Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Read Online Free PDF Page B

valley, being more influenced by Greek culture. We can place by name the domains of up to a hundred Celtic tribes and peoples. Some of those peoples may be studied in abundant detail, such as the Aedui of what is now eastern France, who were first allied with the Romans before being crushed in rebellion against them. Other names reappear on the modern map. The Swiss refer to their country as Helvetia after the ancient Helvetii of the Alps, just as the modern Belgians take their name, if not their ethnicity, from the Belgae. We have excavated large protocities such as Alésia and Bibracte in what is now eastern France, and Manching in southern Germany, the latter’s defensive wall measuring four miles. Individual faces emerge from records, such as Abaris the Hyperborean (sixth century BC ), possibly the earliest druid, who conversed with Pythagoras.
    Two resisters to Roman domination, one Gaulish, the other British, have so fired the imagination of readers over the centuries that they sometimes seem more mythical than historical. Vercingetorix (from the Latin
ver
: over;
cinget
: he surrounds, i.e. warrior;
rex
: king) led a heroic but ultimately futile resistance to Julius Caesar’s conquest. A prince of the Arverni people, he could not rally other nobles to his cause and instead commanded a rag-tag army of the people, who made him their king in 52 BC . His initial success led other peoples to join him until, in a fatal error, he allowed himself to be put under siege at Alésia. Forced to surrender, Vercingetorix was humiliated in display before Roman crowds, imprisoned, and eventually executed in 45 BC . Rediscovered in the Romantic nineteenth-century reinterpretation of ancient history, an aggressive, moustachioed Vercingetorix was commemorated by Napoleon III in a huge, heroic public monument at the modern village of Alise-Sainte Reine on the site of Alésia, 32 miles northwest of Dijon. Long cited in the French school curriculum as the first national hero, Vercingetorix’s struggle is so widely known to most French people that it has inspired a long-running comic strip, Asterix the Gaul. His British counterpart, the tall red-haired queen Boudicca, lives on in even greater esteem. Her name, spelled many ways, Boudica, Boadicia, Bunduca, Boadicea, etc., may mean ‘victory’ (cf. Old Irish
búadach
: victorious; Welsh
buddagol
: victorious). After the Romans killed her husband Prasutagus, they scourged Boudicca and mistreated her daughters. Infuriated, she led her own people, the Iceni of eastern Britain, and the neighbouring Trinobantes in a brutal if short-lived rebellion, during which her forces burned the cities of Colchester and London. When her fortunes declined, she took poison rather than be taken prisoner (
c
. AD 61). Her story has always been accessible as it appears in the works of Tacitus, the well-regarded historian, to whom she was a dangerous giantess. Her persona began to be reshaped in Renaissance drama and continues to expand in contemporary popular fiction. A victorious Boudicca is commemorated in a heroic nineteenth-century statue on Westminster Bridge, London (a more maternal rendering stands in City Hall, Cardiff, Wales).

SUN AND SKY
    One of the few constants across cultures and climes, the sun engenders homage in many early religions as the author of life and the patron of healing and fertility. The wheel and the swastika, ubiquitous symbols of the sun, are found with early settlements as far apart as Asia and North America. Veneration of the sun appears widely in late Stone Age and Bronze Age Europe, especially Scandinavia. The thirteenth-century BC Trundheim Chariot, found in Denmark, indicates attitudes and beliefs many generations before the advent of writing. It features a small bronze horse-drawn wagon containing a gilt sun-disc. Even without corroboration from other contemporary materials, we can infer the existence of processions and sun worship.
    Close observation of the sun’s