the deutsche mythologie wasn't so much an attempt at pagan survival literature as positing that SOME myths might have come from pre-christian religions. more of a "hey, so here's some ideas from the stories we've gathered" rather than "these are set in stone by me personally" thing. i get the sense that clegg doesn't speak or read german terribly well (the constant issues with pluralizing nouns are a big neon sign pointing to that fact) or have access to translations that haven't been affected by the golden bough; the grimms*, at least in their fiction, were cataloging tales (and, unfortunately, putting their own protestant spins on things, but it's not their fault that translators of their scholarly works were hell-bent on telling pretty stories instead of accuracy). she also seems in some cases to be subscribing to some of this behavior herself which docks points from the decent-to-good scholarship in this book. what was that about the death and resurrection motif in the st lucia chapter that not too long after is shat upon when talking about the spurious fertility cults? similarly, i don't care much for her assertion that the dark creatures of wintertime are simply manifestations designed to terrify and delight when it's really not so hard to notice that a lot of them come from the fact that winter is an extremely lean time for many and that not everyone will come out of it whole or even alive. that's not to say that they don't serve the dual horror-entertainment purpose, but they definitely spring more from the horrible and probable fact that death could come visiting

this book is like [genuinely fun description of rites & rituals i would love to see] [piss-poor scholarship] [maudlin rhapsodizing over what the author has just written about] [more bad scholarship] ['btw i'm reading m r james after spending an entire chapter complaining about things in a bad translation of jacob grimm's deutsche mythologie but i don't do any of the things i just spent the chapter complaining about'] along with constant footnotes...put those thangs in an appendix or limit them to a couple per chapter, not every single page. also, james was primarily an EDWARDIAN author, not one from the "late eighteenth and early nineteenth century" (that is, the 1700s and 1800s)--if you're going to make claims, at least be damn sure they're accurate and have an editor who knows what they're about. how does someone educated at cambridge, where james taught for many moons and unearthed medieval texts THAT SHE PROBABLY CONSULTED, get the timing so wrong?

on the whole accessible, but it's probably best to do your own research and not have any sort of nonfiction text tell you what to believe aside from tradition and folklore being ever-changing

* jacob especially was a linguist which would account for the third-sentence discussion of terminations of the word 'god' in various germanic languages. definitely not a book that would've been printed for the masses. hang your arguments on james frazer and his ideas that crept into translations of various texts, maybe, instead of what you've gleaned from awful translations from academics who can't find their asses with both hands and a sheet of detailed instructions