About Myths of Ireland

I’m Darren. I was born in America to an Irish family, both my parents Irish through and through, and when I was thirteen we moved home to Ireland. I live in Wicklow now, and my working life keeps me much in the west.

When we were small, my mother read to us constantly. She read us a broad spectrum of everything until we were old enough to read for ourselves, but Irish folklore, legend and myth sat at the heart of it all, and nothing else came close. Nothing was as mysterious, as strange, or as thought-provoking as the old Irish stories. The first one I can remember is the Salmon of Knowledge. For most of my life I’d have told you it was Cú Chulainn who tasted that salmon. It was Fionn. That half-remembering is exactly the forgetting this library exists to fix. From there, I was more or less hooked.

What I didn’t expect, coming home, was the empty space. The stories had slipped almost entirely out of Irish schooling; a child here could grow up nearly as far from Cú Chulainn and the Morrígan as a child in Boston. The richest mythology in western Europe, native to this island, and it was being forgotten at home.

Myths of Ireland is what I want to do about that: a reference library where the stories are told properly, made as accessible and as interesting as I can make them, for anyone who wants them. And every story shows its receipts: each entry names the manuscripts it comes from and the translations it was checked against. Where scholars disagree, we say so. Where a beloved “ancient legend” turns out to be a Victorian invention, we say that too, because the truth about these stories is consistently more interesting than the merchandise version.

My parents left Ireland for a better life, and in the end they brought us home. Most families who left never made that return journey. Their descendants are scattered across America and far beyond, generations deep now, and many of them carry a pull toward this island they’ve never lived on: a want, sometimes a need, to reconnect with an ancient past that belongs to them every bit as much as it belongs to anyone born here. I was one of those children once, hearing the stories an ocean away from where they happened. This library is written with those readers in mind as much as anyone. The stories are their inheritance too.

I believe we need to reconnect with what we’ve lost, and that the stories are one of the ways back: to the land they’re set in, and to some element in ourselves that might be missing without them. The site is written for both of the readers I’ve been in my own life: the curious one who wants the story told well, and the obsessive one who wants the footnotes. You’re welcome to stay on either level.