Ireland: Land of Legend

By Anthony Murphy

Ireland is a land steeped in story. Generations of Irish people have narrated their relationship
with this island - its people, its landscapes, its monuments and sacred stone temples, its birds
and animals, its unique climate - through myth, legend, folklore and song. This rich tradition of
storytelling and mythmaking began in the very distant past, in the Stone Age. Thousands of years
ago, during the Neolithic, people began to construct huge stone monuments here.

Many centuries later, when people first began to write things down, their manuscripts were
brimming with stories about monuments and sacred sites that are still well known to us in the 21st
century. Something about the eminent places of old captivated audiences in the Middle Ages. Those medieval stories are peppered with Biblical references and Christian themes, but when you peel back the layers there is a distinct sense of something very ancient.

Anthony Murphy has spent more than half his lifetime digging down into those stories, like an
archaeologist of myth, to reveal their extraordinary secrets - details within the mythology that could not have been known to the medieval religious men who wrote them down.

In Ireland: Land of Legend, Murphy explores the remnants of a prehistoric past - monuments, sacred sites and their associated myths and legends - to reveal traces of a forgotten heritage. Leading us into a mystical past, he finds a world not dead but vibrantly alive, an Ireland whose mythic luminaries, archetypes and metaphors are resuscitated and interrogated to reveal their timeless wisdom. There is a reason these stories survived centuries and even millennia of change, and that in the 21st century brimming with existential crises and challenges, they retain an immediate, urgent relevance.

The legends of the Tuatha D Danann, Ireland's prehistoric deities, are immutably infused with the
belief that although they retreated beyond this world to another realm - accessible through ancient
portals of stone and earth - they never really went away.

In attempting to find out why, Murphy
believes the stage has been set for a Third Battle of Moytura, an epic confrontation between darkness and light in the modern era foreshadowed by myth that is almost as old as the hills themselves.

In Ireland, myths never die or vanish. They sleep for a while, like the Tuatha D Danann, until they
are called forth again to usher in a new age of renewal and enlightenment.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1786053225
• ISBN13: 9781786053220
• Release Date: December 2026
• Publisher: Red Stripe Press
• Length: 260 Pages