Read on for the chance to win a signed copy of the new edition of If Women Rose Rooted, along with other news. This message is likely to be truncated by your email provider, so please think of clicking through and reading it in your browser. And while you’re there, do join the conversation and leave a comment! (Especially if you want to join the competition for a free copy …)
‘Truth Coming Out of Her Well’, by Jean Léon Gerome (1896). This image always reminds me of the old English myth of the rape of the well-maidens – a powerful story which I used as the framework for If Women Rose Rooted.
Dear friends
This newsletter is a wee bit late, because I’ve been waiting for the publication of the gorgeous new edition of If Women Rose Rooted – more of which, below. Also, to be truthful, because I don’t really have very much other news to offer up right now. It’s a beautifully quiet month or two after all the frantic activity at the end of last year, in support of Wise Women and other shenanigans. And I have my head down working like a madwoman on my next book, the deadline for which is steadily and inexorably creeping up on me.
I think I’m a little slower at book-writing these days; a couple of intense early-morning hours and I’m all out of writing energy. Though I can often tweak and twiddle for an extra hour or two in the afternoon, because that is, frankly, my favourite bit of writing a book. It’s the initial drafting that I find painful. Once I have a full outline - paragraph by paragraph – of what I want to say in a given chapter, which is the most excruciating work imaginable and like pulling teeth, then the work of shaping it into proper sentences and paragraphs is infinitely more enjoyable. And once I have a few pages I’m happy with, I would happily polish those few pages for days. I love love love that work. I can spend an entire hour on a paragraph that really matters to me. Unlike the very marvellous Anne Lamott, who recommended them highly in her book Bird by Bird, I am NOT a writer who can live with ‘shitty first drafts’. I can’t even live with a shitty paragraph. I just can’t move on until the preceding pages contain writing I can be proud of, even if they’re not yet perfect. I realise that this is quite different from the way many writers work, and I’m never entirely sure it’s the easiest way to do things. But it’s the only way I can seem to manage it, and I don’t expect I’m going to change now.
Anyway: in celebration of that new edition of If Women Rose Rooted, I wanted to share with you some thoughts about why it’s so important to us, now more than ever, to know more about women in our native myth and folklore, and also some exciting new research that’s recently been published which shows that actual women really did hold a great deal of power in Celtic Britain. Please do read on! – because there’s also the chance to win a signed copy direct from me, along with an exclusive lapel pin and another couple of tokens of my appreciation.
Wishing you, as always, all the joys of the season, wherever in the world you are.
Sharon
The Power of the Celtic Woman
The first edition of If Women Rose Rooted, which landed in the world on St Patrick’s Day 2016, had the subtitle ‘The Power of the Celtic Woman’. In the end, for subsequent editions, the publishers decided to change that subtitle, because we didn’t want women from other places to feel that the book and the stories in it excluded them, or weren’t relevant to them. (And also because some English women seemed to think that classification excluded them! It doesn’t. A Celtic language was also spoken in England, back in the day.) They’re profoundly relevant to any woman who’s alive in these times. But the book was very much about the stories of women from Britain and Ireland, because the native pre-Christian mythology of these islands is not only beautiful but highly woman-centred. In our oldest stories, the creative, generative essence of the universe was female, not male; women represented the spiritual and moral axis of the world. But the Celtic divine female was a long way from the remote, transcendent sky-deities we've grown used to in recent centuries here in the West: she had one foot in the Otherworld for sure, but she was firmly grounded and deeply rooted in place, indivisible from her distinctive, haunting landscapes. And that’s precisely why those stories are so powerful and so necessary today.
Here’s what I wrote about those old myths and stories:
For women particularly, to have a Celtic identity or ancestry is to inherit a history, literature and mythology in which we are portrayed not only as deeply connected to the natural world, but as playing a unique and critical role in the wellbeing of the Earth and survival of its inhabitants. Celtic myths for sure have their fair share of male heroism and adventure, but the major preoccupation of their heroes is with service to and stewardship of the land. And once upon a time women were the guardians of the natural world, the heart of the land. The Celtic woman who appears in these old tales is active in a different way from their heroes and warriors: she is the one who determines who is fit to rule, she is the guardian and protector of the land, the bearer of wisdom, the root of spiritual and moral authority for the tribe. Celtic creation stories tell us that the land was shaped by a woman; Celtic history offers us examples of women who were the inspirational leaders of their tribes. These are the stories of our own heritage, the stories of the real as well as the mythical women who went before us. What if we could reclaim those stories, and become those women again?
What if we could reclaim those stories, and become those women again? That was precisely the passion that drove me to begin writing If Women Rose Rooted, a full ten years ago now, and it’s still the passion that drives me today. As a qualified academic who’s been studying the authentic origins of these stories for many years now, I believed then, as I do now, that our old mythology needed to be better known. That the women of these islands, and women who have ancestry in these islands, need to know our old stories, because those stories show us how to live. Stories like those of the remarkable women I wrote about in the book: the Cailleach, Cerridwen, Rhiannon, Elen of the Ways, the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach, Blodeuwedd – all from Britain. Medb, the Morrígan, Macha and Mis, from Ireland. Viviane, Lady Ragnelle and the Grail Maidens, from the Arthurian tradition. Our foundational myth about the lost Voices of the Wells and the coming of the Wasteland, from the west of England. The sacred ritual marriage between the king and Sovereignty, the goddess of the land, from Ireland. The characters of the selkie and the wise woman, or bean feasa, from our folk traditions.1 Those stories – and others like them that I’ve extensively written, taught and lectured on since – as I outlined in the book, hold insights that can help us find our way in the challenged world we live in today.
