people, but in English, the language in which, he said “modern Ireland thinks and does its business”. According to Yeats, folk art "is indeed the oldest of the aristocracies of thought ... it is the soil where all great art is rooted." Combining this belief with his fascination with the occult led to Yeats focusing on the supernatural aspects of Irish folk life, in contrast with many other writers of the time. Clearly still under the influence of the Theosophists, Yeats continued to announce things like: “The fairies are the lesser spiritual moods of the universal mind, wherein every mood is a soul and every thought is a body." Yeats devoted the book Celtic Twilight to taking this particular aspect of folklore and transforming it into poetry.  His book Mythologies delves deeper, incorporating his own visions of spirits, while at the same time helping to establish him as the preeminent collector of Irish folklore.

                   To say Yeats arrived at the national poetic agenda alone is a little unfair. There were actually plenty of segmented little groups working away at the cause.  One such group was called the Young Irelanders; Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy numbering among them, and they worked hard at trying to promote national poetry through the romantic ballad, which they saw as the supreme form of public art. These were not the songs of the people, but instead more of a high-brow invention, intended more for the parlours and the salons. Yeats was introduced to the Young Irelanders and their books by the revolutionary John O’Leary and by that time their aim was not just national ballads, but to encourage a national identity, unifying the country behind a single cultural idea. Yeats straight away realised that these men weren’t anything like great poets and seemed to believe a lot of things contrary to his own views. In his lecture “Nationality and Literature”, published in 1893, Yeats states that all national literature is maturing from epic to lyrical, like a tree which “grows from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity” A young nation, not yet fully formed and yet to achieve national and cultural unity, is still at the epic stage. It’s the epic which forms a unity and defines social structure, rather than the lyrical. Yeats saw the epic legends as the ideal way to represent a fledgling social consciousness as they are “made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow process of modification and adaptation, to express its loves and its hates, its likes and its dislikes.” Ancient art would be a unifying national force because it speaks to the people’s unconscious identity. Yeats believed the way to achieve this in modern times was to rekindle a relationship with the folk and mythological themes with which, we know, he had a particular relationship.

                   It was around then that Yeats began calling himself “The Celt” and put himself forward as a kind of update on the traditional idea of the Celtic bard. Celts had already been given a special place in the zeitgeist at that time by people like Matthew Arnold, who, in a culture awash with dichotomies like masculine/feminine, emotional /intellectual and natural /industrial, ascribed to Celtic culture a feminine, natural and emotional character as opposed to the masculine/ utilitarian Teuton, and within that Celtic culture, bards were a kind of custodian of culture, knowledge and even prophesy. The thing was, William Butler didn’t actually have any Celtic blood in him whatsoever. He came from the middle class Protestant Ascendancy. To get around this, he rejected an ethnic idea of the Celt and instead tapped into the idea of a hazier, cultural ancestry, combining Theosophy and Paganism and claiming it as “the only true religion of the Irish.”

                   What you start seeing in Yeat’s poetry and plays from then on is a combination of the heroic, the epic and the transcendental. There’s another world, another condition to be achieved. I’ll stop here and flag the fact that this pretty much the MO of every practicing religion since the dawn of time too, but there are singular Theosophical elements you begin to notice emerging. The most obvious example of his combining poetry, nationalism and the occult is the poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times.”, written in 1892. After claiming his place in a list of national poets, he continues to link Ireland’s past with what is to come and highlights the role of art in this. Artists are the only ones who can talk about “things discovered in the deep/where only body’s laid asleep” and their work alone can bring about a supernatural world “For the elemental creatures go/About my table to and fro,”.  The occult is mixed in with the mythological, pagan and artistic with “elemental beings,” and “Faeries dancing under the moon/Druidic land, Druidic tune.” The idea of Ireland as a mystical, other-worldly place, peaceful, feminine, emotional and profoundly “Celtic”, far from the grinding, industrial horrorshow of Europe, becomes a core theme in poems like ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and “Into the Twilight”.  The transcendence of the individual into this quasi-spiritual realm doesn’t only mirror the nation transcending into freedom and cultural identity, but also the transcendence of the world into a higher supernatural plane. Oisin venturing to Tir Na N’og is another example, as is Cuchulainn’s Fight With The Sea.

