Reddit reviews Early Irish Myths and Sagas (Penguin Classics)
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Penguin Classics
For a start:
Not pre-Yeats but also not terribly well known is Brian O'Nolan, also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. The Third Policeman is his most famous book.
As for before the 20th century Jeffery Gantz's book Early Irish Myths and Tales is a wonderful selection of Irish folklore. Quite a lot of the intertextual references in Yeats are from folktales.
Then of course there are Swift, Wilde, and Shaw, all of whom are all wonderful.
(I prefer Druidry to Druidism, rolls off the tongue better).
Yes, you can do whatever you want. It's a belief system, a way of life, it is not Ikea plans. There is no right or wrong when it comes to someone's beliefs :)
As far as 'a certain ancestry', I assume you mean people of northern European descent claiming only they can be Asatru?
Look, here's the thing. Any neo-pagan religion is reconstructionist. Fact is there is very very little documentation of non-Abrahamic religions in Europe from the middle ages and previously. Even Greco-Roman religious practices and customs are largely speculative and taken from recorded myth and legend. For the most part 'pagan' religious weren't even very organized and beliefs could vary wildly from group to group, region to region, decade to decade.
I recommend you read the various myths and legends of all European cultures and even the Greco-Roman ones. You'll see a lot of recurring themes, the names of the heroes and deities will change but you see the same stories over and over.
Look at Thor vs Perun. Zeus vs Jupiter. Hel vs Prosperina vs Persephone. Hell look at the native tribes of North America, you'll see a dozen or more versions of Coyote.
Do what feels right to you, and don't be afraid to drift. But first, really dive into the source material for the deities we know about. I'll edit this post shortly with some things to start with.
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Edit:
That's a good start.
Also wherever you live find the Audubon society book for trees and the like in your area, you should be able to find one for your region on Amazon used for 5-10$.
For Norse sagas, Penguin classics has some fantastic editions:
For eastern mythology, you'll want:
For Celtic mythology:
How far back do you want to go? Early Irish Myths and Sagas by Jeffrey Gantz has a good collection of several Celtic myths. In my day, it was the go-to primer for starting to learn about early Irish mythology (though it could totally be something else, now. I am not very up-to-date on how this is taught nowadays.)
The CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts) database hosted by UCC hosts transcriptions of many Old Irish texts. There are some English translations, though they can be difficult to dig up. Nonetheless the database contains a wide variety of material the narrative literature section includes mythology.
Ignoring the somewhat dodgy-looking website MaryJones.us contains a wide selection of Irish (and Celtic!) material and more translations. The only real downside to MaryJones is that the sources of translations aren't always provided, so the accuracy cannot be checked against the actual texts the translation is working from. Nonetheless, the majority are good translations.
Irish Literature which includes many of the historical and mythological texts that CELT also has, and some Pre-Christian Inscriptions.
In terms of books, The Táin, early Ireland's great epic is a good one. I've yet to read the latest translation, admittedly, but I do quite enjoy Kinsella's version: he manages to capture the feel of Old Irish, so to speak, and its occasionally choppy narrative style, while making the text legitimately readable. It stays true to the text while still being accessible.
Likewise, Jeffrey Gantz's Early Irish Myths and Sagas is an excellent introduction to some of the more interesting, and important myths of early Ireland. The translations are very readable - though at times he has sacrificed the tone of Old Irish to do so.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Tales of the Elders of Ireland as translated by Ann Dooley and Harry Roe, has retained the Old Irish flavour, and is therefore occasionally difficult to understand.
In terms of secondary material, you'll have to be a little more specific as to what you're looking for. Miranda Green has a pretty good book, but she runs into the same issue that we all run into: we don't know how the myths that we have were perceived by or influenced the people who created them.
All of our stories, all of our information, really, is relayed to us through manuscripts that were created primarily in monasteries (though we have some created by laypeople and not monks, they're younger, and fairly well-removed from whatever paganism may be represented in the texts.) Few (if any) of them provide any commentary, or meta-analysis - and what we do have is pretty spare (ie. a note that the scribe doesn't believe any of what he's just written.)
The texts do tend to uphold the laws that we have, so I suppose you could argue either way: did the myths influence the laws, or the laws influence the myths?
But as I say, as we have no sources, really, from pre-Christian Ireland, only material that has been transmitted through a Christian lens, it's hard to know how the remaining texts were treated. Granted, their preservation does indicate that they were regarded with a certain level of reverence, but their actual influence is unknown. There is some literature that compares the ways in which the Christian authors follow some of the tropes of myth in their own writings of saints lives, but I'm not sure if that's what you're after.