Friday, May 22, 2009

Blood & Mistletoe

From the Telegraph:
Our knowledge of who and what the Druids were is based, in fact, on a tiny stock of ancient texts; all that the archaeologists can do is first make an interpretation of the texts and then select those bits of physical evidence that appear to back it up. Professor Hutton gets through all of this, with masterly inconclusiveness, in fewer than 50 pages. The great bulk of his book (and it is a great, bulky book, with more than 400 large pages of small print) is taken up not with the history of the Druids – as the subtitle might suggest – but with the history of what people have subsequently thought, imagined and claimed about them.

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