Twenty years of learning by heart
Julius Caesar, who spent years fighting the Celtic tribes of Gaul, left one of the few eyewitness descriptions of the DRUID. Training could take twenty years, he wrote, and pupils learned huge numbers of verses by heart, because druids refused to put their teachings in writing. Pliny the Elder added the scene that has stuck ever since: a druid in white robes climbing a sacred OAK to cut mistletoe with a golden sickle.
The picture most people add next — druids gathering at Stonehenge — came much later. Stonehenge was built more than two thousand years before anyone wrote about druids. The link was popularised in the 1700s by the antiquarian William Stukeley, and it caught on so thoroughly that modern druid groups now gather there for the summer solstice.
Gods with a silver arm and a bottomless pot
In Irish myth the gods are the TUATHA Dé Danann, the people of the goddess DANU, and they behave more like a quarrelsome royal household than distant powers. Their king, NUADA, lost an arm in battle and had to give up the throne, because a king was expected to be physically whole. The healer god made him a working arm of silver, and in time he ruled again.
When LUGH turned up at the royal hall of Tara, the doorkeeper sent him away: whatever skill he offered — smith, harper, warrior, poet, healer — they already had someone for it. LUGH asked whether they had anyone who could do all of them. They did not, and he was let in.
The DAGDA owned a CAULDRON that never ran empty and a club that killed with one end and brought the dead back with the other. Before a great battle his enemies dug a pit, filled it with porridge and ordered him to eat the lot or die. He finished it with a ladle big enough for two people to lie in, then scraped the bottom with his finger. BRIGID, goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft, belongs to the same family, and she shares her name and her feast day, 1 February, with St Brigid, one of Ireland's patron saints. Historians still argue over how much the saint owes to the goddess. Since 2023, St Brigid's Day has been a public holiday in Ireland.
How a boy became a hound
CUCHULAINN, Ireland's greatest hero, began as a boy called Sétanta. Arriving late to a feast at the house of Culann the smith, he was attacked by the smith's enormous guard dog and killed it. Culann was heartbroken — the dog had guarded everything he owned — so the boy promised to guard the house himself until a new pup could be raised. From then on he was Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Culann.
In the Cattle Raid of Cooley he held back an invading army by fighting its champions one at a time while the men of Ulster lay under a curse. Mortally wounded at last, he tied himself to a standing stone so that he would die on his feet. A bronze statue of that moment stands in the General Post Office in Dublin, as a memorial to the 1916 Easter Rising.