This month I began rereading one of my favorite fantasy book series of all time. It is The Witches of Eileanan series, by Kate Forsyth.
The first time I saw these books was when I was about 12 or 13 years old, in a Barnes & Noble.
Going to a Barnes & Noble was a major treat for me. I would head straight to the back shelf to the fantasy and science fiction section. I was super into witches and sword and sorcery fantasy back then. (I still am.)
I remember distinctly the cover with the red dragon, and the two hooded witches riding their horses. I opened the book and fell in love from the very first paragraph, where we learn about Isabeau, the young apprentice witch growing up talking to animals in her hidden valley. She had to learn witchcraft in secret because magic has been made illegal in the Scots-inspired alternate universe of Eileanan.
The concept behind the magical world of Eileanan is that the witches, fairies, and other mystical creatures of Celtic Scotland had magically created a portal through space and time and landed in a world with two moons, which happened to have its own tribes of indigenous fairies and mer-folk.
The book is written using a lot of Scottish idioms like “augh!” and “ken” and the characters swagger about wearing kilts and tam-o-shanters. The Scottish dialect is a little bit silly at first, but you quickly get used to it.
When I was a teenager, I absolutely fell in love with this world. For years, whenever I would go to a bookstore, I would race to the back shelves to see if there was another book in the series.
Back in the ye-olde-days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was hard for brick-and-mortar stores to carry an entire fantasy series. Alas, I never finished the series as a teenager because the books never seemed to be on the shelf. (I think I was only ever able to find the first three books: The Witches of Eileanan, The Pool of Two Moons, and The Cursed Towers.)
Even so, the world that Kate Forsyth built had a huge impact on my worldview because it was so feminist.
I loved that the female characters were fully-developed, major players in this world. I loved that much of the book was built around female relationships—friendships, mentor-mentees, colleagues.
And there were so many different types of women: old, young, power-hungry, naive, athletic, femme, tom-boyish, motherly…it felt like there was a huge spectrum of the female experience that got represented in this book.
It really mattered to me that I was getting to see a representation of women that was as complex as all the women I knew in real life.
Fast forward fifteen years later and I was a mother in my late twenties up in the middle of the night nursing a little baby. My mind started to wander and all of the sudden I remembered Kate Forsyth’s name.
I looked her up on Amazon and OMG, the entire series was available!
Book 1: The Witches of Eileanan (The title in America. Outside the USA, the book was titled Dragonclaw.
Book 2: The Pool of Two Moons
Book 3: The Cursed Towers
Book 4: The Forbidden Land
Book 5: The Skull of the World
Book 6: The Fathomless Caves
I was so excited!
I downloaded the entire series and immediately started binge-reading every spare moment I had, thumbing through the pages on the Kindle app on my phone. I read while pushing my son in a swing. I read while nursing. I read in the middle of the night, with the white text glowing against the black background.
What a delight it was to finally find out what happened to Isabeau. After more than a decade of waiting, I finally got to complete the series!
Now I’m in my late thirties, and my son has recently begun to fall in love with sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy books. His love of fantasy started with the Dragon Masters series of chapter books by Tracey West, and has continued with the Eragon, Inheritance Cycle series by Christopher Paolini.
I recently downloaded the audiobook editions of the Witches of Eileanan series, and I have begun re-listening to the books to remind myself of the story before I introduce the series to my son.
I love listening to the audiobook-version of this series, because I’m actually hearing the Scottish pronunciation and noting how it differed from the other two times I read this series and I only had my mind to sound out the words.
It is incredibly rare to find a series of books that holds up over time—a world you can enjoy in multiple decades of your life. I loved the The Witches of Eileanan series as a teenager, as a young mother, and now as a grown woman nearing my forties.
This is my third time through and Eileanan is still one of my top favorite fantasy worlds. I love how feminist the world is. I love all of the folklore, and the magic system, and the relationships between the characters are still solid. These books pass the Bechtel test over and over again.
I definitely recommend the series to anyone who loves sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy. I’m so glad that Kate Forsyth wrote it. I can’t wait to read some of her other books, which re-imagine fairy tales from a feminist perspective.
