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Roger Sherman Loomis
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Celtic Myth And Arthurian Romance (Celtic interest) by Roger Sherman Loomis (1995-02-20) Paperback

by unknown author (Author)
3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 9 ratings
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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01K8Z9Z2K
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

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Roger Sherman Loomis

Roger Sherman Loomis

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Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5 stars
3.6 out of 5
9 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Juliet Fischer
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting.
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2021
Loomis's conclusions (and those of the scholars he cites) might be outdated but the book is an interesting 'take' on the origins of story-elements and motifs in Arthurian tales. If your primary knowledge of 'The Matter of Britain' is through movies or pop-culture references, you'll discover the wild world of Celtic story-telling that gave us Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, and Merlin.

(If you're a writer or a gamer, this will provide plenty of ideas.)

The Kindle edition has misspellings and errors that should have been caught after the conversion. They aren't fatal, but they are distracting.
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Flint F. Johnson
2.0 out of 5 stars Loomis is not the giant he used to be
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2013
Drawing on all of Celtic mythology and using linguistic arguments to connect Arthurian characters to mythological figures, Loomis argues that Arthur and all of his men were originally a pantheon of gods euhemerized by the romance writers. His comparisons are surpassed by his linguistics; Arthurian figures are notoriously difficult to trace by their names alone and Loomis was not a great linguist. Remember, too, that this book was written in 1926, decades before modern scholarship took hold in the 1970s. This may be entertaining or even a good appetizer for things Arthurian, but it has no practical uses.
7 people found this helpful
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Michael Field
4.0 out of 5 stars A Celticist with an Irish skew.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 22, 2016
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The late and lamented Roger Loomis was a dedicated Celticist convinced of the Celtic origins of the Arthurian legends but with a skew to Irish and Breton myth. The latter, he says are the variously named 'Britones' referred to in apposite Mediaeval manuscripts of the 12th and 13th centuries but in this matter he is wrong as the Britons well before the 12th century and well beyond were rather well recognised as the Welsh.

As early as the 11th century, the Gwynedd court of the Welsh Prince Gruffydd ap Cynan was a centre of literary activity and because Gruffydd was born in Ireland of a Welsh father and Danish mother, he encouraged the flow of legend and myth to and from Ireland with a rich admixture of Danish mythology. It is impossible therefore to cite Irish mythology as the single source of Welsh legends; both have similar tropes but even these themes are infused with exotic material from Greece, Egypt and Thrace and that fact is of far greater interest.

As for the Bretons, they were indeed émigrés from Cornwall and (little known) Shropshire. Sharing a common title of 'Cornovii', the reason for their displacement is a matter of conjecture but over the years they had acquired knowledge too of the French language. It is almost certainly true therefore that they contributed to and stimulated the Arthurian literary pandemic that emerged from the Court of Poitou in the French Renaissance era of 'courtly love' but although the tales they related in song and verse were enhanced with contemporary mediaeval themes, they did not originate the Arthurian mythology. Mike Field
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