The Isles Of The Many Gods

"An A-Z of the pagan gods & goddesses worshipped in ancient Britain during the first millennium CE through to the Middle Ages"--Cover.

This is a collection of poems penned by Cale Young Rice, best-remembered today for his opera, Yolanda of Cyprus. Featured titles to be found within the pages of this book include 'All's Well', 'Meredith', 'Immortal Foes', 'The Christian in Exile', and 'Navis Ignota'.

The descriptions and the stories of the British gods have hardly come down to us in so ample or so compact a form as those of the deities of the Gaels, as they are preserved in the Irish and Scottish manuscripts. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology.

Magic, romance, and slumbering gods clash in the start of a riveting fantasy series spanning gangsters' dens, forgotten temples, and the high seas from the New York Times bestselling author of the Illuminae Files and the Aurora Cycle. Selly has salt water in her veins. So when her father leaves her high and dry in the port of Kirkpool, she has no intention of riding out the winter at home while he sails to adventure in the north seas. But any plans to follow him are dashed when a handsome stranger with tell-tale magician's marks on his arms commandeers her ship under cover of darkness: He is Prince Leander of Alinor, and he needs to cross the Crescent Sea without detection so he can complete a ritual on the sacred Isles of the Gods. Selly has no desire to escort a spoiled prince anywhere, and no time for his entitled demands or his good looks. But what starts as a leisure cruise will lead to acts of treason and sheer terror on the high seas, bringing two countries to the brink of war, two strangers closer than they ever thought possible and two dangerous gods stirring from centuries of slumber...

Stone sculpture constitutes the richest surviving corpus of Viking-Age artefacts from the British Isles. In northern England, the geographical focus of the present study, sculptural production in the Viking period increased dramatically compared to the previous centuries, and stone monuments underwent changes in style and iconography, as well as in function and patronage. Consequently, stone sculpture provides rare visual evidence for the cultural changes that took place in the Scandinavian settlement areas and bears witness to intellectual and social processes that have otherwise left few traces in either the textual or material records.Gods and Settlers is an interdisciplinary study that brings together iconography, literature, history, and religious studies to investigate a unique subset of this sculptural corpus: stone monuments with mythological and heroic iconography of Scandinavian origins. These carvings are particularly interesting because of the ecclesiastical roots of stone sculpture as a mode of artistic expression in England and the undoubtedly Christian context of the majority of the surviving monuments. The first half of the book is a detailed survey of the relevant carvings from northern England and a wide range of textual and visual parallels, together with an investigation of the sources and use of individual heroic and mythological characters and motifs. The second half focuses on the intellectual framework and social context of the artefacts, and presents a new view of these sculptures as cultural documents of the conversion of the Scandinavian settlers of northern England.

Did King Arthur really exist? The oldest manuscripts refer to him as a "Lord of Battle" who emerged soon after the Roman Empire crumbled. But what would be the origin of all these stories that turned a war leader into a king, an emperor, a legend... even a god? What if Arthur was really a deity similar to Zeus and Odin, with his roots in the rich Celtic mythology of the British Isles? A study of Arthurian myths reveals Britain's most legendary king as an ancient Sun God, known by many different names in the myths of Wales and Ireland. Even his Knights of the Round Table, and his sister Morgan le Fay can all be identified as ancient Gods and Goddesses of earth, sea and sky. Their survival in Arthurian legend stands as a shining testament of a story far more ancient, but by no means lost to us...

The fifth and best novel yet in David Drake's acclaimed epic fantasy series, Lord of the Isles Starting in Lord of the Isles and continuing in Queen of Demons, Servant of the Dragon, and Mistress of the Catacombs, David Drake has told the continuing, interlocking stories of Garric and Sharina, Cashel and Ilna, young brother and sister pairs who journey together from a small town to the capital. Their destiny is to reunite the island kingdoms of the Isles into one empire for the first time in a millennium. They seek to do this at a moment in history when the cosmic forces upon which magicians draw are at a thousand year peak. Wizards of even small learning are immensely powerful. Human greed and evil are reinforced by supernatural energies In Goddess of the Ice Realm, as Garric and his retinue reach the island city of Carcosa, the wizard Tenoctris perceives a powerful supernatural assault directed against them. Ilna and her beloved, Chalcus, are sent to investigate a magical threat to shipping in the north. Cashel is translated into another world by evil magic, and Sharina to yet another. All of them face deadly dangers and overcome them before they are again united during the terrifying and dramatic climax. Filled with action, startling revelations, romance and sorcery, Goddess of the Ice Realm is epic fantasy at its exciting best. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.