I have been bothered by our economy for some time. Granted, I’m not an economist, a policy maker, or even particularily well educated, still, it seems to me that wealth creation must involve the finding and securing of resources, the refining of resources, and the creation of some useful item or at least desired item. This seems to be an idea that is not shared by the leaders of our country.

I think that people and organizations unfriendly to the United States or at very least unfriendly to our way of life have been agressively obstructing the securing of resources and for whatever reason we have fallen farther and farther behind in manufacturing the items that we use and therefore need.

Ultimately we need food, water, and shelter. As Americans we have become accustomed to having private transportation and a ready and varied supply of entertainments. The first things truly are necessary, but the other two things seem culturally to be very nearly so.

But that is today, and what I want to talk about how the past is similar to today or perhaps to America in its golden age.

In the past, golden ages involved a surplus of items necessary for sustaining life. Usually it was easy to get these things, long fruitful growing seasons securing abundance of food, unexploited raw materials, items that may not have had a use in the past, that could be gathered without difficulty, water running near by, easily aquired and reliably abundant.

These are things that may not be long so easily found for Americans. As such, unless we can develop means to create abundance again, we are leaving a golden age for a darker period.

In fiction as in real life, as we see from history, we remember the golden times. Perhaps there is time for such entertainments as remembering, perhaps artistic elements can grow and amplify, from abundance, the lives of folk who can spend their time being heroic without being forced to scrape for sustainence.

Yet perhaps these are the times that are truely the most heroic, when men must be more than they are at other times. Art is not reality, it pretends it is. Securing bare survival isn’t the stuff of legend, but if there is no survival then there can be no story either.

What a mess. I’m going to post this. I will be so humilated to see this drek I will be forced to revise and improve it. Forgive me dear reader.

LSO

I am sorry that I haven’t posted in awhile. I was spending much time poking around the theories about the origins of the Celts. Theories are stories about what has happened in the past. Some are very entertaining; some are fairly believable.
That I am researching theories of Celtic origin might seem somewhat ironic after my previous post about many academics being uncomfortable with the idea of Celts at all. But certainly there were a people who lived a certain way that was similar to the way of life of folk on the mainland who remained even after Romanization in northern Britain and Ireland. Some of the academics who allow for Celts call these people the Insular Celts.
What is very interesting about these people is that unlike their possible predicessors or anticedents (or whatever) some of the legend and lore of the insular celts was preserved by Christian monks.
Now the neo-pagan greatly resents the fact that we would know almost nothing at all about the Celts save only their material leavings if it were not for these sons of Hibernia who happened to be able to write and did. Would it be better if we just had Julius Caesar’s words to define a people? I think not, though I am not a neo-pagan, or a member of an anti-Celtic academic elite, nor even a transgendered Wicken accolyte and am not likely to be one at anytime in the future.
Anyway, I’m a long way into this and still not much about stories. The monks wrote down oral traditions that on the main land had died with the druids who carefully preserved them in their well trained brains where it did not survive the erasure of those druids. (or the removal from the rest of their bodies of the aforementioned brains still encased in the otherwise disarticulated carania.)

I’m not going to let that happen. I’m telling them. I’m writing stories down. I’m going to put them on the internet. There is a good reason why I’ve come to that decision. My brains are not well trained and they do seem to experience unintentional erasure from time to time.

Therefore, and in that vein, I shall attempt with my postings to record some of the wonderful stories that come my way.

Warmest regards,

LSO

I am sorry that I haven’t posted in awhile, I’m still imagining what you might like to hear.  I was spending much time poking around the theories about the origins of the Celts.  There is much to say about what little there is of the Celtic world existent in written word.

This might seem somewhat ironic after my previous post about many academics being uncomfortable with the idea of Celts at all.  But certainly there were a people who lived in ways similar to folk on the mainland, these people remained, even after Romanization, in northern Britain and Ireland.  Some of the academics who allow for Celts call these people the Insular Celts.

It is very interesting that these people, unlike their possible predecessors, or antecedents, or whatever, some of the legend and lore of the insular celts was preserved by Christian monks.

Now the neo-pagan greatly resents the fact that we would know almost nothing at all about the Celts, save only their material leavings, if it were not for these sons of Hibernia who happened to be able to write, and did.  Would it be better if we just had Julius Caeser’s words to define a people?

Anyway, I’m a long way into this and still not much about stories.  The monks wrote down oral traditions that on the main land had died with the druids who carefully preserved them in their well trained brains where it did not survive the erasure of those druids.

Tolkien wanted to supply an Anglo-Saxon mythology that he felt the English lacked.  I seek only to popularize and perhaps expand what is available of the stories of an interesting folk who left very little behind.  I for one am willing to believe that some or even most of what we have of Celtic legend and lore is true, at least in the sense of an echo, dimmed and somewhat clouded, of a people and a way of life.

Anyhow, I hope to bring what I find to light. Let the light judge to its truth, to expose fraud or fabrication (would you say that Frodo is Fraud? is Middle Earth not a wonderous fabrication?), to be enjoyed as entertainment, to be considered as insight into days gone, or to be a springboard to more and better discovery.

