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mburnamfink's review against another edition
4.0
Written as a companion volume to a 1987 BBC miniseries, The Celts has the grand ambition of covering the entire sweep of Celtic history in an accessible format, and does a good job, with some compromises in terms of organization and systematic oversight.
Starting with the Hochdorf and La Tene archaeological finds, moving through Roman and Greek interactions with high Celtic culture, decline and Christianity, and the modern Celtic revivals. Art and stories are the center points, with lots of beautiful photographic plates of Celtic grave goods, along with translations of several Celtic myths. Unfortunately, a lot of what made the Celts tick as a culture is lost to time: their druid priestly class refused to write anything down to preserve their own power, which means that the accounts we have are Roman and Greek. From a culture which controlled territory from Austria to Ireland in the centuries BCE, the Celts were consistently forced backwards, by Roman invasion and cultural domination, by waves of Germanic migration, and then by Christian missionaries, who replaced some local heroes with saints, and then by Medieval and Early Modern monarchs who colonized Ireland, enclosed the Scottish highlands, crushed independent Brittany, etc.
For the Celts, history was very much written by the winners, and Delaney is aware that much of contemporary Celtic culture was made up wholesale by folklorists in the 19th century, that there are enough gaps in the oral tradition that reconstructing something from an old fisherman storyteller who died in 1956 may not be sufficient, that the modern (i.e. 1980s) Celtic language revival is about identity rather than history. But read with a critical eye, this book is a useful survey and introduction to the topic.
Starting with the Hochdorf and La Tene archaeological finds, moving through Roman and Greek interactions with high Celtic culture, decline and Christianity, and the modern Celtic revivals. Art and stories are the center points, with lots of beautiful photographic plates of Celtic grave goods, along with translations of several Celtic myths. Unfortunately, a lot of what made the Celts tick as a culture is lost to time: their druid priestly class refused to write anything down to preserve their own power, which means that the accounts we have are Roman and Greek. From a culture which controlled territory from Austria to Ireland in the centuries BCE, the Celts were consistently forced backwards, by Roman invasion and cultural domination, by waves of Germanic migration, and then by Christian missionaries, who replaced some local heroes with saints, and then by Medieval and Early Modern monarchs who colonized Ireland, enclosed the Scottish highlands, crushed independent Brittany, etc.
For the Celts, history was very much written by the winners, and Delaney is aware that much of contemporary Celtic culture was made up wholesale by folklorists in the 19th century, that there are enough gaps in the oral tradition that reconstructing something from an old fisherman storyteller who died in 1956 may not be sufficient, that the modern (i.e. 1980s) Celtic language revival is about identity rather than history. But read with a critical eye, this book is a useful survey and introduction to the topic.
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