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more enduring places that survive from Celtic settlements were often tainted by later conquerors. For instance, the Celts considered the famed mineral waters found at Bath, England, to be sacred healing waters associated with Sulis, an otherwise obscure local goddess of these thermal springs. After the Roman conquest of Britain, the site was transformed by the Romans into Aquae Sulis (“Waters of Sulis”), with a temple to a goddess the Romans called Sulis Minerva, simply attaching the name of one of their familiar deities to that of the existing local goddess. Later generations of British royalty turned the waters of Bath into a regal spa, and it finally became a Victorian-era resort where the English aristocracy could “take the waters.”*

As for the early Celtic burial sites uncovered in Alpine Germany, these, too, have yielded some clues to their myths, religious practices, and beliefs. But even some of these recent finds date from the post-Roman era and are sometimes tainted by Roman influence. There are a few surviving images of Celtic gods from the pre-Roman period, which depict a god with the horns of a stag. And some stone figurines show three seated women, presumably representing a three-person mother goddess as a maiden, a mother, and an older woman. But museum shelves aren’t exactly groaning with impressive collections of Celtic statuary and decorated pottery. Getting a visual impression of early Celtic culture is, ultimately, slippery business.

There is one shining bright spot in this otherwise dimly lit room of the Celtic past. One branch of the Celtic family tree deserves a laurel wreath for record-keeping. Fortunately, the rich oral traditions, foundation stories, and tales of gods and legendary heroes of the Celts who settled in Ireland, Wales, and southwest England were preserved. And several important collections of Irish and Welsh myths capture the voice and spirit of this pre-Christian Celtic world.

Granted, these sources come with a big red warning label attached. Most of the surviving tales were not written down until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, long after Ireland and the British Isles were Christianized in the fifth century. In Irish and British monasteries, the literate monks—the same ones who are largely responsible for preserving the Bible during Europe’s Dark Ages—recorded many of the traditional Irish and Welsh Celtic stories, but probably laundered the Celtic originals, layering them with biblical or Christian sentiments. But beggars can’t be choosers. These Irish and Welsh tales are the best we have—and they have made an enormous contribution to Irish and British literature.

Of these later sources, three from Ireland are most significant and entertaining. The Book of Invasions (Leabhar Gabhala); the Ulster Cycle—which includes a masterful Irish epic called the Táin Bó Cúailnge (pronounced toyn boe kool-ee), or The Cattle Raid of Cooley; and the Fionn (Fenian) Cycle were all written down in Irish monasteries that would be crucial to preserving the written word during the Middle Ages. A fourth collection, the Mabinogion, was written in Wales, although exactly how it found its way into print is a mystery. The oldest known fragments date to 1225, but the oldest complete Mabinogion is dated to around 1400.

The first of these collections—the Irish Book of Invasions (Leabhar Gabhala)—is a twelfth-century attempt to compile a “history” of Ireland. Certainly derived from a much older oral tradition—just as Gilgamesh or Hesiod’s Theogony had been—it describes a series of five successive mythical occupations of Ireland, including a generation said to be descendants of the biblical Noah. Such a biblical flourish was typical of the medieval Christian attempt to add a touch of religious “legitimacy” to these old pagan myths. It concludes with the arrival of the ancestors of the Celts in Ireland.

At the center of this account is the story of the last race of gods in Ireland, the Tuatha (“tribe,” or “people”), told in a foundation myth known as the Tuatha Dé Danaan. The Tuatha—the “people of the