Click here to order
I was not as happy with this book, as I have been with the previous three volumes in the six-book “Ulster Cycle”. Half of the book is taken up with description of Conaire and his warriors who are present in the inn of the title. It drills down to descriptions of cup bearers, for goodness sake!, and describes what valiant warriors even these presumably lowly characters. It is worse than biblical “begats.” However, if you were to cut these passages out of the book, one would be left with something too short to count as a standalone volume. Skip this if you are just interested in the story, but if you are enjoying the series, read it and skip those interminably boring descriptions.
This book, the third in Eickhoff’s “Ulster Cycle”, is far and away the best of the books so far. The three stories selected for this volume are heartbreaking and yet, written in such beautiful language as to be among the finest prose poetry. The author has also included a fabulous Introduction, relating the tales to modern woes. Pick this book up! It’s truly wonderful!
Click here to orderThis book is a wonderful follow up to the first of the Ulster Cycle books, “The Raid”. Anyone interested in a fresher more modern take on Irish myth, that has been taken from the earliest possible sources, needs to read Eickhoff. Eickhoff has sifted and translated through all the medieval manuscripts and compiled the different versions and fragments of these ancient tales and brings out a fresh translation that while it follows the stories exactly as they are written somehow manage to be not so confusing as reading a pure translation can be, and are enjoyable reads. If you haven’t tried Eickhoff yet, you don’t know what you are missing! This book, “The Feast” is a very fun read that, while also being adventurous like “The Raid”, also has humorous touches that often lighten the feel.
Click here to order
While this book is praised to the skies for being the most recommended of the translations in print, being critically acclaimed does not lend itself towards readability. Being Ireland’s National Epic, reading this is important, though you will probably get bogged down with every mention of “and this was how this xxx came to be called xxx” as well as terminally long descriptions of apparel, but the story, frankly, in direct translation is confusing and weird. The reader would be better and more enjoyably served by reading “The Raid” by Randy Lee Eickhoff instead.
Click here to order
Before “Drawing Down the Moon” by Margot Adler in 2006, I might have recommended this title wholeheartedly. But, now I would perhaps only recommend this title for Wiccans, as other Paganisms are given short shrift in this volume (despite being included in the book’s subtitle: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America). Being a more scholarly treatment of the subject does not necessarily make this a more important book to read, as the author sometimes rambles and one has to piece together the various threads that comprise chapters such as “The Rhetoric of Wicca” and “The Playboy and the Witch: Wicca and Popular Culture.” Because of the breakout of the subject into vaguely defined “themes”, the book would have, perhaps, been more readable if it had been written in a more linear fashion. Other than that, my only other quibbles with this title are a couple of errors which one would presume a learned professor (and practitioner of the Craft) would not make. These include referring to author and pagan Diana Paxson as Diana Paxton, and referring to the wildly popular French comic “The Adventures of Asterix ” as Asterisk (which even the Wikipedia entry states “Not to be confused with the Asterisk (typographical mark)”. And thus my lukewarm recommendation, and even then only to the Wiccans, not Pagans as a whole.
