Its Relevance in Contemporary Culture

The ancient legacy of the seanachaì (Gaeillge: story-teller) will always affect the reader or the listener passionately and intimately. Dry-rote text-book style information can rarely do that.

In all 'tribal' cultures events, often from deepest, deepest time, are kept alive - as are those who participated in the events - by those who have learned the lore.

So, you buy a book on some magical practice or another and you become adept at those practices ... then what? Is that going to teach you to recognise your Puck or Herne the Hunter or Fíonn MacCumhaill or the Washer-at-the-Ford when they pass you on the street or flip your life from the recognisable to the unbelievable? Will you know them when they speak? Can you read them in the first bird-call of dawn?

No. And you can compile list after list after list of the so-called attributes of the gods and say There! Now I've got lists!

No. The deeds and the ideals, the foibles and the passions, the teaching ... are best taught through the arts, and particularly through the spoken and the written word. Why? Because the imagination is not some place of deceit but the dwelling-place of the garments of the sacred.

The symbols that most of us gather, from whatever source, end up inhabiting the unlimited mansion of the imagination and are triggered by memory and thought ... or by a mirror (art and story) where we participate somewhere between-the-worlds and often, as a result, we emulate, learn and transform.

This Grove is dedicated to some of the most exhilarating and potent seanachaì of our current era:

The writing of:

Charles de Lint

Morgan Llywelyn

J R R Tolkein

Marion Bradley

Caiseal Mór

Sherri S Tepper

David Gemmell

Terri Windling

Frank Herbert

Manda Scott and her Boudica series

Daniel Quinn

Storm Constantine.

That's not to exclude some of the classics like Dylan Thomas, Willie Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe; of course, Yeats and, of course Kahlil Gibaran's The Prophet.

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Artist: Michael Parkes

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