The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland

In some ways quite satisfying but in others quite generic and I think some of the leaps of faith he makes are interesting and I'm not sure that some of the cognates he posits are quite true, he could be right but he didn't convince me in the text. The final chapter about the "defeat" of Paganism and the "Triumph of Christianity" glossed over many of the pagan holdovers and while most of the information that we have about paganism in Ireland is from Christian sources, Irish Christianity has a lot of pagan influences.

It's a bit dry and lacks a lot of detail about the practice of paganism in the pre-Christian period, I didn't really find anything more over what I already knew and honestly the writing style left me reading it in small chunks.

An interesting and worthwhile discussion, covering the peoples and cultures of Ireland from the stone age to the arrival of Christianity. Strongest where he teases out new information about the Druids from later Christian writings, and perhaps weakest where he wanders off into comparative folklore. Particularly recommended to anyone interested in the Irish Iron Age.

A very readable, thoughtful, and scholarly text.

I had a few problems reading this book.

1. I had no clue to whom Dáithí Ó hÓgáin was referring when he used the term "Celt" - as I am used to Celtic being a reference to certain languages that had grown out of those areas that traded with mainland Europe, not a people who invaded or settled certain lands - and the nearest I could discern was that the Celts arrived sometime between the start of the Iron Age and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. Perhaps another reader might find where the term Celt is clearly defined in the book.

2. From what I could gather, Dáithí Ó hÓgáin is equating all male deities with the sun and all female deities with planet earth (either as land or water), which seems at odds with other books I show more have read on the subject. All names were traced back to "fierce", "bright", "red", "light" and are thus representative of the sun.

3. My understanding has been that the gods of the peoples of the British Isles (in which I include Ireland) were more localised, associated more with the immediate landscape; i.e. the same gods were not worshipped across the nations, except perhaps one or two and whilst Dáithí Ó hÓgáin does look at each of the four/five provinces of Ireland, the impression given is, in all provinces, the people worship a/the sun god (though possibly by a different name).

I feel though these problems are because of my lack of any knowledge on the history of Ireland - something I am attempting to rectify. Perhaps my confusion arises from reading both more recent releases on history (which can now include DNA research and other advances in the field of archaeology) and books written more than 10 years ago.

At this point, I am just not sure I can recommend this book. show less