Celtic mythology is the mythology of Celtic polytheism, the religion of the Iron Age Celts. Like other Iron Age Europeans, the early Celts maintained a polytheistic mythology and religious structure. Among Celts in close contact with Ancient Rome, such as the Gauls and Celtiberians, their mythology did not survive the Roman empire, their subsequent conversion to Christianity, and the loss of their Celtic languages. It is mostly through contemporary Roman and Christian sources that their mythology has been preserved. The Celtic peoples who maintained either their political or linguistic identities (such as the Gaels, Picts, and Brythonic tribes of Great Britain and Ireland) left vestigial remnants of their ancestral mythologies, put into written form during the Middle Ages.
Read more about Celtic Mythology: Overview, Historical Sources, Mythology of Ireland, Mythology of Wales, Remnants of Gaulish and Other Mythology
Famous quotes containing the words celtic and/or mythology:
“Coming to Rome, much labour and little profit! The King whom you seek here, unless you bring Him with you you will not find Him.”
—Anonymous 9th century, Irish. “Epigram,” no. 121, A Celtic Miscellany (1951, revised 1971)
“I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)