What are the historical sources by which we can know the Druids?
* A: Prof. Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol Univ. (UK), once wrote: “All that we know about the Druids is that they were the most highly respected magical practitioners and spiritual experts of the tribes of northwest Europe. The trouble is that we don’t have a single word of writing left by a Druid, and we don’t have a single archeological artifact that everyone agrees is associated with the Druids. We know so little about them in fact that they are almost legendary characters.” Again, the main sources we do have on what they did are Roman historians, who wrote on them as they were in the process of conquering Gaul (what is now France; a variant of Welsh is still spoken in Brittany) so there is that political problem, and they equated Celtic deities with Roman ones as well. The main authors are Julius Caesar, Pliny, Tacitus, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus. But in my point of view, the best sources are the mythologies. There we can read of what the Druids did, how they behaved, what
The main sources we have on what they did are Roman historians, who wrote on them as they were in the process of conquering Gaul (what is now France; a variant of Gaelic is still spoken in Brittany) so there is that political problem, and they equated Celtic deities with Roman ones as well. The main authors are Julius Caesar, Pliny, Tacitus, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus. But in my point of view, the best sources are the mythologies. There we can read of what the Druids did, how they behaved, what some of them said, and though the medieval manuscripts that preserved them were written by Christian monks, much wisdom yet remains there. In Ireland the chief myth cycles are the Ulster Cycle, the Fionn Cycle, and the Invasion Races. In Wales, the major myths are contained in a book called The Mabinogion – as well as in the Red Book of Hergest, and the Black Book of Carmarthen. In this century, a number of folklore collections were made of remaining oral-tradition stories, the best of which a
