For the past decade, Oxford University Press has been printing volumes in the book series called "Very Short Introductions". Each of the 268 volumes are in 6x4 inch paperback format, about 40,000 words in length and priced at $11.95 each. And as the subtitle suggests, the books provide "stimulating ways into new subjects"; brief, intensive, well-presented short courses on particular subjects, written by experts in the various fields. Titles include philosophy, religion, politics and science, including a handful of archaeology and archaeology-related topics. I chose the Druids, because I know, or rather knew, nothing about them.
Druids: A Very Short Introduction. Book cover courtesy Oxford University Press 2010
Druids: A Very Short Introduction was written by Barry Cunliffe, and was published this month by OUP. The book doesn't start off with a definition of Druids, which this total newbie to the subject found a bit difficult to process: I resolved that by peeking into the final chapter. There, I discovered Cunliffe's main point. You see, there have been at least four or five versions of the ideas of Druids, and the most popular one is the supposed builders of Stonehenge: that I knew was a fantasy. But, the reason Druids are still so prominently featured in the national character of Britain has to do with classical Greek and Roman fascination with them.
Essentially, for people as new to the subject as I was (think of this as a micro-introduction), the Druids visited by Greek and Roman travelers between about 325-50 BC were a caste of shamans, religious specialists serving the Iron Age Celtic peoples who tracked astronomical events, discussed philosophy and taught students. They were fascinating to the Iron Age Greeks, I would guess, because the Greeks thought they had cornered the market on philosophy and were startled to find such discussions among the "barbarians" of Atlantic Europe. Cunliffe argues that the caste probably long predated the Iron Age, basing his assumption on the presence of the knowledge base of the Druids--astronomy--in evidence within Atlantic Europe for at least a couple of thousand years prior to Greek visits in the fourth century BC.
Druids: A Very Short Introduction is directly comparable to a short course. The book crams a huge amount of information into a very brief package, and then sets you free for the rest of the summer. As a ridiculously uninformed person about ancient history, I was pleasantly surprised to find ample information about the various Greek and Roman writers and travelers to fill me in on that background. There is a substantial section on the archaeology of Britain, which Cunliffe argues is problematic, because you can't find clear one-to-one archaeological analogues to Druids. And there is also quite a bit on the vernacular Irish and Welsh tales that provide the meat of the current stories about Druids.
There is also a terrific picture of Winston Churchill that made me laugh out loud. But I digress.
Druids are odd, as shamans go, not for what they did--sacrifices, ceremonies, astronomical observations are pretty much part and parcel of most prehistoric shamans all over the world--but for the wealth of documentary and ethnographic evidence supporting their existence. That's pretty interesting, and should also be useful to people studying shamans wherever and whenever they are documented. And I have to thank Druids: A Very Short Introduction for igniting that interest in me.
Cunliffe, Barry. 2010. Druids: A Very Short Introduction. 136 pages, a brief bibliography and an index. ISBN 978-0-19-953940-6. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
- Shamans
- Solstice at Stonehenge, a photo essay
- Druids: A Very Short Introduction (at OUP)
- Druids: A Very Short Introduction (Price Grabber)
Comments
They have been doing that sort of thing in Germany fro quite a while.
Recent archaeological discoveries show the Romans as the people who preformed human sacrifice, NOT the Druids.
Wee-haw!! This is certainly a book that peeks my interest, too!! Off to Amazon to get a copy (or two — one to share with family)!
That is bogus about the Romans. They never practiced human sacrifice on a regular basis the way the druids did.
The RECENT finds at Ribemont-sur-Ancre-France & Alston-England that were shown on the National Geographic channel-2009 gave plenty of proof that the not so humane & overly romanticized Gauls & Britons practiced human sacrifice on a far grander scale
than the Classical authors indicated.
Thanks very much for your excellent synopsis of the book. It looks like a good read. I am an amateur student of Celtic Studies and particularly of archaeology as it relates to Ireland and the British Isles. I am familiar with Druids who were indeed shamans, but their wealth of knowledge is mostly lost for several reasons, not the least of which the fact that the Celtic peoples did not have a written language until much later than the rest of Europe. Knowledge was passed on orally and while there are many Celtic mythological stories, much of it has some grain of collective memory in it. Anyway, your write up was excellent.
I do rather take issue with the idea that the Celts did not have a written language until much later than the rest of Europe–we have thousands of Gaulish/Continental Celtic inscriptions in a number of dialects, and Ogham was being used by c. the fifth century in Britain and Ireland.
As to the druids as shamen–I’d rather assert that they engaged in shamanic behaviors. See:
http://digitalmedievalist.com/opinionated-celtic-faqs/druids-shamen/
Archaeological discoveries (recent or not is irrelevant) generally don’t show much of anything definitive. Researchers interpret the discovery and decide what they think it means. And those interpretations are as rooted in the opinions and biases as are the interpretations of any person.
What pov said is unfair. Irrelevant? I think not since this article claims that the Romans used human sacrifice. I’m sure it is possible, but thus far no one has ever found the remains of it to the degree as I mentioned in my initial comment about what was recently found in England & France.
The Archaeologists were not Roman. They were English & French so you can question their points but to dismiss the finds as some pro-Roman agenda is just false.