Remember, when reading these books, Google is your friend. Wikipedia is your friend. If you are curious, look it up. Were there really Celts in Galatea—modern Turkey—that the British would have recognized as cousins, speaking a similar tongue? (Why yes, there were. Wikipedia tells me that three Gaulish tribes traveled southeast, the “Trocmi, Tolistobogii and Tectosages. They were eventually defeated by the Seleucid king Antiochus I, in a battle where the Seleucid war elephants shocked the Celts.”) Were there really vomitoria, where Romans went to vomit? (No, there weren’t. It’s a common misconception. A vomitorium was actually a kind of hallway. But this is a rare slip.)

Not for All the Gold in Ireland brings us an older Photinus. I’m not sure that he’s wiser, but he’s softer, less monstrous. And he’s funnier (both books are funny, although the humor of Votan is gallows humor). He’s off to get back a document, and on the way he’s going to wander a long way into a number of stories. He’ll become Manawydan, son of Llyr, the hero of several branches of the great Welsh prose work known as The Mabinogion (as are many of the people we will meet on the way—Pryderi, for example, and Rhiannon. Taliesin turns up too, centuries before we would expect the legendary Taliesin, but it is a title, we learn, not a name, handed down from bard to bard).

And there’s a strange and glorious achievement here: For the people are human, yes. But they are also mythical, larger than life. Not always in the way that we expect culture heroes and gods to be, but in a new way: they are avatars of gods, avatars of heroes: are these the Odin and the Loki and the Thor of legend, or do they echo them? Do the gods and heroes have a separate existence from Photinus and his crew, and are our protagonist and his friends being pushed through tales that will need to exist?

As the tale goes on, we meet other heroes (is Photinus a hero? He is the hero of his own story) and when we encounter Setanta, the given name of the Irish hero known as Cú Chulainn, we can predict that we will slip, as we do, from The Mabinogion into the Táin. And Not for All the Gold in Ireland concludes itself in a manner that is both a valid conclusion to the book we have been reading and a cliffhanger, and perhaps also a setup for another book, one in which, I suspect, Photinus would have found himself Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs and Kukulkan of the Mayans.

That book was never written. John James did not return to Photinus: he wrote other novels, fine and powerful, and different. These are books that have been brought back into print by people who love them, and would not let them be forgotten. If you are willing to walk and ride with Photinus, who was called Votan and Manannan and many other names, and who only wanted to increase his family’s wealth, and to bed the willing wives of absent officers, then he will repay you, not with amber, or mammoth ivory, or Irish gold, but with stories, which are the finest gift of all.