The Celts : the people who came out of the darkness

by Gerhard Herm

Paper Book, 1976

Status

Available

Call number

936.4

Collections

Publication

New York : St. Martin's Press, 1977, c1976.

Description

The story of North European cultural ancestors.

User reviews

LibraryThing member vibrantminds
A chronological event of the Celts from the time they first encountered Roman armies in Italy to the coming of Caesar to the campaigns advancing into England and Ireland to the acceptance of Christianity to the arising of the King Arthur legend due to William of Normandy's defeat on Harold of
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England in the battle of the Hastings. The book overall was interesting in parts and slow in others. If nothing else it gave me an appreciation of my heritage. From the beginning they were barbarians with their ragged hair, painted bodies, and unduly tactics of war that drove their enemy into fright at first sight. They had an over imaginative superstition to the spirit world in so much that they kept the heads of their victims and decorated their homes, including making drinking vessels out of the skulls, believing that they would protect them. The adoption of Christianity began to tame them to some extent but their ingenious fallacy continued forth in the devising of the Grail and the legend of King Arthur which continues to influence people today.
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LibraryThing member Petroglyph
TL;DR: Outdated at this point, and clearly written by an enthusiastic amateur, not a specialist. Find a more recent work by an actual expert. I recommend Barry Cunliffe.



So-so. This book clearly has its strengths, but each is muddled (or perhaps cancelled out?) by what I see as some pretty serious
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flaws. For one, Herm offers an ok large-scale overview of what was known about the Celts, their migrations and their interactions with the Mediterranean world -- back in the seventies. That's fine and dandy, but the intervening fourty-odd years have made this book increasingly less reliable, and a similar but more recent book should be preferred.

Secondly, Herm is no historian, but a journalist, and it shows. Herm is at his best when he talks about individual excavations and specific locations: as long as he can rely on archeologists and historians and linguists to guide him through the facts, he's an engaging summarizer. (I found the section on the oppidum at Manching particularly memorable). Where Herm goes off the rails sometimes, in my view, is in linking the large-scale, macro level with the micro-level: I encountered several questionable conclusions and enthusiastic extrapolations that a real historian would be much more careful about. Case in point: at one point the author broaches the topic of Atlantis, and whether it might have been real, and for a few pages he gets lost in speculations about conspiracy theories and cranks' pet theories. He also quotes approvingly a source claiming that all Indo-European peoples are Russians because their putative homeland near the Black Sea lies in present-day Russia. Perhaps it's the journalistic training in him that wants to balance a credentialled specialist with a maverick crank or an attention-grabbing soundbite, but I don't think that such silliness should merit inclusion. And finally: I think he is too uncritically accepting of 18th-20th-century claims of Celtic revivalism, taking them too much at face value.

I feel that this book is now too dated to be of much use, and that a specialist would have done a better job of drawing mid-level conclusions. Its strengths are covered in other, more recent books, that do not suffer from these flaws. Check out Barry Cunliffe: he's an archeologist who's also a great science communicator.
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LibraryThing member wickenden
I read this a long time ago in a galaxy far away. My first vision of the celts, and this book set the stage for my way of looking at the Dorian Greeks, who were probably celts.

Subjects

Language

Original language

German

Original publication date

1975

Physical description

312 p.; 23 cm

ISBN

0312127057 / 9780312127053

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