Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination

Beveridge has written a fairly engaging book on the motifs of Norse and Celtic folktales, mythological cycles and possible pagan religious concepts. She has a tendency to get a little purple prose-y talking about her preferred folktales (it's always “starkly haunting” or some such) and sometimes it can get frustrating when she discusses two nearly identical stories several chapters apart, but the research is solid, and the history is fascinating. She says that she chose Norse and Celtic stories mainly for practical reasons– both communities actually managed to save a decent portion of their folk stories– and I believe it, since despite the similarities, she never seems to really want to discuss the whys and hows of those similarities. The book is not hyper-academic, but it's definitely thoughtful and I learned plenty about the history of salvaging pagan stories in the context of fairy tales.