Myths and Cultures of The Ancient Celts

Catalog description

From Roman claims of human sacrifice to tales of shape-shifting goddesses and from heroes that live for hundreds of years to journeys to Otherworlds and magical creatures, the world of Celtic myth and its interpretation presents us with a rich panorama. This class explores what we know about non-Christian religions in the Celtic regions, drawing on archaeological evidence and examining literary sources for medieval perceptions of paganism. In the first part of the class we will define what we can really know about the ‘religious’ beliefs of the wider Celtic world before and during the Roman conquests before turning to the literary tales that survive from the Middle Ages that are set in the non-Christian past of Ireland and Wales. We will question what can be defined as ‘myth’ and how stories of pagan gods and heroes are treated in a medieval Christian world. This course will take a critical approach to the material and continue to question how much we can know about these early belief systems and what our surviving literary texts meant to their various audiences.