                   As he grew older, Yeats tried to distance himself a little from the pagan and occult themes in his work, from the stories of automatic writing and the famous séances, maybe after criticism from people like Auden, calling it “the deplorable spectacle of a grown man obsessed with mumbo-jumbo of India.” I happen to think it makes his work more interesting, more layered and if we really are thinking of Yeats when we think of Irish Mythology and Irish culture as a whole, asks more questions about the role the occult and Theosophy had to play. Maybe Dan Brown could get a thriller out of it.  

Alan Walsh.

 This post was originally for the blog over at the Irish Literary Festival

If you enjoyed that, I've written a novel, Sour, retelling an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

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Why Ireland's most famous female character is also a feminist icon.

That Deirdre of the Sorrows is still one of the most famous of the old stories in Irish folklore speaks volumes, I think, for how we see the downtrodden, the innocent and, in particular, women in Irish culture. That might come off a glib and sweeping statement but you have to wonder has all that much changed since the story was first told in Pre-Christian Ireland.

Setting the scene
The story goes that Deirdre was trouble before she was even born. The mystic druid, Cathbad, on hearing shrieking from within her mother's womb, advised the baby be killed, predicting it would be too beautiful and bring war and mayhem to the men of Ireland. Conchobar Mac Nessa, the king of Ulster, at this point steps in and takes the child as his own, as I guess  kings were able to do then, promising to keep her safe from causing any trouble.

The tables turn
Conchobar brings Deirdre up in seclusion, with only an old maid for company, with the intention of marrying her himself when she's old enough. Now, so far this is all tapping into some pretty on-the-nose themes of women as property, women as the downfall of men, women as helpless to decide their own destiny and also as a gateway to some kind of chaos if left unchecked, which rings true with a lot of older myth, only even going back to as far as apples in gardens. What's interesting next is the turn the story takes. The scene is set, Chekov's pistols are mounted securely on the mantelpiece, but now we start seeing things from Deirdre's perspective.

Deirdre takes control
She tells the old maid that she dreams of meeting a young man with hair as black as a raven, skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. Fair enough, this could be seen as her only character motivation being defined by men, which doesn't help us as far as the Bechdel test goes, but I guess these were different times. The old maid, Leabharcham, says she might be able  to help out here and introduces Deirdre to a young warrior called Naoise, from the Uisneach family. Well, right off the bat, Naoise wants no part of this, knowing she's promised to the king, but it's not like he doesn't have eyes and can't see how outrageously beautiful the girl is. She finally convinces him to run away with her by jumping on his back and shaming him into doing it. What I find interesting about this is it shows her taking control. There are strong, powerful female characters in Irish mythology, Queen Medb being the foremost example, but here we see a young woman, controlled and dominated by men, breaking free of her own will and bending that of a young man to do what she wants. Sadly, this doesn't work out that well.

The action part
Conchobar learns of the escape and rallies troops to chase Naoise and Deirdre down. Meanwhile, Naoise has called in his brothers, some of the best warriors in the country, and the gang of them cavort from county to county trying to hide from Conchobor's soldiers, finally straying to as far as Scotland. Knowing this could go on forever, Conchobar offers a truce, saying Deirdre and Naoise and all his brothers can come back to Ireland and even back to his castle, without threat of retaliation, to work things out. Unfortunately,  when they arrive, Conchobar has his chief warrior, Fergus, kill Naoise and all his brothers and immediately marries Deirdre against her will. 

