Celtic Mythology and Religion: With Chapters Upon Druid Circles and Celtic Burial (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Celtic Mythology and Religion: With Chapters Upon Druid Circles and Celtic Burial

Ness Burgh School Board, and thereafter was officially connected with the Secondary Department of the Inverness High Public School. In 1901 his Uni versity of Aberdeen honoured him with the honorary degree of LL.D. In 1905 Mr. Arthur J. Balfour, then Prime Minister, in consideration of his great services to Celtic, and specially Gaelic, philology, history and literature, recommended him to the King for a Civil List Pension of £90, as from Ist April of that year. Two years later he died suddenly in Stirling, where he had gone on business during the Easter vacation.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Celtic Magazine in 1883-4, and is here reprinted from theM agazine type. Hence it is that it is reproduced with all its imperfections on its head, and the critic must be asked, before condemning details at least, to note the list of corrections appended to this preface. The intention of this series of papers was to popularise the subject of Mythology, and to apply its principles to the elucidation of Celtic beliefs, tales, and traditions. I wished to place clearly before myG aelic brethren the exact position which the religious beliefs of the Celts held in theE uropean kinship, to clear up the misty subject of Druidism, and to reconstruct, from the shattered materials to hand, the Pantheon of their Gaelic ancestors. This I undertook, knowing that in the last part of my object the rehabilitation of the Gaelic Olympus my results must only be tentative, for the material for reconstruction is difficult to deal with, and much of it is in MSS. unedited. Since these papers began to appear in print, events have travelled with more than usual rapidity both in the field of general and of Celtic Mythology. It was last year that Mr Andrew Lang delivered his lively attack against the orthodox school of mythologists, and it was also last year that M. DA rbois de Jubainville simportant works on Celtic Literature and Myth ology appeared. Mr Lang sattack has certainly driven the older school from several of their positions, but he has by no means overthrown either the importance of language in the development of myth, or the fact that the sun, the sky, the powers of wind and storm, and the change of day and night were the most prominent factors in the creation of the deities and powers of the ancient mythologies.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion,