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language: English
country: Ireland
year: 1894
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 17.6.22-20.6.22, 21.1.24-25.1.24
Standish O’Grady’s The Coming of Cuculain is a fast and delightful read (and available freely from the Internet Archive). it presents itself as a kind of smoothed version (implicitly almost a translation, thanks to O’Grady’s background as a popular historian and the (intermittent) explanatory footnotes that serve to claim scholarly authority) of actual medieval narratives. it is not that. it is, fundamentally, a fantasy novel, albeit one that does draw heavily on medieval sources.
it is BIZARRE. the politics — when they manifest obviously — are as unhinged as you might expect from someone who was described by Lady Gregory as a “Fenian Unionist”. it is incredibly homoerotic. it gets suddenly extremely gory at the end when Cuculain goes on his first (adult) rampage. as you have probably gathered from my posts over the last few days, I had a blast reading it and would highly recommend it; I’m looking forward to In the Gates of the North.
I can see how you would, at several degrees’ remove, get from this to Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories: O’Grady’s Cuculain definitely lays the groundwork for the sword-and-sorcery hero (and Laeg is the prototypical sidekick), even as the register of the novel also I think leads pretty directly to Dunsany and so, by extension, to Tolkien, for all that Tolkien disliked medieval and traditional Gaelic literature.
mood-wise, I used “inspiring” because it’s renewed my desire to start a small press that reprints out-of-print speculative fiction in English and the Celtic languages and also because I can’t wait to write something about this. also, though, I use “inspiring” because I’m considering adding another custom tag, namely “majestic” — the word certainly feels appropriate (including the implication of monarchism).
moods: adventurous, inspiring, lighthearted, wacky