~~ Royally Matched by Emma Chase

(The Royally series)

~~ Emma Chase, Royally Matched

(Royally series book #2)

A quote from the beginning of Spirits of the Sacred Grove. It absolutely is not a how-to book, and anyone picking this up to learn Druidry will have their work cut out to say the very least. Even so, it is a book that has inspired a great many people to find their own way and their own path as Druids. Emma Restall Orr offers a poetic sense of what it means to be a Druid, a tantalizing glimpse of something hard to name, and even harder to pin down or possess. There are a great many contemporary Druid authors whose journey and inspiration began with Emma Restall Orr's work, and a great many Druids who are still questing after something that they first sensed while reading this particular book. It holds an important place in the evolution of modern Druidry.

I've taken this quote from the beginning of 'Kissing the Hag' - it gives a flavour of the book, in terms of both the writing style and the content. It's a very readable book, in which some quite difficult subject matter is handle in prtty accessible ways.

The story of Gawain and the Loathly Lady runs through this book - a mythic counterpoint to talking about issues of modern femininity and gender relations. I've talked about that aspect of the book in more detail in another blog post - http://nimueb.booklikes.com/post/1274838/of-knights-and-hags 

Taken from the Forward to The Wakeful World. I think the quote illustrates something of the shift here from previous books - the tone is very different (I thought) from much of Emma Restall Orr's previous writing - there are more academic tones in the mix, and there's less of the experiential material that dominated previously. Instead, she adopts a more theoretical and philosophical approach to considering Paganism.