An Invitation "To Lose Yourself in the Unspeakable Places, Where Time has Stopped"
THE RED HAIRED GIRL FROM THE BOG:
The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit
By Patricia Monaghan
New World Library
ISBN: 1577311906
Reviewed by Jessica Keatley
An exhilarating rush of passion for her ancestral home of Ireland is what initially strikes the reader of Patricia Monaghan's The Red Haired Girl from the Bog.
At first, I feared this exultation would capsize the meaning and leave only a melancholic skeleton for a time and place long forgot. However, it soon became apparent through Monaghan’s humourous storytelling that she clearly has done her homework on Irish myths and pleasantly surprises us with how relevant they still can be today.
Coming from a very unique background, Monaghan was raised in Alaska, where much of her family still lives and considers herself blessed to have learned the ecology of the taiga, the sub-arctic forest, in her youth. An award-winning poet, an acclaimed lecturer and a practitioner of meditation, Monaghan has lived a varied and coloured life.
The book combines decades of study on Irish mythology with Monaghan’s own personal observations of her time spent there and the result is a barrel load of entertaining stories that instruct and teach.
There are some beautiful passages that invite the reader to lose themselves in the “unspeakable” places, where time has stopped; “Irish places often seem this way to me, storied significance flickering upon current emptiness like movies on a dull screen,” Monaghan says of the elusively located “Cruathain.”
Astute at tackling any convoluted tale, even that of Diarmuid and Grainne, Monaghan never trips on the detail and comes away smelling of roses. Unafraid to capitalize on the contemporary relevance of these famous stories, she points to the contrast of life for Irish women in Brehon times to those in the Nineteenth Century.
She irreverently refers to Grainne and many of her female counterparts of that time and their infamous libidos, which were compromised somewhere between the Fifteenth Century with the ailing Brehon Law and then smothered in priest-ruled Ireland until recent years. She regales us then with her stories of schmoozing Dublin gardai after smuggling condoms for distribution in St. Stephen’s Green in the 1970s.
She breathes life back into the old texts, rekindling them with a simplicity and love that would appeal to anyone keen to hear a few yarns about Ireland and how it came to be so.
Monaghan could give any contemporary seanchai (Irish story teller) a run for their money.
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