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 ithin the last few years, interest in anything Celtic has exploded around the world. Libraries are bulging under the invasion of new books touting new theories and speculation about the Celts. Surf the web and you are deluged with literally thousands of sites claiming to have the truth about these enigmatic peoples. It seems that almost everyone has become an expert on the Celts. Yet a close look with any kind of analytic eye and you quickly see that the only real truth is that there is a lot of confusion on who the Celts actually were and their place(s) in history.
Too many authors write with a myopic view that only examines easy to find references on folk-lore and mythology generated over the last century or so, but fail to bother to investigate the most recent work being done in Europe by various disciplines such as archeology, art, linguistics, and genetics. Additionally, many tend to provide inflated bibliographies, which includes works not pertinent to the subject at hand or rare documents available on in a handful of Rare Document Libraries around the world. Another ploy seems to be the listing of foreign language documents. While not all bibliographies are inflated, I always advise a little analysis to determine pertinence to the subject at hand and the likelihood that the author may have actually held the document in hand. First of all, if you are going to study any particular people or culture, you need to study that particular people or culture in its many aspects. You need to examine the expressions of the culture and reach across such academic lines of Language, Art and Law and Literature through the eyes of archeology, anthropology, dendrochronology, language, literature, sociology, mythology, genetics, and any other area which might have a fragmentary piece of the great puzzle. As an Irish Celt, I take umbrage with the many misconceptions and often blatant falsehoods heaped upon the unsuspecting by both articled scholars as well as poorly advised amateur. It seems no longer a case of mental fruit salad, but rather one of poor quality mental fertilizer and oral flatulence. Rather than vent my displeasure, follow me a bit as I try to strip away some of the scum, filter out sediment and find out if there really is any good Celtic water to be found. |
