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Ireland: Land of Legend
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By: Anthony Murphy
Publisher: Orpen Press
Published: September 2026
Pages: 240
Categories: Non-Fiction, Religion
Language: English
Available as: Paperback
On sale at:
ISBN-13: 9781786053220

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 Dé 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 Dé Danann, until they are called forth again to usher in a new age of renewal and enlightenment.

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