MYTHOLOGY OF IRELAND

I. The Celts

Who were the Celts ?

The Celts may be taken as a starting-point for a study of the long

series of people whose arrival and settlement in Britain have

contributed to its history. They provide a link between the prehistoric -

at the end of which the had emerged as the product of much cultural

evolution - and the early historic period . The Celts in the prehistoric

period had no writing , and so were unable to leave written records of

themselves. We know of them from place-names, from the reports of

classical writers-often their enemies-and from archaeology. For

centuries they have been relegated to the remote parts of UK's islands,

beautiful but somewhat inaccessible, and commercially and politically

of little importance .

We have been in the habit of thinking of the Celts as they were left

by their Saxon and Norman conquerors, a somewhat backward and

relatively thin population in the less accessible mountain highlands of

Scotland and Wales . But is only the end of the story which stretches

much further back into the centuries before Christ .

Religion and mythology

The religion and mythology of the Celts are difficult to interpret. It

might be assumed that a certain unity of belief had prevailed

throughout the Celtic world, despite the continuing influence of earlier

indigenous and localized cults and the effect of contact with the

Mediterranean civilizations.

At their beginnings, Celtic people did not commit their ritual lore to

writing, the only native sources available for Europe and Britain are

those derived from archaeology.

On the other hand, in Ireland, where local written evidence, based

on earlier oral tradition, is ample, conservative and eloquent, these

sources date from after the introduction of Christianity, while

archaeological evidence for Celtic cults in pre-Christian Ireland is

generally less abundant that that of Gaul and Britain.