The Celts: The People Who Came Out of the Darkness (English and German Edition)

This is a work originally published in Germany in 1975, the British and American editions came out in 1976-77, this is a review of the first American edition.Gerhard Herm, the author, unlike previous authors compares the Ancient Celtic peoples to Greece & Rome as the Great Northern European Civilization comparable and equal in Cultural richness, Power and Diversity, something I don't think more recent scholars have done.Herm's over view of the Celts follows a historical narrative that has a tendency to loop back on itself, for example, Chapters 1&2 look at the Celts earliest encounters against Republican Rome, Chapters 3-4 look at the interactions of the Celts & Greeks from the time of Alexander the Great to the Ancient Galatians of Asia Minor and the Historical Descriptions of the Celts by the Great Greek Historians. Chapters 5-6 look back to search for the earliest ancestors of the Celts through finding the origins of the earliest Indo-European peoples. In Chapter 6 Herm takes the unusual stance of looking for Celtic ancestors through focusing on Jurgen Spanuth's Nordic theory of Atlantis and the Great European Migration of the 13th century B.C.E.Herm then looks at the origins of recognizable Celtic Culture through the Hallstatt & La Tene Cultures and their developments and looks at their religion and mythology including the role of the Druids in Chapters 7-9.He then goes on to look at the later clashes between Rome and the Celts in Chapters 10-13, Caesar and the Gallic Wars, the Defeat of Vercingetorix, the Campaigns in Britain and ' The Barbarian Conspiracy', the piratical raids and later invasions that would see Britain removed from the Empire in A.D.410.Chapters 14-16 focus on Ireland and the Irish La Tene cultural period from 300B.C.E. to A.D.450, the rise of the Celtic Church in Ireland & Scotland, the Christinization of Continental Europe by Irish & Scottish Missionaries and the final fall of the Celtic Church to Roman Catholicism in 663 at the Council of Whitby and the rise of the Arthurian Cycles with their clearly Celtic British origins into the early14th century.There is some outdated material but overall an outstanding introduction to a highly interesting subject.

Book Club choice that keeps us all interested and fascinated.

Great book

Given that the book was published in the 70s, it doesn't benefit from recent scholarship so I was concerned it might be very dated. Sure enough there is some out-of-date information, but overall I thought it was very good. I'm no expert on the subject myself, but most of what he says that I know anything about seems to be accurate.The book starts with early references to the Celts by the early Roman Republic and follows them through to the early medieval period. It does focus somewhat on the Celtic peoples of the British Isles but it also discusses continental Celts, what we know of them. I enjoyed the breadth of the coverage in that regard.One thing I didn't like was that the translator just loves him some hyphens! He uses them where he should, but also in lots of places that aren't necessary. I got to read about salt-mines and trade-centres, head-hunters and the after-life, wine-jugs and grain-farmers, market-places and mountain-ranges, warrior-people and pincer-movements, siege-towers and escaping by a hair's-breadth. It comes and goes; you'll have some pages of easy reading with few, shall we say, optional hyphens, followed by pages just chock full of these things, which I found distracting. Still, this was just an annoyance, really; it's an esthetic/stylistic thing, not a substantive fault in the book.

Given that the book was published in the 70s, it doesn't benefit from recent scholarship so I was concerned it might be very dated. Sure enough there is some out-of-date information, but overall I thought it was very good. I'm no expert on the subject myself, but most of what he says that I know anything about seems to be accurate.The book starts with early references to the Celts by the early Roman Republic and follows them through to the early medieval period. It does focus somewhat on the Celtic peoples of the British Isles but it also discusses continental Celts, what we know of them. I enjoyed the breadth of the coverage in that regard.One thing I didn't like was that the translator just loves him some hyphens! He uses them where he should, but also in lots of places that aren't necessary. I got to read about salt-mines and trade-centres, head-hunters and the after-life, wine-jugs and grain-farmers, market-places and mountain-ranges, warrior-people and pincer-movements, siege-towers and escaping by a hair's-breadth. It comes and goes; you'll have some pages of easy reading with few, shall we say, optional hyphens, followed by pages just chock full of these things, which I found distracting. Still, this was really just an annoyance; it's an esthetic/stylistic thing, not a substantive fault in the book.

An excellent book on the subject covering all the reinvent aspects and history of the various celtic regions