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For Amergin, who brings me immortality
Mar. 22nd, 2019 08:04 amThirty Day Book Meme Day 22: Out of print
One of my favourite books when I was a teenager was The Singing Stone by Canadian author O.R. Melling. It's a portal fantasy in which Canadian student (and orphan with mysterious origins) Kay goes on a trip to Ireland to discover the secrets behind her origins, and ends up sucked into the past when climbing around some standing stones. She tumbles into a world of magic and intrigue, hovering on the brink of invasion and war, and has to go on a quest to find several magical objects, helped by an amnesiac girl, Aherne, and several other misfits.
Melling packs the book with just about every medieval Irish text that fit the story she's trying to tell — there's a blending of the stories of Lebor Gabála Érenn and Cath Maige Tuired (a mythological history of Ireland that depicts it as being settled by waves of successive invasions, and the story of a battle between various supernatural beings respectively), and Tuán meic Chairill shows up at one point as well. Of course when I was reading the book as a teenager all these stories were new to me, but rereading it in my thirties after having majored in undergrad, and done an MPhil and PhD in medieval Irish literature (Lebor Gabála was one of the texts I researched for my PhD, in fact), I see the book with different eyes. I had to laugh at the heroine, Kay, learning Old Irish to a level of proficiency that she was able to travel back in time and engage in conversation with people — and this after only one year of study!
The book is long out of print (I think it was first published in the 1980s), but I borrowed it repeatedly from the public library when I was a teenager, and I think it was one of the many formative stories that pushed me towards studying what I studied in university, such that I forgive it for its hackneyed tropes about pre-Christian Ireland in a way that I wouldn't if I read it for the first time now.
( The other days )
I have to apologise again for leaving many people's comments unanswered. I will get to them eventually, but the uncertainty and stress about Brexit has pushed me right over the edge. I'm having panic attacks every night when I try to sleep, and so I'm going around in a kind of exhausted fog. I need to preserve all my energy for work. I will try to set aside some time on Sunday to answer people's comments on past posts.
One of my favourite books when I was a teenager was The Singing Stone by Canadian author O.R. Melling. It's a portal fantasy in which Canadian student (and orphan with mysterious origins) Kay goes on a trip to Ireland to discover the secrets behind her origins, and ends up sucked into the past when climbing around some standing stones. She tumbles into a world of magic and intrigue, hovering on the brink of invasion and war, and has to go on a quest to find several magical objects, helped by an amnesiac girl, Aherne, and several other misfits.
Melling packs the book with just about every medieval Irish text that fit the story she's trying to tell — there's a blending of the stories of Lebor Gabála Érenn and Cath Maige Tuired (a mythological history of Ireland that depicts it as being settled by waves of successive invasions, and the story of a battle between various supernatural beings respectively), and Tuán meic Chairill shows up at one point as well. Of course when I was reading the book as a teenager all these stories were new to me, but rereading it in my thirties after having majored in undergrad, and done an MPhil and PhD in medieval Irish literature (Lebor Gabála was one of the texts I researched for my PhD, in fact), I see the book with different eyes. I had to laugh at the heroine, Kay, learning Old Irish to a level of proficiency that she was able to travel back in time and engage in conversation with people — and this after only one year of study!
The book is long out of print (I think it was first published in the 1980s), but I borrowed it repeatedly from the public library when I was a teenager, and I think it was one of the many formative stories that pushed me towards studying what I studied in university, such that I forgive it for its hackneyed tropes about pre-Christian Ireland in a way that I wouldn't if I read it for the first time now.
( The other days )
I have to apologise again for leaving many people's comments unanswered. I will get to them eventually, but the uncertainty and stress about Brexit has pushed me right over the edge. I'm having panic attacks every night when I try to sleep, and so I'm going around in a kind of exhausted fog. I need to preserve all my energy for work. I will try to set aside some time on Sunday to answer people's comments on past posts.