The blurb on the back of this book suggests it’s ‘a scholarly
yet highly readable study of the place of the goddess in past and present
belief systems and mythologies’. As a convinced agnostic and casual student of
history and myth, I thought it would be a useful book to augment my knowledge
of these subjects. I was, unfortunately, disappointed.
The book is mainly an annotated list of references to other
works with the occasional piece of narrative inserted to reduce the boredom: a
trick that doesn’t work, by the way. Scholarly, it no doubt is. But highly
readable it most certainly ain’t! It came across to me as a series of pieces by
writers desperate to illustrate how well-read they are. It, perhaps, doesn’t
help that there are various references and asides in untranslated Latin and
some Scandinavian language I’m unable to identify, since I speak none of that
collection of tongues.
Perhaps the book is intended as an introductory text for
university students studying mythology; I could envisage it having a place in
such course material. But, for the general reader, it appears dense,
uninformative in those areas of most interest, self-congratulatory, obtuse and
often plain boring.
I found myself skipping the frequent, not to say,
innumerable, references in a vain attempt to find some meat. I rarely
discovered anything more than the leavings of a dog-chavelled bone. In fact, I
learned almost nothing, discovered very little that I didn’t already know from
former reading around the subject.
I suspect you’ll deduce from the foregoing that I was
unimpressed. You will be correct, Watson. I cannot, in all honesty, recommend
the book.
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