Subject Guides » Books » Reading Lists » Angles, Saxons, Celts, Britons: Children of a Common Past

Selected fiction and nonfiction about the early inhabitants of the British Isles. December 2009.

• How the Irish Saved Civilization
  by Thomas Cahill
  Reveals the pivotal role played by the monks and scribes of Ireland in the development of Western culture and history.
• Confessions of a Pagan Nun
  by Kate Horsley
  A fictional memoir of a nun who had been a practicing druid for many years during Ireland's Dark Ages.
• I am of Irelaunde: A Novel of Patrick
  by Juliene Osborne-McKnight
  Years after escaping slavery in Ireland as a young man, Patricius returns to Ireland to bring Christianity to the heathens, and finds himself joining forces with Osian, a great poet-warrior of the Fianna.
• The Greener Shore: A Novel of the Druids of Hibernia
  by Morgan Llywelyn
  As druids in Celtic Gaul, they had been the harmonious soul of their tribe. But when Julius Caesar and his army invaded and conquered their homeland, the great druid Ainvar and his clan fled for their lives, taking with them the ancient knowledge. Guided by a strange destiny, they found themselves drawn to a green island at the very rim of the world: Hibernia, home of the Gael.
• The Last Kingdom
  by Bernard Cornwell
  Captured and raised by Danes in the ninth century, dispossessed nobleman Uhtred witnesses the unexpected defeat of his adoptive Viking clan by Alfred of Wessex and longs to recover his father's land.
• Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
  translated by Seamus Heaney
  
  
• Grendel
  by John Gardner
  The monster Grendel expresses his isolation and loneliness in a dark and bleak northern world.

Category: Reading Lists