That brought me here, that brings me back

Normally I dream about art of the kind I wish actually existed, like female-created pre-Code proto-noir or really inclusive '90's sci-fi TV. Last night I dreamed about reading a relatively famous fantasy trilogy from the '80's that I had just happened to miss during the period where I was reading anything with a genre-looking cover that wasn't nailed down. It was an entirely plausible '80's fantasy trilogy of a certain style; it was very Celticky and not very good. Everyone had flaming red or jet-black hair and lots of it. There was an important forest and frequent talk of the Goddess. The antagonists were not strictly speaking Roman, but they were an imperial power which had legions, so the audience didn't have to reach for the parallel; I want to say there was some component of science fantasy, or at least technology of the ancients that passed Clarke's Law, but I can't remember which direction it went. There was a love triangle. Everyone had hurt/comfort coming out of their ears. I was talking about it with a friend who doesn't exist in waking life at the equally dream-based sushi restaurant where he worked; his mother had named him after her favorite character, about which he felt embarrassedly ambivalent having read the series as an adult and realized that his namesake was the author's designated plucky comic relief. (Not that most people noticed, since the character's name was a permutation of "Seamus," but I understood the principle of the thing.) I didn't hate the experience of reading it, but it was definitely no longer my thing. I might have felt differently in elementary through high school. From outside the dream, I'm actually pretty sure I would have read it if I'd run across it on a library shelf and not noticed the problems for years. Anything that wasn't nailed down. I have piecemeal middle-school memories of Monica Hughes' The Isis Pedlar (1982) and that novel has a terrible case of the Space Irish. derspatchel and I are off to early dinner and the MFA.