Robin Williamson is a bard. From his days with The Incredible String Band, through his solo albums that mixed personal history with British myth and culture, to his spoken word recordings of Celtic tales and poetry, Williamson has written and performed with inspiration and charm. R.J. Stewart is a scholar, author of numerous books on Celtic mythology, literature and magick. He visited Seattle recently, speaking to a store full of people curious about his version of the underworld and the fey (or fairy) realm. Now the two have combined forces to produce this lavishly illustrated overview of the legacy of the Celtic druids and bards.
Stewart starts the book off with a short introduction to the druids, telling us the few facts we have about them as recorded by Roman writers, medieval scribes and eighteenth century revivalists. Williamson picks up the thread with a few words on bards, who were originally a class of druid, but who survived the end of active druid practice by hundreds of years. Stewart's introduction is more scholarly, while Williamson quotes heavily from Welsh and other sources to give a more experiential feeling of bardry.
Following these introductions comes the meat of the book, divided (perhaps a bit arbitrarily) into three thematic sections: "The Cauldron - Wisdom Through Questing - The Dark Goddess"; "The Sacred Head - Wisdom Through Suffering - The Sacred King and Poet"; and "Return to the Source - Wisdom Through Inspiration - The Light Within." This reviewer was familiar with a few of the pieces from earlier Williamson works and other Celtic story collections; those who have read Stewart's earlier books may recognize others, for the acknowledgments state that some of the contents have appeared before, in different form.
Particularly enjoyable stories? Stewart provides two tales translated from Breton, "Princess Marcassa" and "The Palace of Crystal," that are beautifully detailed and touched with magick. The latter is especially good in its description of an initiatory journey. "Dan Dheirg (Song of the Red)," rendered by Williamson, is a great piece of derring-do, tragic love and jealousy.
This reviewer's favorite, though, is Williamson's "The Dialogue of the Two Sages," a poetic competition between young Néde and old Fercheirtne in which each asks a question, to which the other always asserts, "Not hard to answer," before launching into responses that ring equally of wisdom, braggadocio and mystery. Listen, for instance, as Fercheirtne asks, "a question, O young exalted man/what are your tasks?" and Néde responds:
not hard to answer
to cross life to the mountain of youth
to rise to the hunting of age
to follow kings to the tomb
to pass between the wick and the flame
between the sword and the terror
There's also a few original seasonal poems by Williamson, a story by Stewart about Merlin saving soldiers from one of the World Wars and several snippets from William Blake to illustrate a modern approach to bardic utterance. The book concludes with two appendices, one by Stewart expounding on "Magical Story-Telling," and another an extract from The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, a book written by Edward Davies in 1809. (It's difficult to discern why this latter excerpt was included, since it attempts to explain how and why the druids designed such circular temples as Stonehenge. As most people should know, and as Stewart states in his opening essay, the theory that the druids built such ancient monuments is a discredited one.)
Story-telling, says Stewart, is the least represented of the ancient magickal traditions in our twentieth century revival of esoteric arts. He goes on to elaborate but seems to circle around the subject without piercing to its heart. He suggests that to be magickal, story-telling must be part of a tradition and bars modern fantasy from belonging to such traditions. Yet he makes an exception for certain unspecified but "vastly popular" comic books. Story-telling can also act similarly to guided visualization, being both healing and transformative. How it does so Stewart only hints at: the power of language and ritualized repetition, the concentration by the listeners on the speaker and so forth. It's a subject worthy of deeper study; perhaps some reader of Widdershins would like to grapple with it?
Despite the charm of many of the stories and poems, the book fails to measure up to its potential because it feels terribly padded. The book totals 159 pages, but that includes front matter, illustrations, appendices and index. Pages of text number closer to 130. Some of the illustrations seem to have been selected at random from a set of drawings of Celtic art, musical instruments, stone monuments and so forth and placed in the text to disguise its brevity. The full-page color pieces are bright and elaborate and vigorous, but to my admittedly untrained eye seemed a bit clumsy in figure and face. Their connection to the text seemed as tenuous at times as the black and white ones. For instance, on page 72 one finds "MacRoth/MogRuith, the flying druid," but he appears nowhere in the text (at least not according to either memory or index).
At times, one wonders if the authors worked on the text together or simply wrote their portions and turned the manuscript over to some third party, who assembled everything, picked the titles and sent it all to the publisher. The dedication page includes, as epigraph, Stewart's translation of an invocation recited by bards at the annual Gorsedd of Wales. Twenty-seven pages later, in Williamson's piece on bards, the same poem appears, slightly differently. If they were really working together, wouldn't the authors have avoided the repetition or at least made brief explanation of it?
In the end, one feels that the publisher, Blandford (a specialist in mystical and spiritual Celtiana, judging from the back flap copy), has done a service by putting this material into print but has done a disservice by enclosing it in an over-elaborate and haphazard package. A plain book, better edited and integrated, would have been more welcome and more useful.
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