Shapeshifter - By Holly Bennett
PREFACE
Those of you who have read The Warrior’s Daughter will already know about my love affair with Irish mythology. But for the newcomers among you, here’s a bit of background:
Two thousand years ago, Ireland was inhabited by the Iron-Age Celts. Much of what we know of their lives and beliefs comes to us through the wonderful stories that somehow survived in oral form through many, many generations until finally they were written down by early Christian monks (who were supposed to be copying out the Bible).
Full of adventure, tragedy, magic and raw human emotion, these stories seem to me just begging to be brought alive for a modern audience. But since I am so often drawn to the secondary characters—the ones you don’t hear so much about—rather than the heroes, and since I love making up stories rather than just retelling them, my approach has been to imagine an “untold tale” that lies behind the legend.
Shapeshifter is the story of Sive, a young woman from a magical realm who was the hero Finn mac Cumhail’s first wife. At first I thought it was a story about fear and lost love. But as I got to know Sive better, I realized that it is really a story about courage, and about love’s transformative power. Like any good character, there is more to her than first meets the eye.
For curious readers, I have included a version of the ancient legend of Sive on page 242.
The year Sive became a woman, two things happened that would shape the course of her life:
She found her animal form.
And the dark druid, Far Doirche, fixed his eye upon her.