Things get worse. They won't get better. 
The story finishes up with Deirdre in a chariot, riding along between both King Conchobar and the warrior Fergus. She's defeated, she's broken, she's owned again. She took her shot and it couldn't have gone worse. The king turns to Deirdre and asks her, "Is there anyone in all of Ireland you could possibly hate more than me?"
"Yes." She replies, "Fergus, who killed Naoise and his brothers."
"Then," says Conchobar, "I will share you with him, as a punishment."  Here's where it ends. Deirdre, on hearing this, can't bear to be owned and shared and passed around. It's been said Deirdre represents a woman's need for independence, she expresses that here in the most powerful way imaginable. As the chariot is pulled along, it approaches a low hanging rock, just as it moves beneath, Deirdre raises her head, catches  the rock and is decapitated. The tale ends here.  Tragically, Deirdre has finally asserted her will in the ultimate way. She won't be owned. She won't be made queen against her will. Nor will she be shared. 

Women in Ireland.
Interestingly enough, at the time the story first emerged, women in Ireland enjoyed a position which would have been the envy of those in Greece or Rome or the East. They could own and breed livestock and, thus, make  a living for themselves. They weren't completely subjected to the man and his family on marriage either. Yet they were still unable, as were men, to own property, it being owned by the king, and were still trapped within the conventions of a society still totally governed and operated by men. Deirdre's attempt to break free of that and her final, devastating act, represent a struggle for independence still manifested today across the world and here at home in a multitude of  unresolved issues. 


If you're interested in Deirdre, maybe you'll like my novel, which retells her story as a modern murder story:



Image courtesy of Druid Synge

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Cuchulainn Reinvented: Guardians of the Galaxy, Manga and 5 more bizarre appearances.

Most people know Cuchulain as Ireland's most famous mythological hero, defender of Ulster, warrior against armies and international lover ( he had a thing going on the side with a Scottish girl - worth looking up) but what most people don't realise is how Cuchullain has been re-imagined in modern pop culture. I've just written a novel re-imagining the different 
cycles of Irish mythology into one small modern Irish town, so I thought I'd look this up and I wasn't disappointed.

1) Guardians of the Galaxy.
In the original comics on which the movie was based, Cuchulainn ( pictured above), The Irish Wolfhoud, is resurrected in the 31st century ( thanks to magic from the Book of Kells no less) to  fight alongside the Guardians and protect the earth into infinity. 

First appearing in Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #3, he's a "master of all forms of archaic combat" and on at least one occasion has to actually defeat the Guardians themselves in combat. His weapons appear to be what he calls his "throwing stick" ( the Gae Bolg ) and his ignorance of 31st century culture seems to be his only weakness.

Photo courtesy of Marvel Comics.




2) Slaine.

Photo Courtesy of 2000 AD

Slaine is an impossibly muscular and singularly brutal warrior from the pages of 2000 AD in Britain. In truth, Slaine is a mixture of both Conan the Barbarian and Cuchulainn, but the entire strip is set against a backdrop of Celtic mythology and in moments of particular trouble, Slaine descends into what he calls his 'warp spasm' which is unmistakably the ríastrad of Cúchulainn ( down to the one protruding eye ), as well as carring his barbed spear the Gae Bolg.

Slaine has been hand painted by a slew of impressive comic-book illustrators, none as famous as Simon Bisley, who imagined Cuchulainn as a monstrous landscape of blood flecked muscles and unkempt hair.


3) Final Fantasy.

Image Courtesy of  Square Enix

Cuchulainn makes a pretty bizarre appearance in Final Fantasy XII as a bloated green monster, though his profile does say he was once fair and beautiful. He's the first demon players have to defeat. Despite his nickname being 'the impure' he actually becomes an ally if you defeat him. 

You kinda get the impression the game developers randomly looked up International mythological hero names and went at re-purposing them without even a glance at who they actually were ( Shiva seems to have been done a particular injustice ). 



4) Gargoyles.

