This book unearths the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths on which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled.

Christopher R. Fee is Assistant Professor of English at Gettysburg College. David A. Leeming is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. His most recent book is From Olympus to Camelot: The World of European Mythology (Oxford, 2003).