In 2016, then, and for the very first time, If Women Rose Rooted took British and Irish stories about powerful, fascinating Otherworldly women and goddesses, and blended them into a groundbreaking mix of myth, memoir, nature writing and depth psychology. As I wrote on Notes earlier this week, when it was first published, no one knew what to do with a book that combined all those different genres (and I will admit that I do bring an eclectic mix of academic, professional and writerly qualifications to the table). All these years on, of course, everyone is having a go 😊 But back in the day, no one in publishing or bookselling knew how to classify this book. There was nowhere, quite literally, to put it on the shelves, and the critics couldn’t imagine a way to place it either. They weren’t entirely sure it was relevant. They were quite sure it wasn’t Proper. Myth – and especially the notion of British and Celtic mythology – was more than a little bit ‘out there’ before the endless retellings of Greek myths happened along to render it all a bit more mainstream.
Well, I’m delighted to say that, as often happens, readers proved them all wrong. And as a counter-culturalist from the moment I first drew breath, this makes me very happy. If Women Rose Rooted still hasn’t had a single traditional media review anywhere in the world, but it’s become an international bestseller anyway, by word of mouth alone. I like that. And I hope this new edition will set a few more women free.
Don’t you just love this new cover? With thanks as always to the brilliant Leo Nickolls for the design. And thank you to the team at September Publishing/ Duckworth Books for the video at the bottom of this email, which contains the spoken words of some of the women whose lives were changed by the book. And just a clarification: it’s still a paperback and still the same text as the original edition, just with a new cover.
How to get hold of your copy
If you’re in the UK and trying to order a print copy of If Women Rose Rooted, the new edition’s cover isn’t showing up yet on the Amazon UK listing for the book. It always takes Amazon a while to catch up … and I can’t be entirely sure that the edition they’re shipping is the lovely new one, as the listed RRP is wrong. So if you want to be certain of getting the right one, you can order it online at Blackwells (which also offers free international shipping). Or online at Waterstone’s. If you’re in North America or elsewhere, the new edition will trickle through sometime, when old warehouse stocks have run out. But if you’re anywhere overseas and want to be sure of getting the new edition now, order from Blackwells here in the UK and you’ll get it with free international shipping.
If you’re wanting a signed copy, then my very wonderful sort-of-local independent bookshop, Westwood Books in Sedbergh, has another pile of signed copies of all of my books, including this new edition. They ship worldwide, postage at cost. If you’re interested, have a peek on their website here.
And a reminder about The Rooted Woman Oracle
The beauty of accepting the invitation to write this oracle card deck was that it presented me with the opportunity to extend the work I’d done in If Women Rose Rooted. This deck, then, published at the beginning of 2024, has many more examples of archetypes of place, many more British and Irish women from the old stories who might be our allies and teachers, and many new ideas about the various stages and possible shapes of the Heroine’s Journey that I wrote about in the book. Even though it’s called an ‘oracle deck’, I certainly don’t see these beautiful objects as having anything to do with fortune-telling! Rather, what they do is allow us to explore an image, an archetype or a story that wants to haunt us right now. The beautiful artwork for this deck was produced by English artist Hannah Willow, and it’s very much a thing of beauty. So, after you’ve read If Women Rose Rooted, if you want more – this is for you!
For more info, please do head over to this page on my website,
New research about the power of Celtic women
New and groundbreaking genetic evidence has recently been published which indicates that land in Iron-Age England was passed down through the female line, and that our ancestors lived in a matrilocal society. (In anthropology, a matrilocal society is one in which a married couple live with or near the wife’s parents. In other words, kinship is passed down through the maternal line, not the paternal line.) The findings complement existing archaeological evidence and, taken together, it shows that, back in the day, our ancestral motherlines mattered very much more than the paternal line.
Although it’s the only confirmed example of a matrilocal culture in the Europe of the time, this discovery shouldn’t be entirely surprising. As I wrote in If Women Rose Rooted:
In Ireland and Britain especially, women were able to rule and played an active part in political, social and religious life: Boudica and Cartimandua, prominent tribal leaders, are the best-known examples. Women were physicians, judges and lawyers, poets, astronomers, artists and priestesses. They could own property, and retain ownership when they married. They had sexual freedom, were free to choose their partners and divorce, and could claim damages if they were raped or assaulted. Celtic women could, and often did, lead their men into battle and warrior training was often undertaken by women. Diodorus of Sicily reported that ‘the women of the Celts are nearly as tall as the men and they rival them also in courage’; the Greek historian Ammianus Marcellinus stated that ‘a whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand a single Celt if he called his wife to his assistance’.
(The Romans, overall, were pretty outraged by the prominence of women in the Britain of the day, and set about dismantling it as soon as they could.) And of course, that woman-centred cosmology which I wrote about above ought to have held a bit of a clue, too. Our traditions were very different from the myths, traditions and social practices of Greece and Rome which we’ve all been raised on and have come to think of as typical for those times. As I’ve argued at length before (and have a peek at this lecture, which I gave at Pacifica Graduate Institute back in 2018, if you want a flavour) women in Britain and Ireland were different. So all of this makes me very happy, and adds a whole lot of weight to my longstanding argument that women from these islands need to reclaim that rich heritage of ours.
If it’s your thing, you can read the original published study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08409-6
Win a signed copy of the new edition of If Women Rose Rooted and …
… ... and a very fine metal lapel pin, and a couple of other little bits and bobs from me. Just leave me a comment below by Friday Feb 14 – Valentine’s Day seems appropriate – and I’ll have someone other than me pick out a person at random. Then I’ll leave a reply to the winner’s comment, inviting you to email my assistant with your mailing address. This is open to everyone, wherever in the world you might be.
EDIT: The signed copy was won by Anne Chrisp, from New Zealand.
