Freddy, I am concerned that your knowledge of some of the subjects upon which you are quite outspoken, and sometimes even purport to be an expert, may be less scholarly than it seems to be at first glance.
Spare me. You need to read your own sources more carefully. Where's your ancient Druid writings? The text you cite tells you that the Irish waited for St Patrick in 438 AD to write down their law code. We know what we can of the ancient Celts from descriptions by Greek writers like Strabo, Posidonius, Diodorus, Polybius, even Julius Caesar, not from the writings of the Celts themselves, because they wouldn't write anything down. Although there is evidence they knew how to use Greek in Caesar's day.
"Caesar says in the Gallic War that the essence of Celtic secret knowledge was encoded in verses; a man who wished to know them completely had to memorize them for twenty years. They think it sinful to write down what they know." The Celts, Gerhard Herm, St Martin's Press. More: "The method of teaching must have been that of question and response - the master singing out, the pupils answering in chorus -for there were no written lessons... The whole corpus of knowledge, the whole 'literature' of a people, were thus stored not in dead archives but in living brain cells."
"Not much was changed in these practices even when the Irish, presumably in the 4th century AD, invented the Ogam alphabet (it is not known what 'Ogam' means). This was a primitive script which contained, on a vertical line, represented by means of dashes and dots, nineteen of the letters that we use. But it was not suitable for anything other than the inscription of simple grave-stones or mnemonics, and both the filids and bairds had to rely on their memory."
Herm's The Celts will quickly show the reader that most of what we "know" about the Celts, and especially the Druids, is conjecture. The best written sources we have are from the Greeks who recorded what they saw. Other than that we have oral tradions, sagas. |
