Gods, Heroes, & Kings: The Battle for Mythic Britain

by Christopher R. Fee, David A. Leeming

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.

Genres: Mythology, Arthurian

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this as a follow-up to The Hallowed Isle so that I could better understand the mythology woven into Diana L. Paxson's retelling of the King Arthur story. In that regard, it was enjoyable because I had a recent frame of reference to help me digest this academic text on the mythology of Britain. That said, it's still an academic text, not a novel. While the first few chapters detailing the various pantheons and archetypes are an easy read, the latter section reviewing the major sagas takes some diligence to get through. Thankfully, it picked up near the end when all the book's themes are brought together to discuss Gawain and the Green Knight, the Canterbury Tales, and several other stories that illustrate the amalgam of different cultures. It's definitely not a page turner, but it was a solid backgrounder that gave me insights into not only the Arthur story, but also into modern pop culture tales like Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. I wouldn't call it a fun read, but it was an interesting one.

[Candy Wood]

I hadn’t realized how much of my knowledge of Germanic and Norse mythology came from children’s versions, ones that toned down or omitted the sex and much of the violence that are restored here. The combination of retellings and analysis brings out the many similarities among the stories of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking settlers of the British Isles, especially mythic archetypes that continue in medieval Christianity. The concluding chapter usefully shows how these less familiar stories become part of more often studied texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. Fee and Leeming stress the need to read the Wife’s Tale in the whole context of the Canterbury Tales, making it more surprising that they attribute Gloucester’s line about the gods to Shakespeare himself (“as Shakespeare once said”). Prose retellings that retain the alliteration of the originals can be disconcerting, but overall it’s a very readable book.

[Morgan Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an excellent read! I love the continuous connections to Christian Mythology. I learned so much and it was a great tool for me!

[eddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of the variety of Celtic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon/Germanic characters and cosmologies. My quibble: The stories are not annotated as to source/translator. For materials from multiple sources, there's no way to tell where the version of the story comes from. The stories also do not note whether they are abridged. In the end, the book does a decent job of showing how the various mythologies interacted and, to a lesser extent, shows how the transition to Christianity influenced the later understanding and recordation of the earlier myths. While the book does show ways in which Christianity coopted earlier heroes/myths, the book is weaker on showing how Christianity adapted itself to the expectations of the prior cultures beyond mentioning the shift to the warrior Christ (most notably seen in the Dream of the Rood).

[Heather Domin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written; good as both a quick reference and a cover-to-cover read.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book badly, badly needed an editor.