Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend, by Miranda J. Green (Thames & Hudson, £8.95 in UK)
Precisely who and what the Celts were continues to be argued over, but what is past dispute is the density of their mythic and folkloric legacy. This book covers nearly a millennium , or, to be exact, from 500BC to 400AD. We know a good deal about the Gauls and their customs from Roman historians and observers such as Julius Caesar, though their testimony is often as obviously biased as the views of Giraldus Cambrensis on medieval Ireland. Conquered by Rome, the Gauls took over a good deal of the vocabulary of Roman art and imbued it with their own symbolism and nature animism, and something rather similar happened in Britain. To what extent the Celts practised human sacrifice is still argued over, but the presence of ritually murdered bodies preserved in bogs and elsewhere suggests that they did - though the mass burnings described by Caesar may be hearsay. The Celtic Underworlds, the cult of hunting with its strange sympathy between the hunters and the hunted, the sinister symbolism of the ravens (e.g. the Irish war goddess, the Morrigan), the tangled pantheon which sometimes incorporated Roman divinities, the riddle of such phenomena as the Flag Fen in East Anglia, are all reminders of how the folk mind in these islands tails off into legend and prehistory. There are plenty of illustrations, adding much to the interest and also to the authenticity of the volume.