Most of our knowledge of early Celtic culture comes from Latin historians and from an extensive body of early Irish texts composed between 700 and 1000 AD. These include native law texts as well as heroic prose narratives and intricately crafted rhymed verse in hundreds of different meters. There are a few early texts from Celtic Wales as well, but paradoxically most of the surviving Welsh stories about the legendary Celtic king Arthur are translations from earlier French or English stories based on lost Celtic originals. Marie de France, founder of the Romance tradition in England, based her poetic narratives on folklore from Brittany, a Celtic region of France, but none of her Celtic originals survive.

The earliest stories about Arthur were probably much like the Irish stories about the kingdoms of Ulster and Connacht, which feature kings Conchobor and Ailill and Queen Medb (whose name is Anglicized to Maeve or Mab). The boy super-hero CuChulainn plays a prominent role in these stories, and many other characters seem to have godlike powers, leading some researchers to speculate that they were survivors from pre-Christian Celtic mythology whose humanized representations were inoffensive to the Church. Modern readers used to male-gendered heroes may be surprised to discover that Maeve was as redoubtable a warrior as her husband and that CuChulainns martial arts instructor was a British woman named Scathach (the Shadow). A woman warrior well documented in the historical record is the British Celt Boudicca, who led a devastating attack on Roman colonial troops.

In addition to marvelous heroic tales, early Irish literature boasts poems of remarkable sophistication by well-educated intellectuals. There are a number of secular love poems, some dealing with romantic involvements between ordinary mortals and men or women from fairyland, a remote parallel world inhabited by undying humanoids about as tall as human beings or perhaps a bit taller (not the tiny winged creatures of Shakespeare). Many early Irish lyrics are written from the viewpoint of the monastic Christian hermits who took up solitary residence in isolated forest huts or set out at random on the ocean in small boats that drifted to remote island retreats. A prominent feature of Irish monastic poems is a love of nature that would be hard to duplicate in English verse before the Romantic period. One hermit bard claims that the natural flora and fauna around his humble dwelling equal the glory of any royal court, using his descriptive powers to prove it.

A few passages of Irish heroic poetry that survive from the prehistoric period employ an alliterative line very much like the one used by Old English poets. Some researchers attribute this similarity to early cultural sharing between the Celtic and Germanic peoples; others think that alliterative meter dated from a period before Celtic and Germanic had differentiated from each other. Alliterative meter also seems to predominate in the very earliest texts from the third western branch of Indo-European, Italic. We tend to associate Latin verse with the meter of Virgils Aeneid (dactylic hexameter), but this is a Greek meter, and was not used by the Romans until their military conquest of Greece brought them into contact with the poetry of Homer and Sappho. The Latin alliterative charm for fruitful land quoted in an agricultural treatise by Cato looks more like Beowulf than like the Aeneid.

The World of the Celts

Dalriada Celtic Heritage Trust. The Trust exists to promote all aspects of Celtic culture, languages and traditions, past, present and future. Great website.
The Celts and Saxons Homepage. Lots and lots of links, as well as great background material for those who are new to the culture.
Gaelic and Gaelic Culture.
The contents of this page are many. You should explore at your leisure, but here are straight paths to some of the more important parts:
Who were the Celts? See a rough map of Celtic Ireland.
The Celts. Links to all things Gaelic from the folks at MetaLab.
Sabhal Mr Ostaig. This page is made out entirely in Gaelic. I plead complete ignorance of the language, but some of you out there might be able to enjoy the site.
The Celts. Great website on the Celts. Has sections on art, religion and Celtic society, as well as a bibliography.
Clannada na Gadelica. This is the Gaelic Traditionalist Resource & Mail List Page. Cheesy introduction, but seems to have a lot of stuff on the Celts. They have quite an extensive bibliography on the Brehon Laws, as well as stuff like the Book of Feasts and A Few Basic Tenets of Gaelic Traditionalism. Give it a try.
The Celts. The introduction is a bit hard to read, but it has many good links, especially on subjects like religion and festivals.
The Rowanhold Bardic Circle. It's a neo-Pagan discussion group devoted to the exploration of the Bardic Arts, and engaged in the research, study, and performance of the traditional neo-Pagan, pre-Christian and early Celtic Christian Bardic Tradition. Really. Some parts are relevant and some not, but it's great fun to explore, especially the epics made up by the members themselves.

Art and Music

Origins of Celtic Art. This is the home page of Constanze Witt's dissertation proposal in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia. Wonderful pictures of Celtic art and its origins.
Am Breachdan, the Tartan. Great pictures of tartans, one of the most easily recognized of Celtic icons.

Texts

Story of Mac Datho's Pig. Regarded as one of the best of the Irish sagas, with nations fighting over a pig. Fairly entertaining and ironic. Has both the original Gaelic and the English translation.

Religion

Celtic Christianity and the Celtic Church. Includes links as well.

Miscellaneous

Faeries. Likely everything you'll want to know (but with links to other faerie sites, just in case).

The Anglo-Saxons
The Norse
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The Celts/August 2000