Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

Written by Ronald Hutton

Narrated by Gary Paul Williams

A concise history of the goddess-like figures who evade both Christian and pagan traditions, from the medieval period to the present day

In this riveting account, renowned scholar Ronald Hutton explores the history of deity-like figures in Christian Europe. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, literature, and history, Hutton shows how hags, witches, the fairy queen, and the Green Man all came to be, and how they changed over the centuries.

Looking closely at four main figures-Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Mistress of the Night, and the Old Woman of Gaelic tradition-Hutton challenges decades of debate around the female figures who have long been thought versions of pre-Christian goddesses. He makes the compelling case that these goddess figures found in the European imagination did not descend from the pre-Christian ancient world, yet have nothing Christian about them. It was in fact nineteenth-century scholars who attempted to establish the narrative of pagan survival that persists today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765054925

Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton is a professor of history at the University of Bristol who specializes in pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. He is the author of more than a dozen books.

Reviews for Queens of the Wild

[Doug Seacord · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked this out after hearing Professor Hutton on The Rest Is History podcast. The book is more scholarly than I was probably expecting from anything converted into an audio book—it’s more historiography than history, although there’s plenty of that too. But that just made the work interesting in ways I probably wasn’t expecting. The story of the interactions of interpretations of the mythological figures covered in the book is at least as worthwhile as a recitation of the stories associated with the subjects, and as very much an outsider to folklore studies (I took a class in college…), I’m hoping I’ll walk away from this book a much savvier consumer of ostensibly timeless tales and the interpretive cottage industry that surrounds them.

Also, although I mentioned the book was more scholarly than I anticipated, it doesn’t lapse into the kind of opaque prose one might fear. I don’t think more than one or two things were “centered,” and if I’m not mistaken, there wasn’t a single sentence devoted to pronouncing on the “liminal” character of bridges or doors.

One minor con: The reader’s voice is pleasant enough, but I’m not sure he understood a great deal of what he was reading. He often uses pauses and emphases in strange places. This isn’t YA-level prose so one can understand that the sentence structure might be more challenging for a reader, but I feel like it would have been better to just have Professor Hutton read his own book.

[Matt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book by the author. The audio narration, however, is atrocious. The cadence is random and robotic, more like an AI that has not been trained to recognize punctuation than a human reader.