LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED.

NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

TO

ANDREW LANG




PREFACE


The scientific study of ancient Celtic religion is a thing of recent
growth. As a result of the paucity of materials for such a study,
earlier writers indulged in the wildest speculative flights and
connected the religion with the distant East, or saw in it the remains
of a monotheistic faith or a series of esoteric doctrines veiled under
polytheistic cults. With the works of MM. Gaidoz, Bertrand, and D'Arbois
de Jubainville in France, as well as by the publication of Irish texts
by such scholars as Drs. Windisch and Stokes, a new era may be said to
have dawned, and a flood of light was poured upon the scanty remains of
Celtic religion. In this country the place of honour among students of
that religion belongs to Sir John Rh[^y]s, whose Hibbert Lectures _On
the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom_
(1886) was an epoch-making work. Every student of the subject since that
time feels the immense debt which he owes to the indefatigable
researches and the brilliant suggestions of Sir John Rh[^y]s, and I
would be ungrateful if I did not record my indebtedness to him. In his