Image Courtesy of Disney

This is the Disney version of the Hound of Ulster. In the second season of the Disney cartoon, the characters encounter a young Irishman who turns out to be Cuchulainn reincarnated. There's a bit of weirdness then with a Banshee and a giant worm and defending something that seems to follow the kind of lines only children are sophisticated enough to grasp. 

Pretty dull rendition when compared to the previous though. 





5) Political Murals. 

Photo courtesy of Norman Craig ( Flickr) 

It's perhaps not surprising for a hero credited with defending Ulster against all the other armies of Ireland ( often single-handedly) that he'd eventually be claimed by the politics of his home province. Often used in some pretty spectacular looking loyalist murals, Cuchulainn takes on an almost martyr like appearance but one of pretty big, if divisive, cultural significance. 



6) Megami Tensei 

Photo Courtesy of Atlus, Cave 

Another pretty bizarre Japanese video game, Cuchulainn is a demon who can be summoned to defeat other enemies. He actually appears in many, many versions of this game ( even once as Setanta, his boyhood name ). You'd really have to wonder at the thinking behind leveraging the character for this kind of thing. 



7) Tir Na Nog

Photo courtesy of Gargoyle games. 

Yet another weird video game, this one for the Commodore 64 all the way back in 1985 ( before that for the Spectrum and Amstrad). Cuchulainn essentially has to wander Tir na Nog collecting items and solving puzzles. Dun Darach is another game released in 1985 for the Spectrum which was essentially a prequel to this. 



To be honest, I'd imagine there are even more out there. In my own novel, Cuchulainn is reinvented as a traveller, Cuckoo, living peaceably with his wife after a lifetime of incredible fighting feats, which I thought was odd enough before discovering Final Fantasy. This has all prompted me to check out how other Irish Mythological characters have fared across popular media. I'll be posting more soon hopefully. Has anyone else seen anything out there? 
  








If you're interested in this, maybe you'll like my own novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder mystery:

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How modern mythology connects people from different cultures

I was living in London when I started reading the old Irish stories again. I had gone there for work and had started missing home pretty hard. It’s a common thing for expats to try to reclaim a little of their identity by tuning into the radio for familiar accents, or listening to the bands making their name back in Whelan’s. I did both anyhow.

When I mentioned I was reading the old stories again, people would invariably ask me to tell one. This could be in a pub, in a friend’s flat late at night, on a park bench. I was working at a small design company at the edge of Soho. I was working mainly on code, which I hated, being a designer, and was finding myself a little out of place in the city.

The work was pretty intensive but the people were unusually friendly and at lunchtimes some of us might venture down to a pretty little park just off Tottenham Court Road and take our sandwich in the sunshine. They were from all over, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, Slovenia, and they all took a particular interest in my book of stories. They all missed their homes the same way.

The story which came to me the easiest and I told the best each time was Deirdre of the Sorrows. Probably because it’s so evocative of so many other tales: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, practically any story where there’s a damsel rescused by a young prince, only in the Irish version Deirdre is no mere damsel, she’s not rescued by any prince and it certainly doesn’t end happily.

Maybe it was the finale that made me enjoy the telling of it. How people would recoil, shocked. How they’d comment on the bleak Irish outlook.

There was that moment of silence after the end of it, in the sunshine, with the bees hovering by our half-eaten salad rolls. People were waiting to be told everything was going to work out. Perhaps it was this which inspired me to take the story and place it in today’s Ireland, which hasn’t seemed quite as bleak in quite a time.

I wanted to write a thriller, I wanted it to talk about the country today, the issues at hand, but I wanted it to remain faithful to the strangeness and shock of the original. For this reason I had the story told by a Puca, a supernatural creature from mythic tales, who speaks coarsely but objectively.

The story of Deirdre tells of a very young girl promised to the high king, Conchobor, who raises her from infancy to be his wife. Deirdre runs away from the king having met a young man and the king chases the couple, along with his brothers, as far as Scotland. He promises them safe passage home only to murder all the young men when they get there. The king then asks of Deirdre who it is she hates most in the world and she answers Fergus, the man who killed her beloved. He tells her that the punishment for her flight will be that he will share her with Fergus. Her reaction to this, and the end of the tale, comes when she’s riding in a chariot with both men and raises her head in sight of a low hanging rock , so that she’s decapitated.

