Nerd Picnic reviewed The Sacred Isle by Dáithí O hOgain
Dense mix of lore, linguistics, and speculation
3 stars
The bottom line is stated early in the book: almost all we know about the pre-Christian Irish was written down by Christians, and the original cultural context of those surviving (and distorted) details is lost. For a historian there is no way around these facts.
The author here uses a lot of linguistic evidence, looking at cognates between Irish names/places and their possible Celtic or Indo-European roots. When necessary, he discusses beliefs and practices from Gaul (roughly France) or Wales instead, because they are better-sourced and presumably similar because of the shared Celtic origin.
There is plenty more to say, but overall I'm glad I read it. Reasonable and convincing claims are mixed with pretty tenuous inferences. That's probably the best that can be done with this topic.
The bottom line is stated early in the book: almost all we know about the pre-Christian Irish was written down by Christians, and the original cultural context of those surviving (and distorted) details is lost. For a historian there is no way around these facts.
The author here uses a lot of linguistic evidence, looking at cognates between Irish names/places and their possible Celtic or Indo-European roots. When necessary, he discusses beliefs and practices from Gaul (roughly France) or Wales instead, because they are better-sourced and presumably similar because of the shared Celtic origin.
There is plenty more to say, but overall I'm glad I read it. Reasonable and convincing claims are mixed with pretty tenuous inferences. That's probably the best that can be done with this topic.
