#IT'S REAL CELTICIST BACKSTORY HOURS HERE

[margridarnauds]

How did you get into Irish mythology? :0

Funny story, that!  

I was about....thirteen or so, working on my OCs, as you do when you’re thirteen. And I decided that an immortal kelpie OC of mine was going to have had this epic backstory, and so I wanted to toss in the Fomoire as a group of people that she’d had dealings with, because I remembered them from a Weird N Wild Creatures card that I’d collected when I was, like, 9. 

(Note: This is NOTHING like how they’re described in the myths, but MOVING ON.) 

To a certain extent, it almost feels inevitable, looking back. Like a lot of my colleagues, I had an interest in the Arthurian myths growing up, especially Morgan Le Fay, and even though not everyone who does Arthurian studies does Celtic Studies (I WISH) and vice versa....there’s overlap. I was REALLY into some nerdy stuff as a kid already - Gargoyles was my SHOW growing up, and, even though it’s much heavily Shakespeare/Arthurian inspired, I think it kind of set me up for it, along with Magic Treehouse. I’d already fallen deeply in love with the world of the Ancient Egyptians, the world of the Romans, the world of the Tudors....ironically, The Pirate Queen was one of the very first musicals I really got into and, at the time, I kind of...glazed over the historical accuracy because all the different clan names confused me. I remember, faintly, reading about Finn Mac Cool and the Children of Lir in various kids’ books, but....that one writing decision was really what ended up pushing me in.

So, I did what everyone does - Went on a Wikipedia deep dive, stumbled on Bres, thought “Oh, this guy is interesting”, got into a BUNCH of questionable-at-best sources, fell on my ass multiple times, read Lady Gregory’s “Gods and Fighting Men”, fell on my ass some more, and then found Mary Jones and the CELT database. From there, I just....read everything I could get my hands on. I would spend HOURS typing in various figures’ names into the search engine at CELT, trying to get all the sources I could get my hands on. (I also realized around this time that, ACTUALLY, for a variety of reasons, Bres was a Mood and I loved him.) Even the legal texts because, after all, if I was going to write about this, I NEEDED to have that legal background. I kind of feel like Cath Maige Tuired was the best possible starting place because, while it was a little scarring to read the uncensored version when I did...it’s also the myth that’s probably MOST like a modern fantasy novel, as well as having a lot of parallels to other mythologies, so if you’re already in love with, say, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia (and I WAS. So much), then it’s a kind of natural fit. 

Then...when I was about 17 or so, I read John Carey’s article “Myth and Mythography in Cath Maige Tuired” on Scribd, and it was like “...wait? People can actually STUDY this? As a job?” 

It was like a light bulb came on.

From there, I started to kind of screen more carefully - I looked at the stuff done by university presses, I looked at getting my hands on more primary sources and more analysis. I got Celtic Heroic Age, I got Ireland’s Immortals almost when it was hot off the press, I slowly started to build my library from there. When I was completing my undergrad, I was given the choice of my topic of Senior Capstone Project, and I chose Irish Mythology as a topic, and somehow that got me into applying for a grad program at a formal program and actually moving to Ireland for the sake of my degree. 

The reason I’m saying this is because I know that, for many people, they don’t think that they can get into the field. Whether it’s because they don’t think they’re good enough or because they think that because they’re not from a country with a Celtic language or their interest is “cringey” that there’s no way for them to really get into this. And most people in the field, I feel, kind of feed into that by sanitizing the weird parts of our interest in this. “Ah, yes, I fell in love with the myths because I’ve always had an interest in mythology.” And, yeah, that would be true. But it’s not the whole story. (Also, I know that one of the best and brightest of our field has admitted that he got his start by pretending to be Merlin as a kid, in a formal article, so.) Like, we all got here because we fell in love with it, I don’t really feel the need to hide that I fell in love with it as a teenager and it never let go of me, especially because, tbh, it gave me an edge to a certain extent because it means that I know about quite a few texts that no one really cares about. 

Also why I try to offer as many suggestions as I can for getting into this: I remember VERY well what it was like to dive into the deep end with no direction. In some ways, I totally fell into the field ass-backwards. 

Also, incidentally: I ended up scrapping the OC.