There are a lot of people who are interested in the Celts and all things Celtic. I certainly count myself as one of those. Some others especially those among the academics find the idea of a Celtic people as ridiculous or probably more to the point they think of people who believe that there is such and want to know more about such a heritage as unsophisticated rabble.

Perhaps that makes me a rabble-rouser. I don’t really see a problem with a popular cultural celticness. Perhaps that is one of the problems that academics have with us enjoying the past without the educational background, we fall prey to the geewizzification of the Celts. Though it is strange that they would have a problem with it, as they don’t believe in Celts at all.

I feel like their objections are a bit foolish. Of course the indo-european people we are talking about didn’t think of themselves as “Celts.” But looking back it seems to me that there was an aesthetic, a way of life, and a people group that it is valid to call by a name, Celts, Gauls, whatever.

Obviously we have to look back in time to see Celts. I’m Irish, or rather Irish-American, from the home of the insular Celts, but it is only in hindsight that we see the ornaments that they wore and the life that they lived had parallels on the continent.

I think my own experience bears on this. I was born in Spokane Washington. I really didn’t think of myself as Celtic, or my background as Irish until long after my formative years. The truth is I was Western if anything. My grandfather admired cowboys. My parents were just plain American. We as a family had no tradition that owed itself to Ireland or any nation but the USA and then we moved to Canada where I learned hockey. (Well, imagine my surprise long after when I poked around the roots of it and found Scot’s Shinty, and Irish Hurling, and what does Lacrosse owe its similarity to? All interesting explorations beyond the bounds of this post.)

And then we moved to North Dakota where I first encountered a culture that owed itself to a nation of origin. I graduated high-school in a Norwegian community. UffDa! Still it was in North Dakota that I got the first inkling of what might truly run in my blood despite all the cultural overlays I experienced growing up. I knew persecution, I was stubborn. Try being a Cowboy fan in Viking’s land…  …among actual Vikings. Interesting, no? An unaccountable aversion to Vikings.

Strangest of all was my first encounter with bagpipes. Our high school only had 35 people in my graduating class, but it had a radio station owing to the enterprise and many talents of our industrial engineering/shop teacher. On a “Wings Greatest Hits” album was the track “Mull of Kintyre.” The haunting skirl of the pipes spoke to me, it brought tears, and I played that song every day after that. Fortunately nobody listened or I’m sure there would have been culturally oriented complaints.

And that was it. I graduated, my family moved to Montana, and to Oregon. I didn’t subscribe to any bagpiping magazines or even buy the album. So much for my blood.

So the bagpipes blindsided me not so long after that. I was going to Community College in Oregon after the army and what should I hear but pipes on the wind. I wasn’t looking for the highland games, the highland games found me. I found a necktie with my maternal grandmothers tartan on it and off we went.

And off we go. I didn’t know I was a Celt. Nobody told me so. But I ran into it and it called to me, like the song in the radio studio unheeded, and then that day when pipes on the wind carried me away.

So, let stuffy academics scoff, I believe in Celts. I feel I am one.

LSO

Free CELTIC Fiction

My hope is to create fiction that speaks to the Celtic Heart.  So, warts and all here is a new story that I rip from Celtic legend and set in my new world, Tir na Nua, the Red Son of Concubar.

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Here is the novel beginnings: Intro to and Beginning of The Abbot and the Djinn.  Follow my progress HERE.

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Using a sort of “just start writing and see where it goes” technique I’ve completed the first draft of a short story.  In the end, Concerning The Deer Riders wandered a bit farther than I had anticipated.  Legendary wanderings?  You can read Concerning the Deer Riders yourself and see what you think.

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My Polished Stones

Since this is my process, a good deal of it is rough here as I begin.  My hope is to get better and better at writing Celtic Fiction so that reading it free will become a bargain and not a chore.  I plan to work on a few of my stories to make works of fiction closer to my potential.  That is, I plan to polish them by rewriting them for your reading pleasure and in particular the reading pleasure of those who might come across this sight and have little patience for my early fumblings unfiltered from my imagination?

Recently I’ve realized that I should not.  My first goal was to get something, anything here, secondly I NEEDED to write because it had been a long time since I had.  I have courted your opinion to no effect, but then why should I expect it?  Do I read other’s work and offer up my opinion, my help?  Not recently and can I help? 

So, I intend to polish up a few of the stories that have accumulated.  The raw novelization of the Abbott and the Djinn will continue, undoubtedly I’ll put up more unfiltered imaginings like the Deer Riders and Child of Moss.  Then, in a section before those unpolished stones, I will begin to offer some that have had my attention and effort so that you can judge me or at least have a better chance of being reliably entertained.  Some may read on to the raw.  HERE is the page that will list the more polished work. (it is currently empty <sigh>)

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Other Stuff

I am in the process of writing several novels, but on the way to that I offer these thoughts, insights, resources, and diversions of interest to me and, I hope, to you.  Here I hope to gather legends and lore, notes on antiquity, and present day reality.  Have a look HERE

For now, welcome, and please tell me what you like or you don’t.  I value your insights.

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LSO

PS. HERE are some authors I have read and admire by way of giving you hints about where I’m aiming