The best thing I can say about this book is that I now know where a lot of the names Tolkien used in The Lord of the Rings came from more specifically than I did before. I was expecting to learn something new about one of my favorite topics. Instead, I got a dry recitation of things I already knew.

There is a marked lack of analysis or even speculation in this book. At times, the author explicitly states that she does not know why something is. And twice, I could have supplied the answer. That is not a good sign in a book I expected would teach me something. Few conclusions were drawn and there is no comparative discussion at all.

While I appreciated the snippets of stories, I was left with an impression that the stories were more filler than used to truly demonstrate a point.

Some examples include:

1. The author doesn't know why the fairy woman would speak ostensibly Christian words in a story that pre-dates Christianity. That's easily explainable. It is pretty well documented that some monks altered the older stories that they were transcribing or adding Christian elements to them.

2. The author does not know why the stories that center around Samhain (Samain, in the book) and mid winter are so dark in tone. Again, some amount of speculation would suggest that since for the Celts, at least, if not the Norse as well, winter was a time of culling - the old, the young, the sick and infirm humans and cattle. It was also a time of sickness, extreme cold, harsh storms, and near total darkness in some places. All this would naturally lead to darker stories as the extreme weather and sickness were ascribed to supernatural elements.

3. The author fails to draw parallels between Celtic and Norse mythologies and symbols and other civilizations' symbology. For example, the apple as a temptation is prevalent. But she neither ascribes it as definitely pre-Christian nor as an element that may have been introduced when the stories were transcribed by the monks. She also fails to draw parallels between several of the Celtic goddesses and Greek goddesses.

4. The author fails to develop the mythologies to any depth, leaving may details out which actually matter and also fails to differentiate between Christian and pre-Christian stories when necessary. This is perhaps most pervasive at the end where the story straddles the eras but she never discusses how the two traditions influence the story or even how it might have been altered from the original.

In the end, this is simply not a book I could recommend.