Giving new life to ancient stories

Lifestyle – Mark Joyce shares his passion for Irish myths and legends in a new book which he has written and illustrated. A companion piece to his previous work on Ireland’s mythical beasts, Ireland’s Mythical Wonders is a treasure trove of heroic figures, magic events, and occasional forays into madness. He tells JUDY MURPHY how it came about.

While most of us moan when rain falls, Mark Joyce embraces bad weather. It’s the one time you can stay indoors, happily immersed in books without feeling guilty about neglecting any work that needs doing outside, the Recess man says cheerfully, during a deluge of Biblical proportions.

Mark, an artist by training who owns the renowned Joyce’s Craft Shop in Recess, loves books of all sorts, but has a particular passion for Irish history and heritage.

In recent years, he has taken that ‘grá’ and created his own illustrated books, the latest of which, Mythical Irish Wonders, has been just published by Currach Press.  Mark describes the colourful hardback book as “a companion piece” to Mythical Irish Beasts which Currach published two years ago.

Mark, a graduate of the Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design who also has a background in film, concentrated on fantastical creatures from Irish mythology for that first book, which he also illustrated. Some were familiar while others were less well-known – he brought them to life for a new generation.

While he was researching Mythical Irish Beasts, Mark stumbled across a range of smaller, fantastic pre-historic tales. “I’d never heard of some of them before and they were really cool,” he explains.

Individually, these ‘wonder stories’ were too small to merit individual books, “but too important to be forgotten”, he says.

These included information about how to become an Irish warrior, the location of the gates of hell (Roscommon), how a chieftain’s sword could also make rainbows, and Ireland’s magic trees. Mark decided to compile these miniature treasures into a new collection that would transport readers into another space and time.

The result is Mythical Irish Wonders, a hardback book with 49 stories, similar in design to Mythical Irish Beasts. It has adventurous deeds from heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhaill as well as information on Celtic and pre-Celtic Ireland, including the various tribes that inhabited the country in pagan times. There’s also an account of the 14 different names given to the country, as recorded by 17th century historian, Geoffrey Keating.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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