hey i hope its ok to say i originally found your blog because of the fate series. i've gradually been picking up the original lore and text as i've gotten interested and reading through your blog has really motivated me to pick up those books i got years ago! but just wanted to say i really enjoy reading your thoughts and your blog! (and honestly i'd think it'd be 'cool' story-wise if cΓΊ was lug's incarnation, i think its even more interesting how lit can change from errors like you described)
aww thank you! I am always happy to know I got people interested in the medieval lit behind their pop culture interests tbh. everyone I know in celtic studies/academia had their own route into it... for me it was children's fantasy novels, for another friend it was roleplaying games, so I try and be open-minded about what those routes into medieval lit actually are and also where they end up! (because I'm not suggesting everyone has to go full academia, the field would be crowded if they did, haha)
reading lit on its own terms can be super rewarding. I started from a very mythological/folkloric perspective but I've really enjoyed coming to see it as literature and there's so much you can do with it and so much you can learn historically from what people choose to develop or emphasise during different periods and how certain aspects and ideas enter the tradition... understanding the historical, literary, and manuscript context for stories is like unlocking the secret bonus layer of story on top of what you see at surface level. knowing that they put a text next to another text in the same manuscript, or knowing that it's being written while X church reform is going on, or knowing that it's part of a wider tradition of certain kinds of stories ... it's all fascinating
I also feel a lot of popular approaches to Irish lit seriously tone down the weirdness, which is TRAGIC, because that's the best bit. like it's interesting, what people say happens in the stories, but the actual stories are EVEN BETTER!
