The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

Beloved women's spirituality author Patricia Monaghan does it yet again with _The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog_, once more demonstrating to me why she's one of my favorite religious authors. Her focus here is Ireland, and its goddesses, whose myths are intimately connected with the landscape. After all, the country itself *is* named after a goddess...Monaghan traveled to Ireland for the first time in her early adulthood, in search of her Irish roots. She was so moved by the experience that she has returned many times. And in this book, she takes us on a "tour" of what she has experienced in her journeys. We travel vicariously to the rock said to be the Cailleach, the field where Macha ran, Medb's burial mound, and the shrine of Brigid at Kildare, where the sacred fire has recently been lit again.But lest you think this is just fluff, Monaghan does not ignore the bad stuff either. Woven together with her beautiful spiritual experiences and warm friendships are the dark threads of the Troubles, the potato famine, and the English invasion, which forever haunt Ireland. And also, there are the personal tragedies. Some of Monaghan's friends have died over the years, ahd she pays them tribute here. The result is a book by turns uplifting, melancholy, and sometimes riotously funny, but always emotionally moving. Read this book if you are interested in Ireland--a land which, like the Cailleach, has survived against the odds.

I was hoping for more historic data. This is more like a memoir. You will enjoy it if that is what you are looking for.

What fun! I loved this book. Patricia -- the author, I feel like I know her after reading this -- meanders along in a way that at first seems a bit confusing. Confusing, until you realize she is doing it purposefully. Her book meanders in the way that the land, the streams, the rivers of Ireland meander. They take their time and go their own way. And so it is with Patricia. She doesn't want you to speed through things or to find the quickest way from point "A" to point "B." She really helped to make Ireland come alive for me (I am yet another Irish gal born in exile) in terms of its myths, its history, its geography, etc. She was very honest all the way, sometimes embarrassingly so. Which of us (if you're reading this book, you KNOW you have!) have not questioned aloud that other world of faerie? But how many have gotten an answer? Patricia has in unexpected ways, and perhaps you will recognize your own "answers" too after reading this book.If nothing else, it was a pleasure to read Patricia's quest for her ancestry. I felt like I was walking along with her and her friends, drinking tea and pints along with them in the pubs!

I will not go into a description of this book since so many others have done such superb and detailed reviews here. But I just wanted to say that this book was good enough to make me purchase the book AFTER I had just read it on my Kindle! I wanted to have a hard copy to leave in my cottage in the West of Ireland so that I may refer back to it and use it as a source for some adventures of my own.For a long time I have been interested in Celtic Christianity and Spirituality and this is one of the best books I've read on the subject. A combination of historic information and personal anecdotes told with accessible language, this academic does not write like a academic - but as a person unafraid to bare her soul a bit. Highly recommended.

As well-written as it is well-researched, Monaghan's book reads like a conversation with a thoughtful, well-traveled friend. I stumbled across it while doing research for a novel I am working on and found it intriguing, moving, and as enjoyable to read as any novel -- high praise from someone who generally prefers fiction to nonfiction.

I have been reading Patricia Monaghan's 'The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit' and have fallen entirely in love with it. I've almost never read prose like this before in which landscape, from one specific land feature to another, is given transcendent, poetic, spiritual significance, and in which landscape is recognized as the Face of the Feminine Divine. To read Monaghan's words is to participate in her ecstasy.

Written by the sister of a friend of mine. I love having this in my library. It's a great read too and bound well. I thank Amazon for having it listed so I could purchase it. The Monaghan's are a highly talented family.

Lyrical writing and searching for the mysterious .....to be savored a little at a time. The fact that the author is a scholar of Irish myth makes it all the more enjoyable.