SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Celtic and Germanic Religion III
about a century; in Gallia Cisalpina the relations had
been even more intimate and lasting. I take it for
granted that we may confidently rely upon the information
given by Caesar.
But, even so, this information is very defective. At
any rate we would like to know more and better. Some
remarks about the high gods, presented with the names
of the Roman deities, are most unsatisfactory from our
modern point of view. What we would like to know,
for instance, are the tales about their acts and feats:
without a myth a god remains only a hazy concept. In
this respect the disparity between our information about
the Celtic and the Germanic religions is glaring. From
Icelandic sources we have a remarkably abundant account
of all kinds of myths and tales, by which we can get a
clear-cut image of most of these deities. In the whole
Celtic world there is nothing comparable to the detailed
information about the Germanic creeds. To be sure, we
can glean some precious bits of mythological lore from
Irish literature, but they are imbedded in quasi-historical
sources or even in profane tales; this makes it very difficult,
if not altogether impossible, to reconstruct the
original religious meaning.
Snorri Sturluson wrote a marvellous essay about
Scandinavian heathen mythology, but we have nothing
of this kind from the Celtic world. So if we get a fairly
coherent and highly coloured picture of Germanic religion,
we have only the flotsam and jetsam of Celtic tradition,
long since disintegrated and forgotten. The state of
information about Celtic religion is therefore most disappointing
and we may even despair of ever getting an
adequate idea about the beliefs of this people, in many
ways so puzzling. Some scholars have even asserted
that Irish heathendom had not known fully-developed
gods at all, but had on the contrary lived constantly in a
world of bewildering magic. In that case this people
would be a most curious exception to their Indo-European
kinsmen all over the world.