The story deals with youth, in particular the mistreatment of the young, power, property and oppression. These are ordinary enough themes, but seem especially relevant in the Ireland of 2014. It’s relevant enough that another writer, Eamon Carr, was publishing another modern retelling of it, Deirdre Unforgiven, with the Doire Press at the same time I was with Creativia. His version is in verse and uses Deirdre to convey his outlook on the Troubles.

More interesting again is how these two reinventions are actually just the tip of the iceberg. People are retelling the old stories over and over in newer and more diverse ways. Last year Will Sliney wrote and illustrated Celtic Warrior: The Legend of Cú Chulainn, a graphic novel telling the story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge for a young generation. This followed on the heels of previous publications like Brian Boru: Ireland’s Warrior King by Damien Goodfellow and Tomm Moore’s Oscar-nominatedSecret of Kells, An Táin by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh and Róisín Dubh by Rob Curley and Maura McHugh.

There’s a sense that this isn’t simply a rehash of the leprechaun museum or twee Temple Bar bodhráns reeling in the tourist pennies, but that people are telling the stories as a part of who they are, the same way I was in the park, or when a few visiting friends from home in Greystones and I tried patching together the story of Oisin and Tir na nOg on the last Tube home to Bayswater to the bemusement of an otherwise sober carriage.

These stories were crafted over centuries by master storytellers. They come laden with historical and cultural significance and work as a touchstone for something real, a foundation speaking to us about ourselves whereas so much of modern storytelling, in whichever form, comes over as purely commercially driven or as a mere lightweight escape.

After I had finished in the park that day, Amir, who was from Pakistan, told a tale from his own culture. I don’t want to give the impression here that we habitually sat in circles on the grass, singing one another the songs of our people. These were guys who spent hours arguing over why Aaron Lennon wouldn’t ever make it into the Spurs first team or rating girls in the park out of 10 (I know).

We were by no means cultural attachés, but that particular lunchtime something struck which left us feeling a little closer to one another and nourished for the experience. Amir told the story of Heer and Ranjha. It’s a Punjabi tale, from his district, and is one of the world’s most famous and tragic love stories. Naturally I was too ignorant to ever have heard of it. In fact, none of us had. He told it fantastically. It’s about young lovers kept apart by a powerful, jealous rival, and it ends just as tragically as Deirdre. It’s well worth looking up online. Heer and Ranjha was remade as a film called Rockstar a couple of years ago in Bollywood.

Mythology and folklore are enjoying a resurgance internationally also. Guy Ritchie has just been taken on to direct a series of King Arthur movies. Television shows like Once Upon a Time and Grimm are reimagining the familiar fairytales of Europe in modern, urban settings. The latest series of Percy Jackson books from Rick Riordan tell tales from Greek mythology from the point of view of Percy. Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes by Cory O’Brien, which retells myths in casual online IM speak, became an Amazon bestseller (his website is well worth checking out incidentally: bettermyths.com – even though he doesn’t have any Irish ones on there). I watched an episode of Supernaturalrecently which featured changelings, a staple of old Irish fairy stories, as wicked mother-eating monsters. I won’t even talk about Thor and Loki.

There might be a strong smack of fan-fiction to all of this. Tapping a cultural heritage already very familiar feels quite like standing on the shoulders of giants. It certainly felt that way to me when I wrote It’s The Stars Will Be Our Lamps. At the same time I don’t happen to think it’s all that far from people sat around fires listening to the storyteller down the centuries. The good stories stick around and they always will in some or other form. It’s up to us to find new ways to tell them.

This article was originally published in The Irish Times website

If you're interested in Irish mythology, maybe you'll like my novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

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