Myths & Legends of the Celtic RaceRolleston, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race
Rolleston, T. W. (Thomas William)
Celts -- Religion; Mythology, Celtic
“The Gauls as well as the Britons—of the same Celtic
stock—practised enamel-working before the Roman conquest. The
enamel workshops of Bibracte, with their furnaces, crucibles,
moulds, polishing-stones, and with the crude enamels in their
various stages of preparation, have been recently excavated from
the ruins of the city destroyed by Caesar and his legions. But the
Bibracte enamels are the work of mere dabblers in the art,
compared with the British examples. The home of the art was
Britain, and the style of the pattern, as well as the association
in which the objects decorated with it were found, demonstrated
with certainty that it had reached its highest stage of indigenous
development before it came in contact with the Roman culture.”(17)
The National Museum in Dublin contains many superb examples of Irish
decorative art in gold, bronze, and enamels, and the “strong Celtic tinge”
of which Mr. Romilly Allen speaks is as clearly observable there as in the
relics of Hallstatt or La Tène.
Everything, then, speaks of a community of culture, an identity of
race-character, existing over the vast territory known to the ancient
world as “Celtica.”
*Celts and Germans*
But, as we have said before, this territory was by no means inhabited by
the Celt alone. In particular we have to ask, who and where were the
Germans, the Teuto-Gothic tribes, who eventually took the place of the
Celts as the great Northern menace to classical civilisation?
They are mentioned by Pytheas, the eminent Greek traveller and geographer,
about 300 B.C., but they play no part in history till, under the name of
Cimbri and Teutones, they descended on Italy to be vanquished by Marius at
the close of the second century. The ancient Greek geographers prior to
Pytheas know nothing of them, and assign all the territories now known as
Germanic to various Celtic tribes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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