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.