How the Irish Saved Civilization

Thomas Cahill's 1995 How the Irish saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe was an easy home run for its author, with its appealing premise that Celtic monks preserved the best of Roman-period high culture and literature during the "Dark Ages" following the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth at the beginning of the fifth century AD. Mr. Cahill has a remarkable fluency with the classics, an old-school education that is all too rare these days, combined with a storyteller's ability to tease a world and an epic out of dauntingly scanty and arcane folklore and archeaology. His comparison of the strong and orderly Roman culture abutting wild back-country tribes was compelling.

It is harder to get a grasp of the Pre-Christian Celtic people, but our author is nothing if not into the spirit of the thing. There is often a tendency to "Orientalize" the Irish, but one has to admit that Cahill (who is also obviously fiercely loyal to them) gives us a consistent account of a tough pagan way of life. The relatively quick conversion from warrior culture to monastic society recalls the conversion of Tibet to Buddhism and raises the same kinds of questions.

Cahill continues to impress as a scholar during the extended discussion of the Irish leaders who followed Patrick, about whom he knows a great deal. Of course the old Latin culture continued in the Mediterranean as well, mostly through the vehicle of the Church, but Mr. Cahill is pleasantly persuasive that there was a place under the brush, if you will, off to the side, where some precious endangered shoots of human culture survived for a time. At points there is too much rhetoric around, but part of the difficulty here is filling out a story based on, sometimes, very little.

I also recommend Philip Freeman's The Philosopher and the Druids for some nice imaginative attempts to visualize the ancient Celtic world without taking too much liberty with the known facts. Also there is quite a bit about Patrick including a short autobiography and that is a topic I recommend.

Ancient Celtic Tribes of Gaul

I recommend Philip Freeman's books for rigorous scholarship bearing fruit as an entertaining and interesting book. Freeman is the author of St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, as well as The Galatian Language (he does his own translations of the material from Greek, Latin, and various ancient Celtic languages), and several other books drawing on the latest philological and archaeological evidence to cast light on the Gauls and Celts of antiquity.

The present book, The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the Ancient Celts (2006) is focused on the Gaullic tribes in the first century before Christ, a time of expansion of the Roman Empire and increased contact for the two cultures. An Athenian-educated philosopher named Posidonius undertook a trip deep into tribal territory, recording some of the first known ethnological and cultural notes on the Celts in classical sources. You get the sense that a host who has his enemies' heads hung on the dining room wall might actually be the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. The equally tough Celtic women are rightly emphasized, with some discussion of their cultish temple communities.

Freeman is scrupulously careful about sticking to the known facts which pays off with a sense of satisfaction that one has got a glimpse of them. The ending is poignant with a discussion of some recognizably Celtic elements found in Tomas O'Crohan's The Islandman (1937) and other early twentieth century Blasket Island sources. I very much enjoyed it.