Been seeing a lot of Joyce posting lately...

there is.
The Book of Invasions, among other things.

That Gantz anthology with its dumb spellings and americanised presentation is very off-putting.

>The Book of Invasions, among other things.
Maybe, but it's not exactly a pagan book. They tried to link early Irish history to the Old Testament, and the gods aren't really presented as gods. That's what I mean when I say we have no equivalent to the Eddas, a relatively faithful account of the old paganism as written by a Christian. I suppose it helped that Snorri wasn't a monk.

The Book of Invasions isn't really all that Christian. Yes, it tries to link the Bible into Irish history, but that's a very Celtic thing to do. Before Christianity, the Romans did similar things to the Celts, like Caesar calling their gods by the Roman equivalent, and the Romans probably did that because the Celts had such diverse local names for the same god and used them interchangeably themselves with local similar gods where they settled.

The book is more akin to the cults that decide they have the direct descendant of Jesus everyone forgot about, or even Mormonism. It steals from things that aren't very Christian, like Hesiod's Theogony alongside what it steals from Christianity. Where the story originally came from (be it Christian or Greek or Roman) is usually obscured in favour of proving centrality and continuity of Irish history above other histories.

Within the myths you can see that happening: the most famous Tain starts because the king has something the queen does not and the queen reacts by ensuring she can tell of the same riches by any means necessary, because she does not want it to be said her husband possesses more. Tales like Sweeney's Madness still allow for witches and magic, but priests also have magical powers and a moral ambivalence rather than a Christian mien and the guaranteed ways to piss off a priest is to interrupt the means of his communication such as the bell to call people to story time and his book which contains his version of history.

Things like St Brendan's journey actually wind up infecting Christianity because Ireland disseminated its sister tales so well- the first copy we have comes from a Danish island monastery, started by Irish monks, which was then much later copied and edited back into Irish monasteries.
Since it shares most its features with a pre-Christian myth, even if you strip away the layers of Christian myth, its basis comes from the Odyssey. The parts that seem distinctly Celtic are told differently by other Celts- the Welsh Lyr would not inspire Bran in Brendan's sister tale which is recorded earlier and in Ireland to return to Ireland, and neither would the Manx Manannan. Their Christianised myths never have them return to anywhere but their homeland for redemption, and its that localisation of the continuation of legitimate authority those books were written for.

>tl;dr
it and other books like it are more unfaithful to Christianity than they are to Irish myth and history. where they are faithful, i find it's normally where they inserted something into Christianity rather than took something out of it.

Bumping a good thread

This guy was a buddy of Yeats

and these

speaking of the Book of Invasions, fans of Flann O'Brien will enjoy Desmond MacNamara's Book of Intrusions very much.

I also nominate Arland Ussher's journals for an honourable mention. Pity his writings aren't better known, he was a bit of a Veeky Forums tier shitposter in his own patrician way (see his Eros & Psyche if you plebs can find it, for example.)

Skerrett, The Black Soul, The Wilderness, such raw novels.

Mr Gilhooley = the Irish Lolita: an alcoholic old man shacks up with a young girl, cue lots of booze, bad sex and Catholic guilt. (what did you expect, really?)

George Moore's Untilled Field is a collection of rural short stories of which Joyce's Dubliners is the urban equivalent (magister dixit). Well crafted and short, well worth a look.

Moore's other stuff isn't worth looking at unless you're a psychologist or litcrit investigating the Irish propensity for self-aggrandising, otherwise known as not letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

Thanks for the recs lads, will have to check a lot of these fellas out

Yeah, that the Irish and Slavs had everything figured out for centuries and the rest of civilization now enters its decline as they begin to figure it out as well.

Does Ulysses have an English translation?

b8 but anyways, get yourself Anthony Burgess' great primer Rejoyce/Here Comes Everybody

I'm basically il/lit/erate but greatly enjoyed Dubliners just for the feel of old–timey Dublin. What else should I read?

A Portrait of The Artist

If you liked Dubliners, check out William Carlos Williams, particularly his Doctor Stories. Similar vibe, but old traveling doctors from the early Americas

flann o'brien

Francis Stuart: Black List, Section H;

shitlord-tier author, and a great writer too (read his main novel at any rate).

Flann O'brien (pen name for Brian O'Nolan

Flann the Man hardly counts as obscure, does he now?

every post-modern fedoratwat has gotten onto that wagon of alcoholic literary genius.

here's another good one:

My Life and Loves by Frank Harris:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_and_Loves

Nice thread. Just reserved Islandman at my library.