jarandhel

I'm a big believer in the principle that if one learns a day's worth of knowledge, one can (and often should) teach a day's worth. Doing so helps to distribute the knowledge more widely, and the process of teaching can also help you learn aspects of the subject that you otherwise might not.

The problem, of course, is that a little knowledge can often be dangerous. Sometimes people may make up facts to sound more knowledgeable on the subject than they really are, or misinterpret information which they have only partially understood. A lot of neopagan authors suffer from this problem, in my experience. Or they may listen to other sources with bad information and simply pass it on without knowing any better.

In my opinion, it's incumbent upon both teachers and students to double-check what they are teaching or what they have been taught. Especially in esoteric subjects, which often suffer from an echo-chamber amplification of false information. Where one teacher passes on incorrect information, it's very easy for it to find its way into the teachings of a number of other people who work from what they learned from that first teacher. Beyond a certain point, if it's not caught soon enough, it becomes self-reinforcing: each teacher pointing to the works of the others as validation of the incorrect material, with no one remembering where or how it originated. It's simply become "modern tradition".

In the interest of preventing this phenomena, let me offer some information I just found while double-checking something I had previously been taught: The Eihwaz rune, far from "never [being] used in actual writing/runic inscriptions", is found in a number of Runic inscriptions made after 400AD. Specific inscriptions can be found listed in Texts & contexts of the oldest Runic inscriptions By Tineke Looijenga, pages 138 through 142. As further verification of the claims made by Looijenga, an image of the rune used in an inscription on the Charnay Fibula from the second third of the sixth century AD may be viewed here. The lack of earlier use does not seem to indicate the Eihwaz rune was somehow prohibited from inscription, but is simply an aspect in the development of the runes over time; the same process of linguistic evolution that would eventually give us the 16 rune Younger Futhark and the 26 to 33 rune Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

Is it too much to ask for pagan authors to engage in basic research and citation of their claims?

Toradh != virtue in Gaelic.

toradh = effect m1
toradh = n fruit
toradh = n outcome m1
toradh = n (AGR) produce m1
toradh = n (outcome) product m1
toradh = n result m1
toradh = n yield m1
http://www.englishirishdictionary.com/dictionary?language=irish&word=Toradh

In referring to traditional Faery foods as "toradh", one is not talking about any innate virtue or quality of the foods.  One is talking about the foods themselves being the yield of the land (fruits, bread), or the yield of cattle (milk, butter).

It is somewhat similar to the Catholic use of "fruit" in the phrase"fruit of the vine, and work of human hands", or the use of "given" in the corresponding phrase "which earth has given and human hands have made".  Food that the land or the creatures of the land have yielded, generally without hunting having been involved though young domestic animals can be and often were included in this as well (lambs, calves, etc).

Likewise, pith is not properly a part of "Gaelic Faerie Tradition" at all.  Pith is not a gaelic word.  It is an English word, from the Old English piþa, which itself came from German origins, not Gaelic.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pith

It's disheartening to find poorly researched content like this in modern books on paganism that I have otherwise found quite valuable, not least because it makes it harder to look into the history and traditions underlying their work.  I found this not because I was looking to debunk the text, but because I was trying to look up additional information on working with some of the concepts contained within it.  Instead I have been lead to question the accuracy of the research which has been done for this book, and am probably going to have to spend at least as much time confirming (or disproving) its claimed historical information as I do in looking into further information about the techniques and practices I have found valuable in this book.  Particularly, it seems, where language is involved.

Yeah, definitely where language is involved.  Sith != co-walker.  Only certain types of Sithe are co-walkers.  Sith is the generic word for a single Fairy, while Sithe was the plural and was cognate with Sidhe.  The Taibhse was the co-walker.  http://rodneymackay.com/druidheachd.pdf/druidt.pdf

If some linguistic argument were being made to justify these as alternative usages, I could maybe see it, but flat declarations of fact about how the words are used in the Gaelic Faerie Tradition should be able to stand up to just a bit more scrutiny when considering the traditional definitions of the words involved.  Checking this stuff took me less than an hour, including writing this post.  Could the author and his editors really not spare an hour to do similar research before publishing?

Up until now, I had been thinking that this was one of the better researched modern pagan books, as it includes a bibliography while so many do not.  But specific claims in the book are not tied to specific books in the bibliography, so it is very difficult to verify any individual claim came from a particular source without going back and reading all 29 books cited in the bibliography, thus dramatically reducing the bibliography's usefulness as a research tool.