The Horse Goddess

Morgan Llywelyn is an excellent writer: Druids and Red Branch are essential works in Celtic revival historical fiction, with characters and stories that rival the best in fantasy. Her prose is superb, doesn't get in the way, and despite her obvious fascination with the material, she never lets it get in the way of expressing what the characters feel or want. In other words, I highly recommend those books.

I do not recommend Horse Goddess, which has only some of the charm and none of the deft storytelling and prose work of the titles mentioned. Llywelyn has taken a euhemerist approach to the mythology of early Celts, giving the deities of the Hallstatt culture human personalities, making them into characters. I thought this was a fantastic idea, even though I'm not really familiar with the subject from that angle. In this story Epona, who will become a Celtic goddess of the horse, runs away from home to live among the Scythians of the steppes and brings horse husbandry back to her people.

That's potentially a great, epic story, but just about every choice Llywelyn made with this one reads like an author who hasn't hit her stride yet. Published in 1982, likely written in the mid to late seventies, the handling of POV makes this feel like something from the 1950s. That's not a fault in itself, but the result is a lot of confusion and lack of emotional depth. Structurally, the story doesn't actually get going until more than halfway through, and the resulting epic journey is shallow and not all that epic. The plot in the steppe settlement is okay, but the choices the author made left me screwing up my face, and this book lost a star in the end because a lot of things that should have happened didn't. Often the opposite did.

All I'm saying is that if you're a fan of Morgan Llywelyn, you can skip this one. This is a book from a different era of historical fantasy, written just to showcase that Celts are magic and to mention lots of cool stuff about Hallstatt culture. That stuff is indeed cool, but this book doesn't really wield it as good storytelling material. Pre-internet, the only chance to hear about these things was at your Renaissance Faire or SCA meeting, or in a book by MZB or Morgan Llywelyn. If I'm glad that we don't live in that world anymore (and I'm not, necessarily) it's because of books like this.