Oxford Very Short Introductions: Druids

For the past decade, Oxford University Press has been printing volumes in the book series called "Very Short Introductions". Each of the 268 volumes are in 6x4 inch paperback format, about 40,000 words in length and priced at $11.95 each. And as the subtitle suggests, the books provide "stimulating ways into new subjects"; brief, intensive, well-presented short courses on particular subjects, written by experts in the various fields. Titles include philosophy, religion, politics and science, including a handful of archaeology and archaeology-related topics. I chose the Druids, because I know, or rather knew, nothing about them.

Druids: A Very Short Introduction was written by Barry Cunliffe, and was published this month by OUP. The book doesn't start off with a definition of Druids, which this total newbie to the subject found a bit difficult to process: I resolved that by peeking into the final chapter. There, I discovered Cunliffe's main point. You see, there have been at least four or five versions of the ideas of Druids, and the most popular one is the supposed builders of Stonehenge: that I knew was a fantasy. But, the reason Druids are still so prominently featured in the national character of Britain has to do with classical Greek and Roman fascination with them.

Essentially, for people as new to the subject as I was (think of this as a micro-introduction), the Druids visited by Greek and Roman travelers between about 325-50 BC were a caste of shamans, religious specialists serving the Iron Age Celtic peoples who tracked astronomical events, discussed philosophy and taught students. They were fascinating to the Iron Age Greeks, I would guess, because the Greeks thought they had cornered the market on philosophy and were startled to find such discussions among the "barbarians" of Atlantic Europe. Cunliffe argues that the caste probably long predated the Iron Age, basing his assumption on the presence of the knowledge base of the Druids--astronomy--in evidence within Atlantic Europe for at least a couple of thousand years prior to Greek visits in the fourth century BC.

Druids: A Very Short Introduction is directly comparable to a short course. The book crams a huge amount of information into a very brief package, and then sets you free for the rest of the summer. As a ridiculously uninformed person about ancient history, I was pleasantly surprised to find ample information about the various Greek and Roman writers and travelers to fill me in on that background. There is a substantial section on the archaeology of Britain, which Cunliffe argues is problematic, because you can't find clear one-to-one archaeological analogues to Druids. And there is also quite a bit on the vernacular Irish and Welsh tales that provide the meat of the current stories about Druids.

There is also a terrific picture of Winston Churchill that made me laugh out loud. But I digress.

Druids are odd, as shamans go, not for what they did--sacrifices, ceremonies, astronomical observations are pretty much part and parcel of most prehistoric shamans all over the world--but for the wealth of documentary and ethnographic evidence supporting their existence. That's pretty interesting, and should also be useful to people studying shamans wherever and whenever they are documented. And I have to thank Druids: A Very Short Introduction for igniting that interest in me.

Cunliffe, Barry. 2010. Druids: A Very Short Introduction. 136 pages, a brief bibliography and an index. ISBN 978-0-19-953940-6. Oxford University Press: Oxford.